California's unique geography—bordering Latin America while facing the Pacific Ocean—has shaped a rich and vigorous culture, says the author. He reflects on the many changes in demography and landscape, particularly in the Santa Clara Valley region where he grew up. "The story of this valley is a classic California story," he writes, "which means it's laced with the ironies of a land continually finding a way to reinvent itself." Like so many regions of 21st-century America, California is "now home to families from Guatemala and El Salvador, from Jordan and Afghanistan, from Samoa and Taiwan and Cambodia." Given its ever-increasing ethnic diversity, he says, perhaps the greatest of all the challenges facing California today is "learning to live together in this new and still unfolding polycultural world, teaching one another how to listen, how to see across the borders that have so often kept us apart."

My father moved to California from Oklahoma during the Great Depression of the l930s. Like so many thousands of others, he was fleeing the drought and dry farmland of "The Dust Bowl," heading west in search of better times. Though he didn't cross a national boundary to get to California, he crossed a desert and two mountain ranges. In those pre-jet, pre-power steering days, this was a large and risky move. Jobs were scarce, and "Okies"—looked upon as refugees—were not welcome. But he came anyway, desperate, as immigrants often are, looking for any way to change his luck.

Eventually he found work as a house painter. The defense buildup for World War II brought new prosperity to America's West Coast. By l948, he had put aside enough money for a down payment on a plot of land in Santa Clara Valley—a farm house, a few outbuildings, and two hectares of dark purple plums that make the best dried prunes. As a painter he no longer worked the land, but he still had a taste for the rural life.

Those hectares gave him a small piece of what was then called "The World's Largest Orchard." California is famous for such grandiose claims. This one happened to be true. For half a century and more, the wide, fertile plain of Santa Clara Valley—in eons past, the silted southern end of San Francisco Bay—had been filled with six million fruit trees. You could see most of them from a country road that followed the base of the eastern hills. It was called Blossom Hill Road. Each spring we would pile into my father's car-my mother, my sister, my grandmother, and me—for a pilgrimage to witness the first blooming. Others were usually there ahead of us, their cars parked along the road's high crest. In the way visitors travel to the northeastern United States to catch the peak moment of vivid autumn color, people would come from near and far to gaze out across the panorama of white and pink blossoms—plum and pear and apple and cherry—that made a fluffy, flowery inland sea.

It was a seasonal ceremony to honor both the short burst of beauty and the produce that soon would follow. Though Mediterranean in climate, this valley was not a pastoral retreat remote from the centers of commerce. Its hub was San Jose, a small, prosperous city of some 70,000 people and a world leader in the processing of canned and dried fruit. Innovative machinery had been developed here that changed how food was gathered and preserved. During my secondary school and college years, most of us made our summer money working in the orchards—picking peaches alongside migrant workers from Mexico, laying out trays of apricots to dry in the sun—or at one of the numerous canneries that surrounded the town. From here, pear halves and peach nectar, stewed prunes and dried prunes, applesauce and fruit cocktail would be shipped to all parts of the United States, as well as around the globe.

THE DRAW OF THE GOLDEN WEST

Driving into the valley today, you enter another kind of world with another identity, another look, another name. It is still framed east and west by two arms of California's long Coast Range. But roads like Blossom Hill, which once linked farms and ranches, are lined with townhouses and condominiums, the lawns and driveways of a thousand subdivisions. Almost two million people live in the valley now. Like Los Angeles County, 480 kilometers south, it's a quilt of adjoining townships with only "City Limit" signs to tell you where one ends and the next begins. San Jose, still the hub, has become America's 11th largest city. The region's transformation has been so complete that from the crest of Blossom Hill, you look out upon a sea of shake roofs and satellite dishes, brightened here and there by the glint of a backyard swimming pool.

That glorious springtime spectacle is long gone, never to return, and it is too late now to mourn the loss, too late for lament or for nostalgia. California is a land so driven by runaway growth, the inexorable rate of change itself can overwhelm you. I give thanks that I had the chance to see that ocean of blossoms before they disappeared.

During the l950s, '60s and '70s, buyers like my father kept coming, from other parts of California, from other parts of the United States, from other parts of the world, looking for a piece of the Golden West. The valley was only an hour from San Francisco. The climate that had so appealed to ranchers and growers appealed to these newcomers, too. California's population was expanding at the rate of 1,000 people per day (a rate that has now increased to 1,500 per day, every day of every week of every year), and the valley's numbers swelled along with the rest of the state, systematically gobbling up some of the most fertile and productive soil on Earth. The worth of croplands simply could not compete with the escalating value of real estate.

If my father were still alive, it would surprise and probably anger him to be told he had played a part in what the valley has become, a small but emblematic part. He loved the look of his plum trees in bloom; he tended them when he could. But he wasn't a grower; he was a painting contractor with a family to support. From time to time he would sell off a quarter of a hectare. As the land was rezoned and reappraised, the buyers would later subdivide and sell off smaller parcels. Driving through our neighborhood today, I see that those two hectares of prune-plums have been replaced by 15 houses with 15 two-car garages and 15 lawns with 15 sprinkler systems. My Oklahoma father would surely groan at the sight. But when he sold off the first parcel, who could have foreseen where it would lead? He needed the money, and there were still fruit trees in laden rows as far as the eye could see.

DECADES OF CHANGE

The story of this valley is a classic California story, which means it's laced with the ironies of a land continually finding a way to reinvent itself. While a precious resource was being paved over and a world-class industry dismantled, another was already rising up beside it. The real estate boom was accelerated by the excitement and economic promise of technological discoveries spawned in the same innovative atmosphere that had made the valley an agricultural force.

Here, engineers who followed Nobel laureate William Shockley when he moved west from Bell Labs developed the integrated circuit. Engineers from Intel invented the microprocessor. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, working out of their legendary garage, developed the personal computer and founded Apple Computer. Cisco Systems devised the routers that direct traffic through the Internet. At the forefront of the high-tech revolution, Silicon Valley magnetized billions of dollars in venture capital, as well as a new generation of fortune-seekers.

So while the orchards large and small have now been uprooted and hauled away, there is more of just about everything else—more money, more millionaires, more elegant homes perched on vista hillsides, along with more homeless persons, more crime, more cars, more road rage, and more qualified students than the community colleges and state university can handle. But with these have come more concerts and literary magazines and theater and dance (a new performing arts center, new galleries, new libraries), and more families coming from more countries, bringing their many histories from every direction, north and south and east and west. California's unique geography—bordering Latin America, while facing the Pacific—has shaped a rich and vigorous crossroads culture. And, again, the valley mirrors population patterns up and down the state.

A LOOK BACK

Indians were here first, hunters and gatherers who roamed the oak-dotted plain for thousands of years. Several hundred descendants of those early tribes still inhabit the valley. In 1769, Spanish soldiers arrived on foot from Mexico, soon followed by colonists trekking north to found El Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe, an agrarian outpost designed to encourage colonization and provide produce for nearby Franciscan missions established to Christianize the Indians. One of these was named (in 1777) for Santa Clara de Asis.

Until 1848, all of California was a northern province of Mexico, and Spanish was the official language. (For many thousands of today's residents, it is still the language learned first.) The discovery of gold in California triggered a great wave of in-migration, as the promise of quick riches drew multitudes across the continent from the eastern United States and, by ship, from Europe, from Chile and Peru, from China, Malaysia, and the Pacific Islands. Before long, immigrants from France and Italy were planting vineyards in Santa Clara Valley, where soil and climate reminded them of lands they had left behind. Prominent among them was Paul Masson, based in San Jose, who introduced champagne production to the United States.

From the Gold Rush onward, most of the settlers—the farmers, ranchers, and growers who developed the valley—were of Anglo-European background. Yet by the time my family arrived, cultural diversity had long been a feature of the region. During my secondary school and college years in the l950s, I had friends whose parents came from Serbia, from the Azores, from Hawaii, the Philippines, Mexico, China, and Japan.

Fifty years later, it's a world my father wouldn't recognize. Like so many regions of 21st-century America, it is polycultural now, home to families from Guatemala and El Salvador, from Jordan and Afghanistan, from Samoa and Taiwan and Cambodia. Immigrants from Vietnam now outnumber the valley's entire population when I was a student. Immigrants from India are served by four locally published periodicals. For three blocks of a major boulevard, half the signs above the shops and restaurants are in Korean characters, some with no English subtitles. Cinco de Mayo—the day Mexico celebrates victory over French forces in the 1862 Battle of Puebla—is observed with a major parade and festival.

A LOOK AHEAD

After a century and a half of ongoing settlement, a huge social experiment is under way in the Santa Clara Valley, as well as in the rest of California. Until very recently, few regions have ever harbored people from so many backgrounds looking for ways to coexist. For some, this looms as a threat—now that whites no longer comprise an ethnic majority. In my experience, however, this, in itself, is not a cause for high alarm.

My wife's background is Japanese. We met during our college years, when her father—a man from Hiroshima drawn east across the Pacific early in the 20th century, for much the same reason my father had been drawn west—was farming strawberries near the eastern foothills. Our three children are Eurasian. Joining us for a recent holiday dinner were my son's wife, who is half Chinese, and our older daughter's husband, who is Jewish. As the son of an Okie with Scots-Irish ancestors, I was an ethnic minority at my own dinner table. And I can testify that one can get through such an evening and actually enjoy the meal.

The time has come to re-examine the word "minority," since it deals with so much more than numbers. For those of us who have long been in the "majority," it can have an ominous ring, connoting a lesser category, to be somewhere off on the margin, out of the mainstream. But what if we simply let go of the word and looked for other ways to describe ourselves and our differences? The term is only useful when there is a majority to be compared to. If there is no longer an ethnic majority in the state of California, then diversity becomes the norm and the mainstream, and we all move a little closer to being in the same category-people of varying hues and backgrounds who happen to inhabit the same region.

This is not to minimize the serious tensions in the air and in the streets. As I revisit where I grew up, it seems to me that of all the challenges now facing Santa Clara/Silicon Valley, perhaps the greatest is learning to live together in this new and still unfolding polycultural world, teaching one another how to listen, how to see across the borders that have so often kept us apart.

James D. Houston is the author of seven novels, including the trilogy Continental Drift, Love Life, and The Last Paradise, which received a 1999 American Book Award. Among his several nonfiction works are Californians, A Pacific Basin Journey, and Farewell to Manzanar, which he co-authored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. Jim taught writing at the University of California's Santa Cruz campus for more than 20 years; he has also worked as a musician and taught classical and folk guitar. Jim and Jeanne live in Santa Cruz, California.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.