On the thirteenth day after the spring equinox, the lawns of Vasona Lake in Los Gatos turn into a sea of picnic blankets, samovars and grilling skewers, and the Persians in San Jose, California reclaim a tradition older than any tech company on Earth. They come down from Almaden, across from Evergreen, up from the flatlands of West San Jose: engineers and grocers, grandmothers and graduate students, carrying sprouted wheatgrass to release into the water. It is the most visible single day in the life of a community that, the rest of the year, tends to express itself quietly, in code, in commerce, and in kitchens.
Greater Los Angeles has Tehrangeles, the loud, glittering capital of the Iranian diaspora. The Bay Area has something different: a community defined less by a single boulevard than by a region, and less by entertainment than by engineering. This is the story of how Persians made a home in the southern end of Silicon Valley.
The Place
San Jose is the largest city in Northern California and the civic heart of Silicon Valley, a sprawl of nearly a million people pressed against the southern tip of San Francisco Bay. It is a city of suburbs more than of a single downtown: Almaden Valley to the south, Evergreen to the east, Cambrian and Willow Glen in the middle, the dense apartment corridors of West San Jose near the Cupertino line.
For decades it was an agricultural valley known for prune and apricot orchards, the self-styled Valley of Heart’s Delight. The orchards gave way to chip fabs and office parks, and the valley acquired a new name and a new economy.
It is into that second valley, the one built on silicon rather than stone fruit, that the Iranian story here is woven.
How It Became Persian
Before the Revolution
A small number of Iranians were already in the Bay Area before 1979, many of them students. Iran sent thousands of young people abroad for university in the 1960s and 1970s, and the engineering schools of California were a favoured destination. Stanford, Berkeley and San Jose State drew Iranian students who intended to take their degrees home.
Most did not plan to stay. The valley was still becoming Silicon Valley, and there was no obvious Persian community to join. These early arrivals were scattered, professional, and small in number.
The Revolution and the Exodus
Everything changed in 1979. The Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Shah sent a large wave of Iranians abroad, and the first to leave were often the most educated and the most affluent, the families with the means and the foresight to go.
Many of them already had children studying in the United States, which made the choice of where to land easier. Where an older sibling was at Berkeley or San Jose State, parents and younger children followed. The Bay Area’s universities became anchors, and the community began to thicken around them.
The Silicon Valley Generation
The timing was extraordinary. Iranian families arrived in Northern California at the precise moment the personal computer industry was being born. The first generation had carried with it a cultural reverence for education, particularly in mathematics and engineering, and that inheritance landed in the most fertile possible soil.
The results are now part of Silicon Valley’s founding myth. Pierre Omidyar, of Iranian descent, founded eBay. Arash Ferdowsi co-founded Dropbox. Ali Ghodsi co-founded Databricks. Dara Khosrowshahi, who left Iran around the fall of the Shah, became chief executive of Expedia and then of Uber. Sasan Goodarzi became chief executive of Intuit. Iranian Americans turned up as founders and senior executives at Google, Oracle, YouTube and beyond.
Behind the famous names were thousands of ordinary careers: engineers at Cisco and Intel, product managers, chip designers, startup founders who succeeded modestly or failed quietly and tried again. This is the bedrock of the San Jose Persian community, professional rather than performative, and it is why the community here looks and feels so different from the one in the south.
Building the Institutions
A scattered professional class slowly became an organised community. In 1981, Persian Zoroastrians established their own organisation in the valley, eventually building a Dar-e-Mehr, a temple and gathering place, on Mount Hamilton east of the city. The Persian Zoroastrian Organization grew to serve hundreds of families and remains one of the most rooted Iranian institutions in the region.
Cultural and educational bodies followed. The Persian Cultural Club was incorporated in California in 2002 to teach Farsi to children and adults and to host the great seasonal festivals, Nowruz in spring and Shab-e Yalda in winter. Weekend Persian schools, professional societies, and philanthropic foundations filled out a civic life that no single street could contain.
Choosing the Suburbs
As families prospered, they followed the same logic as every other ambitious group in the valley: they bought into the best school districts they could reach. For Persian families that often meant the hillside neighbourhoods of Almaden Valley to the south and the newer subdivisions of Evergreen to the east, along with West San Jose near the Cupertino schools.
These are quiet, leafy, expensive places. The Persian presence there is not signposted with neon. It shows instead in the cars at Saturday Farsi class, the saffron and dried limes in pantries, and the smell of grilling kabob drifting over back fences on warm evenings. The pattern echoes other affluent Silicon Valley enclaves, from the Taiwanese families of Cupertino to the Chinese community of Santa Clara, each chasing the same constellation of strong schools.
The Landmarks
Vasona Lake County Park, 333 Blossom Hill Road, Los Gatos. Just over the San Jose line, this lakeside park has hosted the area’s Sizdah Bedar gathering for decades. On the thirteenth day of Nowruz, thousands of Iranian families spread out across its grass to picnic, listen to live music and return their sprouted sabzeh to the water, the single largest annual gathering of the South Bay’s Persians.
Real Kabob Persian Mediterranean Grill, 2982 Almaden Expressway, San Jose. Tucked into the Almaden corridor that anchors so much of the community, Real Kabob turns out flame-grilled koobideh, joojeh and saffron-scented rice for the families of the surrounding hills. It is takeout and catering more than white tablecloths, the everyday Persian table for South San Jose.
Isfahan Kabob, 3014 Union Avenue, San Jose. Near the Union Avenue shops in the Cambrian area, Isfahan Kabob is the kind of small, family-run room that makes ghormeh sabzi, fesenjan and shirin polo to order. Regulars come for grilled meats and the nutty basmati that recalls the cooking of central Iran, the city of Isfahan that gives the place its name.
Reyhan Restaurant, 1625 Almaden Road, San Jose. Established in 1996, Reyhan is among the longer-serving Persian kitchens in the city, a fixture for stews, kabob and the slow ceremony of a Persian lunch. Its longevity makes it a kind of institution in a restaurant scene where many openings do not last.
Persian Zoroastrian Organization Dar-e-Mehr, Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose. Founded in 1981 and built largely through community donations, the Dar-e-Mehr sits in the hills with a view over the valley below. It is the spiritual home of Northern California’s Zoroastrian Iranians, hosting Nowruz and the year’s most important religious ceremonies for hundreds of families.
Rose International Market, 801 West El Camino Real, Mountain View. A short drive up the peninsula from San Jose, Rose was co-founded by Saied Mehranfar and his brothers in 1988 and has grown into Silicon Valley’s definitive Iranian grocer, stocking Persian rice, herbs, sweets and halal meat alongside a kabob grill. For South Bay families it is the pilgrimage shop, the place you drive to when you need the real thing.
San Jose State University, 1 Washington Square, San Jose. The downtown university was a landing point for Iranian students from the 1960s onward and remains a hub of Iranian academic and professional life. Its scholars have documented the very community that grew up around it, including the Iranian American business and technology leaders of Silicon Valley.
Where They Came From
Unlike many diasporas, the Iranians of San Jose did not come overwhelmingly from one province or village. They came from across Iran, but disproportionately from its cities and its educated classes: Tehran above all, along with Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and Mashhad.
This was, especially in the first post-revolution wave, an elite migration. It carried doctors, engineers, professors, businesspeople and their university-bound children. That origin profile is the key to understanding everything that followed, because a community of credentialled professionals arriving beside a booming technology industry was always going to integrate through work rather than through a single ethnic high street.
It also explains the contrast with the south. Los Angeles drew a broader cross-section, including a large merchant and entertainment community, and built the visible boulevard culture of Tehrangeles and the affluent enclaves of Calabasas. Southern California’s professional Iranians spread south too, into communities like the one in San Diego. The Bay Area, by contrast, drew the engineers, and so its Persian identity is dispersed through the suburbs of the valley rather than concentrated on a single strip.
San Jose Today
The federal census counts roughly ten thousand people of Iranian ancestry in San Jose, which makes it the fourth largest Iranian community of any city in the country, after Los Angeles, New York and nearby Irvine. Across Santa Clara County the figure runs well over twenty thousand. Local community estimates run higher still, since census ancestry figures tend to undercount.
The community remains, above all, a professional one. Its centre of gravity is the office park and the startup, not a commercial district, and its public life surfaces mainly at the seasonal festivals: Nowruz in March, Sizdah Bedar at Vasona, Shab-e Yalda on the longest night of winter. Between those dates it lives in homes, schools and companies, woven so thoroughly into Silicon Valley that it can be hard to see at all.
There are tensions in that quiet success, of course. Younger Iranian Americans, many of them born in Almaden or Evergreen, juggle Farsi at the weekend with English everywhere else, and negotiate their own relationship to a homeland most have never seen. But the institutions hold: the temple on Mount Hamilton, the weekend schools, the grocer up the peninsula, the picnic at the lake. The Persians of San Jose have built something durable in the valley, even if you have to know where to look.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Persians live in San Jose, California?
The U.S. Census counts roughly ten thousand people of Iranian ancestry in San Jose, ranking it the fourth largest Iranian community of any American city. Santa Clara County as a whole counts more than twenty thousand, and community estimates run higher because census ancestry data tends to undercount.
Why did so many Persians in San Jose come after 1979?
The Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Shah in 1979 sent a large wave of Iranians abroad, and the first to leave were often the most affluent and educated. Many already had children studying at Bay Area universities, which made Northern California a natural place to settle.
What is the connection between Persians and Silicon Valley?
Iranian families arrived just as the personal computer industry was being born, carrying a strong cultural emphasis on mathematics and engineering. Their children helped found and lead companies including eBay, Dropbox, Databricks, Uber and Intuit, making the community a quietly central force in the valley.
Where do Persians in San Jose mostly live?
Persian families have concentrated in the affluent school districts of Almaden Valley to the south and Evergreen to the east, along with West San Jose near the Cupertino schools. The presence is suburban and residential rather than focused on a single commercial street.
Where do Persians in San Jose celebrate Nowruz?
The largest annual gathering is Sizdah Bedar, the thirteenth day of Nowruz, held each spring at Vasona Lake County Park in nearby Los Gatos. Thousands of families picnic on the grass, enjoy live music and return sprouted sabzeh to the water.
How is San Jose’s Persian community different from Tehrangeles in Los Angeles?
Los Angeles drew a broad cross-section and built the visible boulevard culture of Tehrangeles, while San Jose drew engineers and professionals who integrated through Silicon Valley’s companies. The Bay Area community is dispersed through suburban school districts rather than concentrated on a single strip.
If your family’s story passed through San Jose, or any of the places Persians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the universities of Tehran and Isfahan to the picnic blankets of Vasona Lake, to wherever you are now.