Asian Indians Remake Silicon Valley

The Hindu temple here was one of the largest in California when it opened in a converted electronics warehouse in 1994--big enough, its founders thought, to last a good two decades.

They were wrong. Temple membership has grown from 380 families to 4,800 as the Silicon Valley’s Asian Indian population has surged in the last decade, part of an international high-tech migration that has both repeated and rewritten the standard California tale of demographic change.

Like other waves of new arrivals, the software workers have transformed shopping districts, schools and restaurant menus, altering the very sights and sounds of the place. They have also punched a hole in the immigrant stereotype of the poorly paid toiling in service jobs while their children struggle in overburdened schools.

The high-tech boom drew an ethnic melange of the skilled and educated from around the world, immigrants with college degrees, middle-class incomes and children who have often raised the academic bar in public schools.

“I almost wish they came into kindergarten not knowing so much,” said Fremont kindergarten teacher Karen Ottoboni, who had in her Ardenwood Elementary class five Chinese, one Israeli, two Filipinos, two African Americans, two whites and five Asian Indians. “I’m on the verge of teaching the first grade here.”

Though evident in other high-tech centers around the nation, the pattern in many ways “is an exception,” said David Asquith, an associate professor of sociology at San Jose State. “It’s sort of a new ballgame. Most of the immigration from Asia or Mexico or Latin America has tended to be . . . at the lower end of the wage scale.”

A study published in 1999 by the California Public Policy Institute found that nearly a quarter of the Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies were headed by Chinese or Indian immigrants. “They have made this valley thrive,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Pete McHugh said of the region’s newcomers.

In Santa Clara County, the heart of the Silicon Valley, no ethnic group has grown as dramatically as Asian Indians, whose numbers have more than tripled in the last decade, effectively moving their California capital from Los Angeles County to the Silicon Valley.

Statewide, the number of Indian residents nearly doubled over the decade to 314,819, keeping California the national leader. U.S. census figures show that of the Asian subgroups in the state, the Indian population shot up the fastest during the 1990s.

Signs of Indian Presence Abound

Whether it is manifested in bustling temples or weekend cricket matches in the parks, Indian life has taken root in this land of software geeks and outlandishly priced tract houses. There is even a term for Indians who live and work in the Silicon Valley--”Silicon desi.”

Indian restaurants abound. There are Indian video stores, groceries, sari shops and festivals with parades. The Sikh temple in San Jose is raising $50,000 a month to erect a new facility on 42 acres.

The recently opened Naz 8 Cinemas in a Fremont shopping center in Alameda County show only films from South Asia. Indian performers stop on entertainment tours.

“They find whatever they can find in India,” said Raj Bhanot, co-founder of the Hindu Temple and Community Center of Sunnyvale. “They’re not missing anything, basically.”

They also find a high-tech meritocracy that helps blunt the jarring sense of dislocation that can accompany a move from one society to another.

“The Silicon Valley values your talent more than your race, color, sex or religion,” said Vish Agarwal, a Palo Alto management consultant who first immigrated to the East Coast and moved to the Bay Area a few years ago.

“The Bay Area is much more cosmopolitan and accepting of foreign cultures,” he added.

It helps that many Indians arrive with a command of English and skills sought by an industry that roared through the 1990s.

They still face the shock of astronomical housing prices. And they have not been immune to the tech slowdown of the last year.

Indians, many of whom are here on special work visas, have lost jobs. Some have packed up and returned to India. Others are scrounging for any kind of work in order to stay.

“It’s almost like admitting defeat,” if they return home jobless, said Bina Murarka, editor of India-West, an East Bay-based weekly she and her husband launched 26 years ago. “They’d rather stick it out.”

The newspaper runs about 150 pages every week, fat with entertainment, business and restaurant ads. Recent editions contained the musings of a Silicon desi, Hindu outrage over McDonald’s use of beef flavoring in its French fries and classified ads offering a glimpse of one of the major cultural collisions within the Indo-American community:

“Punjabi Sikh parents seeking tall, handsome, athletic, educated, family-oriented and clean-shaven Punjabi Sikh gentleman for 27 years old, 5’7” very beautiful American-born daughter, established professional career and completing her doctorate education.”

In families hewing to traditional Indian values, youngsters are not supposed to date and parents want to arrange their children’s marriages.

“The kids don’t want that,” said Bhanot, a senior tax auditor for the state. “Over here, parents are helpless. I can say that,” he added ruefully. “We cannot do anything, basically. That’s the price we have to pay for better living conditions.”

When Bhanot and his wife returned from a visit to Punjab earlier this year, they brought back a photograph of a young Indian software worker they had chosen as a prospective husband for their eldest daughter, 19-year-old Rakhi.

She looked at the snapshot and said no thanks, she was not marrying any guy from India.

“I was born here and raised here,” Rakhi said. “I don’t want to spend the first few years of married life teaching [a newly immigrated husband] how to speak, sit and talk.”

Still, Rakhi, who is studying business and computers at San Jose State, does not date. Out of deference to her parents, she says she will agree to an arranged marriage, but not until she is older and not with someone just off the plane.

Like any second-generation member, Rakhi tries to navigate the line between the ways of America and her parents’ homeland. She speaks Punjabi and wants to retain her cultural identity. She abides by Hindu dietary laws.

She has not felt the bite of discrimination. But when she was growing up, there were moments of discomfort. At childhood parties, rather than ask for vegetarian fare, she would simply not eat.

In grade school, there was that great temptation, pizza. “I always wanted to have pizza, but it always had pepperoni,” Rakhi said. “They used to tell me to pick it off, but the [pepperoni] oil is still on.”

In middle school, there were occasional taunts. She has been called “Gandhi girl” and heard classmates say to Indian children, “Oh, you worship a cow.”

The community has experienced other cultural frictions.

One involves the kirpan, a ceremonial dagger worn by Sikh men. After a couple of Sikhs were arrested on concealed-weapons charges during car stops by San Jose police last year, Chief William Lansdowne said the department developed a training film explaining that the carrying of a kirpan is not an offense unless it is used as a weapon.

The department is also working on a video about domestic violence, a subject that treads sensitive ground. Whacking a child or a spouse can get you arrested in this country, something Indians are not accustomed to.

“They think it’s normal, slapping a little kid. But it’s not normal here anymore,” said Bob Gill, a member of the managing committee of San Jose’s Sikh Gurdwara, or temple.

Nonprofessionals Follow the Crowd

With the growth of the Bay Area Indian population has come the immigration of nonprofessionals as well as software engineers. There are taxi drivers, restaurant workers, small-business owners and truckers. Turbaned Sikhs staff the car rental lots at San Jose Airport.

Not as educated or fluent in English as the high-tech workers, they have more of a struggle economically and socially.

Older Indians who have followed their children across the Pacific often feel lonely and isolated, community leaders say.

There are even some small Indian gangs in San Jose, though they sound quaintly old-fashioned. Lansdowne said they fight with their fists, not guns.

Fights are not a problem at Fremont’s Mission San Jose High School, where the student body is 61% minority, much of it Asian, and comes from families working in high-tech or other professional fields.

“It’s a real unique place to work. We rarely have discipline problems,” said Principal Stuart Kew, who has seen the school evolve from predominantly white since he began there as a chemistry teacher in 1972.

As the demographics have changed, so have the academics. The curriculum has become more advanced, because that is what the parents and students want. Out of a student body of 2,000, a third are identified as gifted.

“There is a lot of inherent peer pressure at this school,” Kew said. “There’s a degree of parental pressure to take the hardest classes. But I think a lot of dynamics in the student body are self-imposed. The students compete against each other.”

When the school began offering a statistics class two years ago, Kew said the administration expected about 60 students to sign up. Nearly 250 did and now more than 300 are taking the course.

At Ardenwood Elementary in Fremont, where 73% of the students are nonwhite, roughly half the children come from homes in which a second language is spoken--ranging from Spanish to Arabic to Hindi.

“In the East Bay, you feel the world is with you,” said Principal Paula Rugg, raising her arms to embrace an imaginary globe.

The conventional notion of minority as outnumbered underdog is shredded in such an environment.

“It’s a term we could well dispense with,” said Asquith, the sociologist at San Jose State, where the white enrollment is 47% and dropping. “It doesn’t seem to have any accuracy, true meaning anymore.”

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Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this story.