The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans

The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans. By Stephen J. Pitti. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xvi, 297 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-09287-7.)

In The Devil in Silicon Valley, Stephen J. Pitti examines the history of Mexican Americans in San Jose, Santa Clara, and other northern California cities-beginning with the Spanish period (1777) and continuing to the present. Pitti opens his narrative with a vivid account of everyday life in Mission Santa Clara and uses this context to describe the ambivalent and diverse relationships mission Indians formed with Spanish missionaries. After a brief discussion of Indian-Spanish conflicts over land and resources, Pitti turns to the political changes that occurred in northern California after Mexican independence from Spain (1821). His focus is the immigration policies enacted by Mexico after independence, which allowed U.S. immigrants...