San Jose, the largest city within this sprawl and the tenth-largest city in America, bills itself as “the capital of Silicon Valley,” although even the city’s most loyal residents will admit that’s a bit of a reach. Mostly it is perceived as the bedroom community for people working elsewhere along the peninsula. But some hope that might be about to change.

As the anchor company in a massive, multiyear downtown revitalization project, Google is embarking on an ambitious development plan in San Jose. It includes new office space for the company and new residential housing. The project could dramatically reshape a city that, despite its size and Silicon Valley affiliations, has long been treated like a Bay Area afterthought. The city’s government and residents are waiting to see if the effort will offer a meaningful alternative to the displacement that has defined the region for years, or if it will perpetuate a long history of industry redefining the California landscape in its own image. Given its history and base of community organizing, San Jose might be better positioned to revitalize itself than its valley neighbors.

Facebook and Google have led the way in a series of new proposals from big tech companies seeking engagement with urban developments in Silicon Valley. Facebook is working on a residential development near its Menlo Park offices that promises at least 1,500 housing units. And last December, Mountain View approved a plan around Google’s campus that includes 9,850 housing units, anchored in part around the company’s new Bjarke Ingels–designed office building.

The initial announcement of these projects inspired anxiety and criticism among tech and architecture journalists deriding the possibility that Google and Facebook might turn their campuses into “company towns.” But these ripostes seemed to forget the extent to which the towns of the Santa Clara Valley—the older name for the region Silicon Valley inhabits—have long histories intertwined with corporate fortunes, albeit with the particular companies and framings changing hands over the course of the last 150 years.

Before data mining was the preferred extractive industry of the Santa Clara Valley, mineral extraction built one of the region’s earliest variations of the company town. Back in the 1850s, the New Almaden mine, located south of San Jose, fueled the Gold Rush as one of the most productive mercury mines in the world (mercury being a valuable mineral for refining gold and silver ore). Modeled on Spanish haciendas, immigrant miners from Mexico and Chile lived on parcels of land belonging to the mine’s corporate owner.

The other major industrial influence in the Santa Clara Valley was agriculture. It fed California’s development for decades before software ate the world. Californians sometimes recall this era with images of idyllic, small-scale fruit orchards—the poet Clara Louise Lawrence called it the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” in 1931. But that pastoral vision was already disappearing by the 1920s. By then, the region was producing 90 percent of California’s fruit and vegetable yield, and the California Packing Corporation had industrialized the production process, relying heavily on a low-wage and largely disposable Mexican and Latino immigrant workforce to do so with minimal liability. San Jose was also where Cesar Chavez would first learn about labor organizing, after cutting his teeth in agriculture.