Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Fremont

As I said in a previous post I went to Fremont yesterday. After I got out of the army I lived for a few years in Fremont, and yesterday reminded me of what a nice place it is.

One thing that struck me right away was the racial and ethnic diversity. I live in a fairly white working-class suburb of Sacramento, and teach in a fairly white well-to-do part of town. I went to a mall and instantly noticed the large percentage of Asians and Middle Easterners there. I've been told that Fremont has the largest community of Afghanis outside of Afghanistan, and I saw good evidence of that!

Anyone who's ever attended 4th grade in California, or has been the parent of a 4th grader, knows that we study the Spanish missions in California History class. My son was born just a couple miles from Mission San Jose in Fremont:


Shortly after WWII, one of my grandfathers platted the streets in the Mission San Jose area and in a few other towns that later merged into the city of Fremont. I like driving by the street in the Irvington area that he named after himself :)

I went to Fremont to visit a friend and see his baby daughter, and while waiting for him to get home from work I dropped by Fry's Electronics. Hadn't seen a Nissan Leaf before....

It was a nice day trip. The baby was beautiful, the dinner was delicious, and the company couldn't have been better.

2 comments:

Cal said...

Fremont isn't "diverse". It's Asian--50% Asian, 32% white, 14% Hispanic, 1% black. But most of the whites are in a few areas. Mission San Jose High School is 80% Asian, for example.

In contrast, Sacramento is just 45% white, 18% Asian, 27% Hispanic, and 5% black.

So you've got it backwards. You live in a far more diverse environment than Fremont, which is a huge Asian pocket and becoming less diverse every day.

Darren said...

The numbers for the two cities don't look dramatically different to me, they just have the races in different places. 45% vs 50% for the plurality in both places, that's not a big difference.

Perhaps you didn't read my post closely enough :-) In the parts of the Sacramento area where I live and work, I see mostly white people. Now, I *could* go to that part of town now known (officially yet?) at Little Saigon, but that's a distance from me and there's nothing I really need there. I could go to other parts of town with a different predominant race, but in general I don't *need* to go to those parts of town.

I don't recall the "white" areas of Fremont, which is why I used the description I did.