On any weekday at lunch hour, the queue outside a curry house on Castro Street tells you something about who builds the future. Engineers in fleece vests, badges still clipped to their belts, wait for a thali while comparing notes on a code review. The Indians in Mountain View, California did not arrive to open restaurants. They arrived to write the software the rest of the world now runs on, and the restaurants followed.
The Place
Mountain View sits at the heart of Silicon Valley, on the San Francisco Peninsula between Palo Alto and Sunnyvale, looking out toward the southern shore of San Francisco Bay. For most of its life it was farm country, a town of orchards in the belt once advertised as the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
It is small for a place with such an outsized footprint. The 2020 census counted 82,376 residents in a city of barely a dozen square miles. Yet within those boundaries sits the global headquarters of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, whose Googleplex campus employs tens of thousands.
The result is a town where the cost of a modest house can run into the millions, and where the engineers who keep the place running come, in extraordinary numbers, from India.
How It Became Indian
To understand why so many Indians settled in Mountain View, you have to start with a town that had nothing to do with India at all.
Orchards and a stagecoach stop
Mountain View began as a waypoint. A stagecoach station opened around 1854 on the road between San Francisco and San Jose, and a small settlement grew up around it. Henry Rengstorff, a German immigrant who ran a ferry on the bay, built one of the area’s first grand homes around 1867 and operated a landing that shipped the region’s grain and fruit out to market.
For decades this was the whole economy: apricots, cherries, prunes, and the packing sheds that processed them. When local residents voted to incorporate the City of Mountain View on 7 November 1902, the town had just 610 people. It was, by any measure, a quiet agricultural community.
Silicon arrives
The orchards did not last. In 1956 William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, and the chemistry of the region began to change. The young engineers he recruited would go on to found Fairchild Semiconductor and, later, Intel. Silicon Valley was being born a few miles from where Rengstorff once shipped prunes.
The semiconductor industry pulled in talent, then the personal computer industry, then the internet. By the time Google moved into the sprawling campus it named the Googleplex, Mountain View had become one of the most concentrated centres of software engineering on earth.
The pipeline from India
Indian engineers did not come to Silicon Valley by accident. They came through a pipeline that opened in stages, and the timing aligned almost perfectly with the Valley’s hunger for technical talent.
The first wave were students. After the United States loosened its immigration laws in 1965, talented graduates of India’s elite engineering schools came for postgraduate degrees at Stanford and Berkeley, and many stayed. The scholar AnnaLee Saxenian, who studied the phenomenon closely, found that by 1990 the overwhelming majority of Indians working in Silicon Valley high technology had arrived in the United States after 1970.
Then came the visas. The H-1B programme, created in 1990 for workers in specialty occupations, built a second pipeline that did not depend on a university degree earned in America. When fears about the Y2K computer bug peaked at the end of the decade, Congress temporarily raised the H-1B cap, and a fresh generation of Indian programmers arrived to do the work.
The numbers were striking. Saxenian’s research found that by 1990 a quarter of the Bay Area’s engineers, some 28,000 people, were Indian, more than half of them holding advanced degrees. Indian founders went on to launch a remarkable share of Valley startups and to lead established firms.
Settling in Mountain View
Many of those engineers landed in Mountain View for a simple reason: it was where the jobs were. Working at Google or one of the dozens of firms clustered nearby meant living close enough to bicycle or take a shuttle to work. The families that could afford the rents stayed, and the singles shared apartments until they could.
The 2020 census captured the result. Asian residents had grown to roughly a third of the city, and among them Asian Indians numbered 5,758, the largest single Asian origin group in Mountain View. In a town of fewer than ninety thousand people, that is a community you can see and hear on the street.
The Indians in Mountain View are not, by and large, the shopkeepers and motel owners of older immigrant stories. They are software engineers, product managers, data scientists, and the founders of the next round of companies. Their children fill the city’s well regarded public schools.
The Landmarks
Sakoon, 357 Castro Street. For years the standard-bearer of Indian dining on Mountain View’s main drag, Sakoon draws the lunchtime engineering crowd to its buffet and the evening crowd for cocktails and modern Indian plates. Its place on Castro Street, the city’s seven-block restaurant row, signalled that Indian food had moved from the strip-mall margins to the centre of town.
Mantra India, 288 Castro Street. A few doors down, Mantra India keeps the same stretch of Castro Street smelling of cardamom and grilled tandoori. The two restaurants sit close enough that a newcomer from Bengaluru could mistake the block for a slice of home, were it not for the Caltrain rumbling past at the end of the street.
The Googleplex. No landmark explains the community better than Alphabet’s headquarters. The colourful campus, with its bicycles and volleyball courts, is the magnet that pulled tens of thousands of workers to Mountain View, and a large share of its engineering ranks trace their roots to India. The cafeterias serve dosa and dal alongside everything else.
Computer History Museum, 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard. Home to the world’s largest collection of computing artifacts, the museum tells the story of the industry that the city’s Indian engineers helped build. It is a fitting civic monument for a place where the family business, for so many households, is the history of computing itself.
Shoreline Amphitheatre. The 25,000-capacity outdoor venue beside the bay regularly hosts Bollywood playback singers and Indian touring acts alongside its rock and pop bills. On those nights the car parks fill with families in kurtas and saris, and the lawn becomes, for a few hours, a piece of India by the marsh.
Rengstorff House, Shoreline Park. The restored Victorian home that Henry Rengstorff built around 1867 is the oldest surviving house in Mountain View, now a museum near the bayfront park. It is a reminder of the orchard town that existed before the engineers, and a quiet anchor of local memory.
Castro Street itself. The downtown spine deserves its own mention. Seven blocks of restaurants, cafes, and shops near the Caltrain and light-rail station, Castro Street is where the city’s diverse population mixes most visibly, and where Indian restaurants now sit shoulder to shoulder with every other cuisine the Valley has imported.
Where They Came From
The Indians of Mountain View came overwhelmingly through education and the technology industry, and that shapes where in India they originate.
A great many trace their roots to the southern states, particularly to the cities and towns that feed India’s software industry: Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and the smaller engineering hubs around them. The graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the regional engineering colleges have long formed the backbone of the migration.
Others came from the north and west, from Delhi, Punjab, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. What unites them is less a single region than a single path: a technical degree, a job offer or a graduate place, and a flight to a part of California where the work was.
This is why the community’s food and language are so varied. A South Indian breakfast of idli and sambar, a Punjabi dinner of butter chicken, and a Gujarati thali can all be found within a short drive, because the families who want them all live here.
Mountain View Today
Today the Indian presence in Mountain View is woven into ordinary life rather than concentrated in a single enclave. There is no Little India here in the way older cities have Chinatowns. Instead the community is dispersed across apartment complexes and quiet residential streets, visible in the grocery aisles, the temple car parks of neighbouring towns, and the queues outside Castro Street at noon.
The grocers tell part of the story. While some of the largest Indian supermarkets sit just over the line in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, where rents are gentler, they serve a clientele that lives and works in Mountain View. Diwali brings festival events across the wider Valley, from Cupertino’s large public celebration to parties closer to home.
It is not an uncomplicated success. The same tech economy that drew Indian families to Mountain View has made it punishingly expensive, and many engineers who once dreamed of Silicon Valley now weigh the cost of staying against opportunities back in India, where their skills are in demand. Some families have left for the cheaper suburbs of the East Bay or for other states entirely.
For now, though, Mountain View remains what it became over three decades: a place where the orchards gave way to silicon, and the silicon drew a generation of Indian engineers who made the small bay-side town one of the quietly important Indian communities in America. The connection to other Indian communities across the country runs deep, from the Indian families of Livermore in the East Bay to the Indians of Stone Ridge, Virginia outside Washington, and the growing Indian community in Celina, Texas. The same tech migration shaped Indian Gilbert, Arizona and Indian Milton, Georgia, while neighbouring Silicon Valley towns drew their own arrivals, including the Israeli founders of Palo Alto.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Mountain View, California?
According to the 2020 census, Mountain View had 5,758 Asian Indian residents, making them the largest single Asian origin group in the city. They are part of an Asian population that grew to roughly a third of Mountain View’s 82,376 residents.
Why did so many Indians settle in Mountain View?
The Indians in Mountain View came primarily for technology jobs. Mountain View is the headquarters of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and sits at the heart of Silicon Valley, drawing engineers and software professionals from India through graduate study and the H-1B visa programme.
Where do the Indians in Mountain View come from in India?
Most trace their roots to India’s engineering and software hubs, especially southern cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai, along with Delhi, Punjab, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. The common thread is a technical education and a career in the tech industry rather than a single home region.
Where can you find Indian food in Mountain View?
Downtown’s Castro Street is the centre of Indian dining, with restaurants including Sakoon at 357 Castro Street and Mantra India at 288 Castro Street. Larger Indian supermarkets serving the community sit just over the city line in neighbouring Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.
When did Indians start moving to Silicon Valley?
Indian migration to Silicon Valley accelerated after the 1965 immigration reforms brought students to Stanford and Berkeley, then surged in the 1990s with the H-1B visa programme. By 1990, research found that around a quarter of the Bay Area’s engineers, some 28,000 people, were Indian.
What is Mountain View known for besides its Indian community?
Mountain View is best known as the home of Google and as a birthplace of Silicon Valley, where Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened in 1956. Landmarks include the Computer History Museum, the Shoreline Amphitheatre, and the historic Rengstorff House from its orchard-town past.
If your family’s story passed through Mountain View, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From an engineering college in Bengaluru or Hyderabad to a campus desk in Silicon Valley, to wherever you are now.