On a weekday evening along El Camino Real, the parking lot at New India Bazar fills with engineers still wearing their lanyards, picking up curry leaves and a sack of basmati on the way home from campus. A few blocks away, the marquee for a Telugu film glows. The Indians in Santa Clara, California are not a hidden enclave tucked into one street. They are woven into the working fabric of the city that calls itself the centre of Silicon Valley.
The Place
Santa Clara sits at the heart of the South Bay, a flat grid of about 129,000 people pressed between San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino. It is an old town with a young job market: founded around a Spanish mission in 1777, it is now best known as the headquarters city of Intel and Nvidia.
The streets are quiet and orderly, lined with mid-century ranch houses and glass office parks. There is no single Indian neighbourhood here, no gate or arch. Instead the community shows itself in the grocers, the temples a short drive away, and the schools where Indian surnames crowd the honour rolls.
How It Became Indian
To understand why so many Indian families settled in Santa Clara, you have to start with what the valley used to be, and what it became.
From orchards to chips
For most of the twentieth century this was the Valley of Heart’s Delight, the largest fruit-canning region in the world. Apricots, plums and cherries blossomed across more than 100,000 acres. The orchards have almost entirely vanished now, paved over for the industry that gave the area its modern name.
The shift began with the semiconductor. Intel established its headquarters in Santa Clara, where the Robert Noyce Building still anchors the company, and the Intel Museum opened to the public in 1992 to record that history. Nvidia, founded in 1993, planted its roots in the city and has occupied its Santa Clara campus since 1998. These were the magnets.
The first engineers
Indian arrival in Silicon Valley was, at first, a story of graduate students and a handful of pioneering engineers. By 1990, roughly a quarter of the Bay Area’s engineers, around 28,000 people, were of Indian origin, and more than half of them held advanced degrees.
Many had come through American universities in the 1970s and 1980s, then stayed to work in the chip firms clustered around Santa Clara. They were a small, highly educated cohort, often from engineering institutes back home, and they laid the groundwork for everything that followed.
The H-1B decade
The change in scale came with software and with a visa. The H-1B programme, created in 1990 for speciality occupations, opened a pipeline through which thousands of Indian IT professionals entered the United States during the software boom of the late 1990s and 2000s.
Congress temporarily raised the H-1B cap to 195,000 between 1999 and 2003, and Indian workers took a steadily larger share, passing half of all H-1Bs by the late 2000s. The engineers who had once trickled in as students now arrived by the planeload, recruited directly into firms a short drive from Santa Clara.
By 1998, people with Indian names headed 774 Silicon Valley high-technology firms; by the turn of the century the figure had climbed to 972, accounting for tens of thousands of jobs. Santa Clara, sitting between the campuses of Intel, Nvidia and dozens of smaller firms, became a natural place to rent, then to buy.
Why Santa Clara specifically
The neighbouring towns each developed their own gravity. The Indian community in Cupertino grew up around Apple and a school district prized by ambitious parents. Fremont, across the bay’s southern edge, became the largest South Asian hub in the region.
Santa Clara held a different appeal: it was where the jobs literally were. Living in the city meant a short commute to the office park, a Caltrain station, and a corridor of Indian shops already established along El Camino Real. For an engineer on a visa with long hours and no time to spare, that proximity was the whole argument.
Families that prospered often moved on to bigger houses in Pleasanton over the hills, but Santa Clara remained the entry point, the first American address for a great many arrivals.
It is worth remembering that Indian settlement in California predates the chip era entirely. Long before the engineers, Punjabi farmers and the established merchant families of places like Artesia in the south of the state had built their own communities. Santa Clara’s wave was different in kind: younger, more transient, defined by the badge and the office park rather than the field or the shop.
The Landmarks
New India Bazar, 2213 El Camino Real. One of the anchor grocers of the corridor, stocking Indian and Pakistani staples alongside a counter selling samosas, chaat and hot snacks. For new arrivals it is often the first shop they learn to navigate, the place where curry leaves and the right brand of atta turn a rental into a home.
Shahi Darbar, 2155 El Camino Real. A long-running North Indian restaurant on the same stretch, busy with the after-work crowd and weekend family tables. It is the kind of room where a birthday or a job offer gets celebrated over butter chicken and a stack of naan.
Manjal, 2725 El Camino Real. A South Indian kitchen reflecting the heavy Tamil and Telugu presence among the area’s engineers. Dosa, idli and Chettinad dishes draw families who grew up eating this food and want their Bay Area children to know it too.
Bay Area Hindu Temple, near Fair Oaks Avenue and Highway 237, Sunnyvale. The temple grew from a 1991 board decision and settled on a roughly three-acre site just over the Santa Clara line. Its three-day Diwali Mela draws thousands, with cultural programmes, food stalls and performances, and serves as the religious centre of gravity for South Bay Hindu families.
Jain Center of Northern California, Milpitas. A short drive north-east, the JCNC serves the region’s substantial Gujarati Jain community and even runs its own cricket league, founded in 2016, which plays at local grounds including Murphy Park. It is a reminder that the diaspora here is not one community but many, layered by region and faith.
Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real. Founded by Jesuits in 1851 on the site of the 1777 mission, it is the oldest operating university in California and the only one in the state to succeed a Spanish mission. Its engineering and business schools sit squarely in the talent pipeline that feeds the valley, and Indian students fill its graduate programmes.
Santa Clara Cricket Field. Home ground of the Bay Blazers, a professional Twenty20 side competing in Minor League Cricket. On warm weekends the field carries the unmistakable sound of a sport most of the city’s neighbours grew up worshipping, played a stone’s throw from the chip factories.
Where They Came From
The Indian families of Santa Clara are overwhelmingly a product of the engineering and software pipeline, and their origins map onto India’s technology heartlands. The two largest streams come from the south: Telugu speakers from Hyderabad and the wider Andhra and Telangana region, and Tamils from Chennai.
Both regions sent waves of computer-science and electrical-engineering graduates, many through the H-1B route, into the firms ringing the city. Gujarati families, with deeper roots in California going back to earlier trading and farming migrations, form another major thread, visible in the Jain and Hindu institutions of the South Bay.
There are Punjabis, Bengalis and Maharashtrians too, but the defining accent of Santa Clara’s Indian life is the southern one, the language of the lab and the all-night code review carried home to the dinner table.
Santa Clara Today
Santa Clara is now a majority-minority city where Asian residents are the largest group, making up close to half the population. Within that, residents of Asian Indian background account for roughly fifteen percent of the city, a share many times the California average and far above the national figure.
That presence is visible in the everyday rhythm: the queue at the dosa counter, the Diwali lights that go up across whole cul-de-sacs each autumn, the school science fairs thick with Indian names. It is a prosperous, professional community, anchored by salaries from the firms next door, and it has reshaped the commercial life of El Camino Real one grocer and restaurant at a time.
It is not without strain. The H-1B system that built this community has grown harder and slower, green-card backlogs for Indian applicants stretch into decades, and the cost of a Santa Clara house has put down payments out of reach for many of the engineers who keep the valley running. Some now wonder aloud whether the bargain still holds. For now, though, the city remains what it has long been for Indian newcomers: the closest address to the work, and the first place in America many of them call home.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Santa Clara, California?
Residents of Asian Indian background make up roughly fifteen percent of Santa Clara’s population of about 129,000, which works out to tens of thousands of people. The Indians in Santa Clara are part of Santa Clara County’s Indian community of more than 200,000, the largest in California.
Why did so many Indians settle in Santa Clara?
The city is the headquarters home of Intel and Nvidia and sits at the centre of Silicon Valley’s job market. Indian engineers, many arriving on H-1B visas during the software boom of the late 1990s and 2000s, settled in Santa Clara to be close to the work and to an established corridor of Indian shops on El Camino Real.
Where do Indians in Santa Clara shop for groceries and food?
El Camino Real is the main corridor, with grocers such as New India Bazar at 2213 El Camino Real and restaurants including Shahi Darbar and the South Indian kitchen Manjal. The strip serves the daily needs of Indian families across Santa Clara and the surrounding South Bay towns.
Are there Hindu temples and other places of worship near Santa Clara?
Yes. The Bay Area Hindu Temple near the Santa Clara and Sunnyvale border, which grew from a 1991 founding, hosts a large three-day Diwali Mela each year. The Jain Center of Northern California in nearby Milpitas serves the region’s Jain community.
Which parts of India do Santa Clara’s Indian families come from?
The largest groups are Telugu speakers from Hyderabad and the Andhra and Telangana region, and Tamils from Chennai, reflecting the engineering pipeline that feeds Silicon Valley. Gujarati, Punjabi and Bengali families are also well represented.
How does Santa Clara compare to Cupertino and Fremont for Indian families?
Cupertino is prized for its school district and proximity to Apple, while Fremont is the largest South Asian hub in the Bay Area. Santa Clara’s draw is pure proximity to work, sitting among the office parks of Intel, Nvidia and dozens of smaller firms, which made it a common first address for newly arrived engineers.
If your family’s story passed through Santa Clara, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a graduate flight out of Hyderabad to a rental off El Camino Real, to wherever you are now.