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.
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.
ReplyDeleteIn 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.
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.
ReplyDeletePerhaps 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.