California’s Bay Area is rife with contradictions. The region’s reputation as the land of opportunity harks back to the Gold Rush, when San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boomtown of around 36,000 by 1852. As a result of settlers flocking to the frontier, however, 80 percent of the state’s Indigenous communities were wiped out by disease, displacement, and genocide. Today, the Bay Area has come full circle. The Silicon Valley Gold Rush, ushered in by technology giants such as Hewlett Packard, continues to displace communities: a report from 2010 predicted that the city’s Black population would decrease dramatically from 13.4 percent of the total population in 1970 to 3.9 percent in 2010.