Trespassers?. Willow Lung-Amam

calculated decisions to place their children in Mission San Jose schools, often at great personal and economic expense. Once there, Asian American parents worked hard to ensure that the schools met their expectations in terms of their academic culture, curriculum, and high academic standards. Like generations of White Americans before them, “good schools” were a key part of their suburban dream.

      But many Asian American families in Fremont also held different ideas about what constituted good schools than those of their White neighbors. As well-educated, technically skilled professionals, many Asian Americans parents placed priority on a rigorous education, especially in math and the sciences, that would prepare their children to enter professions like their own. Whereas many established White families claimed to want less competitive schools that offered a more “well-rounded” and “balanced” education, Asian American families were widely associated with an increasing sense of academic competition, stress, and a culture that placed a premium on high grades and academic rigor. Tensions over these differences catalyzed racial and ethnic tensions within the Mission San Jose schools and led a number of White families to leave the neighborhood and the district. This was also true for a number of native-born Asian Americans, who perceived the area as becoming too heavily driven by Asian immigrant values.

      The social reshuffling sparked by Asian Americans migration to Mission San Jose schools runs counter to the typical narrative of suburban segregation. Most scholarship has focused on Whites’ efforts to seal themselves off from racial integration in schools, especially with African Americans, because of racism, fears of property value decline, and reduced educational quality.⁴ The traditional narrative of White flight focuses on the movement of Whites away from inner-city schools and the battles fought to give students of color greater access to White suburban schools through policies such as busing and regional redistricting. The dynamics of White flight explored in this chapter are different. In Mission San Jose, academic competition and the perception of disparate educational values between White and Asian American families have produced and reinforced racial divisions. This fragmentation occurred within suburbs as well as among two relatively economically privileged groups often thought to exist on the same side of the educational divide. Such divisions contributed to the racialization of Mission San Jose schools as spaces that seemingly marked Asian Americans’ inability or unwillingness to assimilate the dominant culture of American education and instead introduce “foreign” practices that many established families claimed were “inappropriate” and “unhealthy” in American suburban schools.

      The racial undertones of educational debates in Fremont were also evident in the public deliberation over school boundaries. As Whites left Mission San Jose and the schools became increasingly dominated by Asian American students, Asian American families found themselves, somewhat inadvertently, competing for spots within increasingly racially “segregated” schools. When the Fremont School District tried to redraw the Mission San Jose attendance boundaries to address population and achievement imbalances across the district, the uproar that ensued showed that Asian American educational practices and ideas continued to be marginalized as out of place and foreign. But the case also showed that education has been an important arena in which Asian Americans have defended their right to helping to craft the culture and character of suburban space.

      FROM WHITE TO ASIAN AMERICAN SCHOOLS AND NEIGHBORHOODS

      Asian Americans’ decisions about education have transformed the social geography of Silicon Valley and the neighborhoods in which they have settled. While immigration reform, globalization, and economic restructuring in the latter half of the 20th century forever changed the face of the valley, not all neighborhoods were equally affected. Mission San Jose quickly rose to the top as Fremont’s hub of Asian American families. According to the 2014 American Community Survey, Mission San Jose had the highest concentration of Asian American residents of any neighborhood in Fremont, with Asian Americans comprising 71% of the population.

      Asian Americans of various ethnic backgrounds consistently reported that schools were their top reason for locating to Mission San Jose and, for many, to Fremont. In the 1980s, Asian Americans employed in high tech tended to move to Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and Menlo Park—more established communities closer to the valley core that had higher-ranking public schools. But Fremont, and more particularly Mission San Jose, offered families an enticing alternative—increasingly good schools and new upper-end housing at a more affordable price. Looking for a nice neighborhood with good schools for their young son, Dan and Elaine Chan had been convinced that Mission San Jose schools were worth a try when they purchased their home in the neighborhood in the early 1980s. They quickly realized what a wise decision they had made. Over the next few decades, many other Asian American families followed suit.

      The path that Irene Yang took to Mission San Jose was typical of many Asian Americans who arrived in Fremont in the 1980s and 1990s. As we chatted over tea in her kitchen, she recalled her early days in Fremont. Irene had recently finished her graduate degree, gotten married to Henry, and had her first son. The Yangs then decided to move from New York to Fremont. Irene’s brother and mother were already living in the city, and Irene and Henry felt that as Asian Americans, they would have better job prospects on the West Coast than in the East. In the mid-1990s the Yangs rented a home in Ardenwood, a neighborhood in northern Fremont with smaller and more affordable homes than those in Mission San Jose. The neighborhood, however, had highly ranked elementary schools, which was the major draw for Irene, just as it had been for her brother who lived nearby. Irene enrolled her son in the Mandarin bilingual program at Forest Park Elementary, which in 1993 was one of the first of its kind in the state. Many credited the program with helping to make the neighborhood attractive to Chinese American families such as the Yangs. After several years Irene’s husband’s real estate business was booming, and they had saved enough to purchase a house in Mission San Jose—a neighborhood where, Irene explained, most Asian Americans in Fremont aspired to live. The Yangs made the move right after their son graduated from elementary school so as to avoid sending him to a lesser-ranked middle school in Ardenwood and place him on track to attend Mission High.

      Asian Americans’ migration into Mission San Jose schools compounded year after year. As more families moved into the neighborhood for the schools, test scores rose—and as test scores rose, more Asian American families located within the neighborhood (Map 4).

MAP 4. Asian Americans have clustered near Fremont’s top performing schools, all of which rank 10 out of 10 on California’s Academic Performance Index, the state’s standard measure of academic achievement. The Mission High attendance area also has the city’s largest concentration of Asian American residents. Image by author.

      In a few short decades, Mission High became one of the highest ranking schools in California, with an internationally recognized reputation. In 2008, 2009, and 2010, Mission High was ranked the number one comprehensive high school in the state, based on its standardized test scores. In 2009, US News and World Report rated Mission High as the 36th best academic school (among both public and private schools) and 4th best public open-enrollment high school in the nation. William Hopkins Junior High, its feeder school, had the highest standardized test scores among public junior high schools in California in 2005 and 2007. Mission San Jose’s four elementary schools have also been consistently ranked among the highest in the state.

      Mission High’s academic ascent happened as quickly as its demographic transformation. When the California Board of Education first began recording racial demographics in 1981, Mission High was 84% White. Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans who had lived on and worked the land for generations made up the majority of its non-White students. Having grown up in the area, Paula Jones, who now teaches at Mission High, recalled that well into the 1980s, the school was referred to as “Little Scandinavia” for its predominance of blond-haired, blue-eyed students. But as Maria Lewis, a longtime Mission San Jose resident and now a teacher at Mission High, observed, “The 1990s marked the end of the dominance of the White, blond-haired group at Mission High.”

      Between 1981 and 2009, Mission High’s White population declined from 84% to 14%, while its Asian American