San Jose, California

• 1. Introduction

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  San Jose was founded on the 29th of November 1777 , before the United States even had a Constitution , as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first civilian settlement in all of the Californias. Today it is home to nearly 990,000 people, making it the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area and the 13th most populous in the entire United States. Corporate headquarters for Cisco, eBay, Adobe, PayPal, and Zoom line its boulevards. Its metropolitan area was ranked in 2017 as having the third-highest GDP per capita of any city on earth, trailing only Zurich and Oslo. And yet for most of its long life, this was a farming town , an agricultural center built on orchards and canneries, not microchips and stock options. How did a small Spanish pueblo on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay become one of the wealthiest and most patent-productive places on the planet? And what happened to the people who were there first, long before the Spanish arrived?

• 2. The Tamien Before the Pueblo

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  The Tamien nation of the Ohlone people had occupied the Santa Clara Valley since around 4,000 BC, speaking the Tamyen language of the Ohlone language family. Their world changed irreversibly from 1777 onward, when Spanish colonization placed most of the Tamien into forced labor at Mission Santa Clara de Asís or Mission San José. There they were baptized, educated as Catholic neophytes, and held until the Mexican Government secularized the missions in 1833. The toll was catastrophic. A large majority of the Tamien died, either from disease inside the missions or as a result of what the source describes as state-sponsored genocide. Some surviving families migrated to Santa Cruz after their ancestral lands were granted to Spanish and Mexican immigrants. The Almaden Valley neighborhood, later named for mercury mines that supplied the California gold rush, sits on land that was once theirs. Their presence shaped the valley that San Jose now occupies, even as the city's growth has largely buried the evidence.

• 3. From Pueblo to Capital

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  Juan Bautista de Anza had been sent by King Carlos III of Spain to survey the San Francisco Bay Area, choosing sites for two future settlements. On his way back south from San Francisco, de Anza selected the eastern bank of the Guadalupe River for a civilian settlement and the western bank for Mission Santa Clara de Asís. José Joaquín Moraga formally established the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe on the 29th of November 1777, acting under orders from Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa, Viceroy of New Spain. By 1791, severe flooding had forced the settlement to move roughly a mile south, centering on what is now the Plaza de César Chávez. San Jose became part of the First Mexican Empire in 1821, then part of the First Mexican Republic in 1824. Mexico began secularizing the California missions in 1833 and opened unoccupied lands to settlement; between 1833 and 1845, thirty-eight rancho land grants were issued in the Santa Clara Valley, fifteen within modern-day San Jose's borders. By 1846, Captain Thomas Fallon led nineteen volunteers from Santa Cruz to capture the pueblo, raising the flag of the California Republic on the 14th of July 1846. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally ceded California to the United States in 1848. On the 15th of December 1849, San Jose became capital of the unorganized territory of California. When California achieved statehood on the 9th of September 1850, San Jose became the state's first capital. Josiah Belden, who had arrived in California in 1842 by traversing the California Trail as part of the Bartleson Party, became the city's first mayor. Legislators met in San Jose from 1849 to 1851; the first capitol building no longer stands, and the Plaza de César Chávez now marks its former location with two historical plaques.

• 4. Dutch Hamann's Annexation Machine

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  City Manager A. P. "Dutch" Hamann ran San Jose from 1950 to 1969, and in that time the city annexed property 1,389 times, growing from 17 to 149 square miles. His staff called themselves "Dutch's Panzer Division." Hamann made no secret of his ambitions; he is quoted directly: "They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true." Sales tax revenue was the driving logic. Hamann identified where major shopping areas would go, then annexed narrow corridors along roadways leading to them, pushing what critics called "tentacles" or "finger areas" across the Santa Clara Valley and effectively walling off neighboring communities. It was said the City Council voted according to Hamann's nod. In 1963, the State of California created Local Agency Formation Commissions statewide, largely in response to San Jose's aggressive expansion. Political resistance eventually grew as neighborhoods organized and elected their own candidates, ending Hamann's influence and prompting his resignation. The city emerged from his era with a defined sphere of influence in all directions, sometimes leaving unincorporated pockets stranded inside what had become, neighborhood by neighborhood, a much larger city. The housing-cost increase that followed was the highest in the nation: 936% between 1976 and 2001.

• 5. Silicon Valley and the Patent Capital

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  The nickname "Silicon Valley" was coined in 1971, drawing on the large concentration of high-technology engineering, computer, and microprocessor companies that had taken root in nearby Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Mountain View. San Jose rode that wave. Results from the 1990 U.S. census showed that San Jose had surpassed San Francisco as the most populous city in the Bay Area for the first time. Mayor Tom McEnery adopted the motto "Capital of Silicon Valley" in 1988. By the early 2000s, the San Jose Metropolitan Area was California's fastest-growing metropolitan economy. Residents of the San Jose metropolitan area now produce more U.S. patents than any other region in the country. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office opened a satellite office in San Jose on the 15th of October 2015. The combined statistical area San Jose shares with San Francisco was the country's third-largest urban economy as of 2018, with a GDP of $1.03 trillion. Apple purchased a 40-acre site in San Jose on the 31st of July 2015, paying $138.2 million for land the previous owner had acquired for $40 million five years earlier. In April 2018, Google was in the process of planning what it described as the "biggest tech campus in Silicon Valley" in San Jose, though construction was paused in April 2023 amid slowing economic conditions. The median household income reached $141,565 in 2023, and the median home price stands at $1,085,000.

• 6. The World's First Broadcast Station

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  In April 1909, Charles David Herrold, an electronics instructor working in San Jose, built a radio station to broadcast the human voice. The station, known as "San Jose Calling" and carrying the call letters FN, later changed to FQW, became the world's first radio station with scheduled programming aimed at a general audience. It was the first to broadcast music, in 1910. Herrold's wife Sybil became the first female disk jockey in 1912. The station changed ownership several times before becoming KCBS in San Francisco in 1949. San Jose's role in aviation history runs parallel. In the period from 1900 through 1910, inventor John Montgomery and his peers made the city a center for both lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air flight. The city later honored him with Montgomery Park, a monument at San Felipe and Yerba Buena Roads, and John J. Montgomery Elementary School. During World War II, the Food Machinery Corporation , contracted by the U.S. War Department , built 1,000 Landing Vehicle Tracked in San Jose. After the war, the company continued under successive names, designing and manufacturing the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and subsystems of the M1 Abrams battle tank. IBM established its first West Coast operations in San Jose in 1943 with a downtown punch card plant, then opened a research lab in 1952. Reynold B. Johnson and his team at that lab invented the RAMAC 305 and the hard disk drive, setting the technological trajectory the city still follows.

• 7. A City of Many Communities

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  San Jose is home to one of the world's largest overseas Vietnamese populations, concentrated in an area known as Little Saigon, and the Viet Museum documents that community's history. Hispanic and Latino residents make up over 30% of the city's population. Japantown is one of the city's historic ethnic enclaves; during World War II, Japanese Americans from that neighborhood were sent to internment camps, including the future mayor Norman Mineta. The city also contains what the source describes as the largest Sikh Gurdwara outside of India. Little Portugal, the Washington-Guadalupe neighborhood centered on Willow Street, and a Chicano mural tradition running in the style of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco add further texture to the urban fabric. The SharkByte exhibit of 2001, modeled after Chicago's decorated-cow display, spread large artist-decorated shark sculptures across dozens of city locations, raising money for charity. Adobe Systems commissioned the San Jose Semaphore installation atop its headquarters in 2006, designed by Ben Rubin: four LED discs that rotate to transmit a coded message whose content remained undeciphered until August 2007. The Cinequest Film Festival in downtown has grown to more than 60,000 attendees per year. Salmon still swim in the Guadalupe River , both steelhead and King salmon, making San Jose the southernmost major U.S. city with known salmon spawning runs. San Jose's PayPal Park will host eight soccer matches during the 2028 Summer Olympics.