Illicon Valley: Inside East Side San Jose's Rap Hustle

KQED’s Silicon Valley Unseen is a series of photo essays, original reporting and underreported histories that survey the tech capital’s overlooked communities and subcultures from a local perspective.

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roTribe Stretch takes a pull from his Black & Mild as he stands under the blazing summer sun in the Tak Food & Liquor parking lot in East Side San Jose.

A tall, thin brown-skinned Eritrean brother in sunglasses and a black shirt, Stretch’s hair is cut short with deep waves, except for the back where a long patch will soon become a set of ducktails. As he moves through the cutty parking lot, he talks about his neighborhood with reverence, noting the sites of music videos and childhood football games.

Stretch is a proud representative of East Side San Jose, an active but often overlooked pocket of the Bay Area. Geographically, it’s near the sprawling campuses that make up Silicon Valley, but culturally it’s closer to parts of the soil that raised me — East Oakland.

It’s a multicultural working-class enclave full of families and small businesses, religious centers and corner stores. It’s over-policed and under-resourced, facing an inflated cost of living and the constant threat of redevelopment.

Rightfully, East Side San Jose should be mentioned in the same breath as other Bay Area cultural hubs known for their grit and resilience, like Hunters Point, North Vallejo and Central Richmond. But for many, the idea of Silicon Valley overshadows East Side San Jose. Existing in that shadow keeps local artists from shining, and leaves many outsiders in the dark about the city within the Bay Area’s largest city.

Stretch puts out the lit cherry of his cigar before going to work on a plate of beef tacos from Cali Spartan Mexican Kitchen, simultaneously explaining his connection to this part of San Jose and its community.

Members of Stretch’s family first immigrated from Eritrea to San Jose in the 1970s. By the end of the 1980s, the extended family owned multiple houses in the cul-de-sac just a block away from the liquor store parking lot. The street’s name is Luke Court. But Stretch calls it “Little Eritrea.”

Born in San Jose in 1991, the year Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia, Stretch is proud of his heritage. And though he’s clear on the importance of history, and the cause of conflicts in the East African region, he’s just as versed in the conflicts happening in San Jose right now.

He knows the turf wars and longstanding beefs. He speaks from experience when discussing the ever-present tension between law enforcement and Black and Brown folks in the South Bay — and America, for that matter. He’s opinionated about the lack of resources in local schools and the region’s high housing costs.

But it’s this one conflict Stretch tells me about that causes my ears to perk up: San Jose’s East Side existing at odds with the concept of “Silicon Valley.”

San Jose is the tech capital of the world. Its suburbs and surrounding cities are home to some of the world’s wealthiest people. Fortune 500 companies dot the southern tip and western peninsula of The Bay. The cost of living is astronomical, and plenty have no issue paying it.

That Silicon Valley brand doesn’t apply to Stretch’s neighborhood. And it hasn’t since the term was first coined in the ’70s.

“We weren’t going to Mountain View or other parts of San Jose,” says Stretch when asked about his teenage years, which coincided with the dot-com boom of the late ’90s and early 2000s.

“A lot of us on this side feel like we got robbed of those opportunities,” Stretch laments. “They’re flying people in from all around the world to come and do these tech jobs, when they really should’ve had us doing them.”

Instead of learning to code as a teen, Stretch played basketball. He hustled. He bumped his head and got into legal trouble. He depended on friends for inspiration and family for finances. He started rapping and his mom invested in his plans to sell merch. He created a group called ProTribe, a nod to the diverse community of Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican and Somali folks he grew up amongst. And he started building with his people.

Rhyming over mobbish, synth-laced beats, Stretch expresses himself through expletives, drug references and poetry about escaping oppression. He only has one full solo album, but a gang of singles and features. He’s done shows all around the Bay, and has worked with some top-tier names, including opening for the most famous Eritrean rapper ever, the late Nipsey Hussle.

He’s done a lot of work in his neighborhood, an area he didn’t leave much as a kid. “We were always in the East,” says Stretch. “Right off King and Story.”

That’s the heart of the East Side, not too far from where I first met him six months ago.

As a light February rain comes down on the Mt. Pleasant Shopping Center on Story and White, a group of men stand in the parking lot outside San Jose Blue Jeans.

The store is a community staple, where schoolkids buy uniforms and homies from around the way buy rags to rep their set. Displayed inside is a piece of artwork that shows the names of prominent local street signs all mounted together.

Last year, the shopping center where the business is located was purchased by a new owner. Like many things in Silicon Valley, it’s now scheduled for redevelopment.

But on this late winter Sunday afternoon, the store’s parking lot is the site of a memorial. A bunch of tattooed guys ranging from their 20s to late 40s stand outside smoking and drinking, paying homage to a fallen friend.

“We go through everything that every other trench goes through,” says Amoneymuzic, a Latino rapper who’s worked with ProTribe Stretch. Raised in East Side San Jose, and ​​sporting an olive green windbreaker and a black backwards baseball hat, Amoneymuzic talks candidly about the streets: police brutality, fentanyl deaths, homicides.

It’s not the side of Silicon Valley that many see. Unless you grew up in it.

He notes that while the vast sprawl of San Jose has a population of over a million people, the concentrated East Side alone has around 300,000 residents. That population density creates a world unto itself: “A city within a city,” as Amoneymuzic says.

San Jose is layered. It’s one of the most diverse places in the U.S., with a population of nearly 40% Asian, 30% Latino and over 20% white. But African Americans account for just about 2% of the city’s residents. The city’s median income is over $130,000, but it’s also home to one of the largest populations of unsheltered people in the nation. With one of the smallest police forces for a city its size and only a handful of homicides this year, San Jose was recently named by Forbes as one of the safest major cities in the U.S.; the same article listed the city as one of the most likely for a mass shooting.

The East Side, a community of hardworking people, a world removed from the headquarters of Intel, Apple and Google, catches a lot of the negative attributions.

To fully understand the inner workings of this community, Amoneymuzic says you have to “push up here” to see it. That’s why there’s a misconception about it, he says: “People don’t come through here.”

Having grown up in Oakland, I know where Amoneymuzic is coming from. Outsiders didn’t understand the story of my hometown, so I took it upon myself to show them the nuances of the soil through photos, written pieces and more.

Local artists and storytellers are important. People from places that are historically overlooked and underreported have a story to tell — one with more layers than are easily found on the internet.

When you type the words “East San Jose” into the Google search tab, the words that autofill are “shooting” and “ghetto.” Just like when you search for “East Oakland.”

That’s when I knew I had to push up and see it for myself.

That afternoon I rode along with Joe Fresco, Jamori “Laze” Ringold, and Justin Engel — a collage of musicians, rappers and producers who grew up on San Jose’s East Side.

We bent corners in an SUV, driving down King Road and under the 680 overpass, where it’s customary for drivers to honk their horns as they go by. While passing Eastridge Mall, the trio of Black men shared stories about their teenage years. They pointed toward places in East Side San Jose where their families once lived before being priced out and relocating to Sacramento, Las Vegas and other places.

Joe Fresco is a bigger dude who wears fly chains, a gold watch, and a two-finger ring. As a rapper, his music is all about player-isms delivered over ’90s-style West Coast synthesizers and heavy bass, full of references to Zapco boards and Daytons. Over the past two years he’s dropped multiple albums, including two duo projects with RBL Posse’s Black C.

Fresco says that outside of Peanut Butter Wolf, and later, Traxamillion, San Jose didn’t have much of a national footprint when it came to hip-hop. He had to choose between being a gangsta rapper like NWA, a backpacker like Hieroglyphics or a player like Too $hort. He went with $hort. It was his way of telling the story of what he witnessed happening in San Jose.

As was the case for Black folks in many major U.S. cities in the 1980s, the crack cocaine epidemic hit Fresco’s family hard. His father, a former serviceman who’d been stationed nearby at Moffett Field in Mountain View, became addicted once he left the service.

“My dad was so strung out on crack that he sold everything in the house,” reflects Fresco. “My mom had to go and collect everything from people around the apartments.”

As a youngster, Fresco also learned that East Side San Jose was “political.” Southern California gang culture hit San Jose like no other city in the Bay, where gang colors have never been as critical an issue as in Los Angeles. But in San Jose, particularly throughout the massive East Side, colors mattered. “If you ain’t bangin’, you ain’t hangin’” was the saying back then, says Fresco.

“We had to survive in East Side culture, which is gang culture,” says Justin Engel, from the back seat of the car. “It’s only so many times you’re gonna get punked on the 71 [bus] before you clique up. And then you have to protect your section.”

The “protection” wasn’t just from people in their own area. It also came from people in neighboring turfs — most notably East Palo Alto, which was dubbed the “murder capital” of the United States in 1992.

“People think San Jose is a suburb,” says Laze from the back seat, adding the nickname of “Scrill-a-con Valley.” He theorizes that’s why some violent conflicts and robberies that happen in the community don’t hit the news: “They want to protect the tech companies.”

And it’s not just the tech companies, but the entire San Jose brand — and the investment in major construction projects and sprawling new neighborhoods instead of the neglected East Side.

Just outside the north side of the city is Levi’s Stadium, home to the 49ers, and the upcoming 2026 Super Bowl – its second Super Bowl since it opened 10 years ago. A multi-billion dollar investment in the future of the region, it also hosts concerts by stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, and is a future site for the World Cup. The San Jose metro area is growing by about 10,000 people per year, and with that growth comes change. New buildings — often without the history or connection to what existed before it — have replaced old community fabrics.

“The kids are growing up in a different San Jose than we grew up in,” says Joe Fresco.

Along the ride, the guys point to spots where shops used to be. They talk about who passed, and who moved away. All are reasons they cling even harder to what’s left.

For now, the hub of the East Side is still Mt. Pleasant Shopping Center, anchored by San Jose Blue Jeans. That’s where the guys bump into old classmates, and reminisce about the grocery store back in the day.

All conversation stops when a Mustang 5.0 starts to swing donuts during the memorial. As the car dances in the light rain, the men with tattoos and 49ers gear take their phones out and record as the screeching tires send smoke skyward.

Moments later, police sirens approach. We assume it’s in response to the car swinging donuts, but it turns out to be for an unhoused person in the alley next to the FoodMaxx.

People pivot their phones from the sideshow activity and start documenting a short-lived police foot pursuit that results in the unhoused person being forcibly apprehended. Joe Fresco and company decide to get out of there — their East Side senses kicking in.

Their decision proves to be wise. Later that evening, Joe Fresco texts me to say that multiple people were shot near that same parking lot, and one of them passed.

“It takes a lot to survive over here, bruh.”

So says Stretch in the summer of 2024, six months after we’d first met in a parking lot on a drizzling day. He’s parked in front of his brother-in-law’s business, Pro Styles Barbershop on the West Side of the sprawling town. Before going into the shop to get a quick lineup, Stretch lists all the hurdles he faces as an artist — and as a working adult — trying to stay above water in San Jose. “You need a job to fund the art, and to live,” he says. He uses his fingers to count on the steering wheel: “The cameraman, the producer, the studio time, all that shit costs. It takes a lot financially and mentally. It’s draining.”

On top of the cost of living, it’s hard for a rapper to get a foothold out of the shark tank. In a region of millions, home to major video and music tech companies, plus some of the Bay Area’s largest live music venues, only a few artists have achieved national recognition. Why?

“Consistency,” Stretch says.

He adds that over-saturation of MCs is an issue — too many people want to be the star — and there’s a lack of connection to the rest of the Bay, both geographically and culturally. Plus, the brand of “Silicon Valley” doesn’t exactly play well for gangsta rappers.

Stretch takes accountability for where his own career is. He’s got one foot in music and the other pounding the pavement to make sure his bills are paid. There’s a real reason for the inconsistencies.

Deeper than that is the mindset he’s ascribed from living in East Side San Jose.

“I grew up where niggas was supposed to be under; we were trying to blend in,” says Stretch.

“[But] you can’t blend in if you’re trying to rap.”

Listen to the stories in his music, and you’ll understand why he wanted to be under. Take a drive through his neighborhood, and you’ll understand just how far it is from Silicon Valley.

“Majority of the time when people visit, they be like, ‘I didn’t know San Jose get down like this.’” says Stretch. “That’s why I tell people to come pay a visit.”