San Jose
When the tech wealth so prevalent in Silicon Valley finally dries up, all that will be left of San Jose is a few used car lots and mom-and-pop taquerias. Some will call it a wasteland, but to those that live in 95110 and not 95014, nothing will have changed, because San Jose was always Chivas bars and lavanderias, never shiny convention centers and museums dedicated to either technology or innovation. Even to the monolingual it’s a city where you can get sourdough anywhere, even at a Denny’s in the barrio, where 56F will always be considered cold, and where the ladies that wait at the bus stop blare music from their mobiles without bothering to wear headphones. It’s a place where if walking around your neighbourhood makes you feel impoverished, walking around one kilometer north will certainly make you feel like a king.
This is the San Jose no one writes about. It could be dangerous, it could be volatile, but it couldn’t be any worse than my little corner of Los Angeles, and the Bay Area this may be, but Oakland it is not. Mostly it’s endless rows of white, windowless vans for rent and a mix of chop shops and auto suppliers. But sandwiched between the dilapidated petrol stations and the sleeping homeless lie the kind of culture I am all too familiat with. Stop in, kick back, and make sure to try some of that tomatillo salsa verde on your taco. Make sure you remind the little ones to wait for the light before crossing the street. Make sure to say your “gracias”es and “denada”s.
The 66 bus runs down South First street, and a quick inventory of the passangers may look homogenous, but now is the time to halt your first impressions quickly. San Jose is as much a massive tangle of freeways and throughways as Los Angeles, but it’s the intersections you want to keep an eye on. Here the gaps are leapt over, skipped across like a socio-economic rayuela, as a 3-series overtakes a pinto, but a Honda with a misaligned back wheel is the first to cross the light, allowing the Cadillac to slink around the back of the burger joint unnoticed. I pull the cord to signal a stop. Nothing happens; there is no friendly ding, no loudspeaker announcement, and I’m not entirely sure the driver has any clue I’m ready to get off until the local bus comes to a jittering halt, throwing the elderly and those with child out of their seats as if to make way for my exit. No sooner have I set foot on the cigarette butt-littered curbside then the bus rejects me once and for all in a puff of rancid exhaust and takes off like a roadrunner in the direction I am now trudging, dodging multicoloured pools of oil on the long trek to my motel.
I’ll admit I don’t know which San Jose to believe. I spent all day in a name tag-wearing, business card-swapping, boxed lunch-eating conference, a sort of insular academia filled with perpetual ice breakers and false eurekas, but now I have walked at least two kilometers in pinstriped pants and impractical dress shoes, a getup that impatiently reminds me this is the first time I’ve ever been to California without my trusty, and perhaps more appropriate at present, hoodie. If the day was a game of “whose title is bigger,” the night cares little of my job description as, a Dos Equis with lime and two flautas later, I’m having trouble feeling remotely cosmopolitan. Am I to fall for the shiny facade of “smart” devices with miniscule chipsets and unprecedented end-user capabilities or am I to go for the hollow sounds of conjuto and muffled insults coming from the kitchen? Am I to believe San Jose is a hotbed of startups, or just someone’s block, 100 times over? Is the valley miracle-gro for technological innovation or a land of forgotten ancestors?
I struggle because both views of San Jose feel inauthentic, incomplete. The polarity between tech silver and ghetto grey isn’t palpable, like it is in New York City, but the disparity cannot be ignored. Just fifteen miles away sleep droves of million dollar properties, fifty miles away they’re multimillion dollar properties, but here they’re just places. There’s space, and there’s culture, and there’s a visceral mise-en-scene, but to call it anything other than perplexing would be to ignore the obvious gaps in reporting almost every account of San Jose has left vacant. Perhaps I am off the beaten path, but isn’t that part of the gig? Part of the purpose of travel? To discover whose San Jose I have landed in: Dionne Warwick’s or Humberto Pineda’s? When I’m all shined up in my suit sipping endless cups of coffee, I feel like I’ve got it all figures out, but the moment the tie is loosed I start wondering why I’m here, whether it’s for business or pleasure, or whether I’m capable of either right now. I’ve barely any to drink but I’m positive San Jose will leave me with a pounding head and an alien taste in the back of my throat when it’s time to shoulder the briefcase again