Milpitas (Spanish for 'little milpas' or little cornfields) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, part of Silicon Valley and the broader San Francisco Bay Area.

Milpitas experienced rapid growth during the 1970s–1990s, fueled by Silicon Valley’s tech industry, and became a hub for manufacturing and corporate offices, hosting companies like Cisco Systems, KLA Corporation, and Flex Ltd.. Its diverse population includes significant Asian and Hispanic communities, reflecting broader Bay Area demographic trends.

Some of the Ohlone lived in various villages within what is now Milpitas, including sites underneath what are now the Calvary Assembly of God Church and Higuera Adobe Park.

[8] Archaeological evidence gathered from Ohlone graves at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in 1993 revealed a rich trade with other tribes from Sacramento to Monterey.

The Burnett, Rose, Dempsey, Jacklin, Trimble, Ayer, Parks, Wool, Weller, Minnis, and Evans families are among the early settlers of Milpitas.

[13] South of the site of French's Hotel, was a saloon dating from at least 1856 when Agustus Rathbone purchased the land and "improvements" from Richard Greenham.

[14] Around this central core, grocery and dry goods stores, blacksmithies, service stations, and, in the 1920s, one of America's earliest "fast food" chain restaurants, "The Fat Boy", opened nearby.

On January 26, 1954, faced with getting swallowed up by a rapidly expanding San Jose, Milpitas residents incorporated as a city that included the recently built Ford Auto Assembly plant.

An overwhelming majority of Milpitas registered voters voted "No" to annexation in the 1961 election as a result of a vigorous anti-annexation campaign.

Following the election, the anti-annexation committee, who had compared themselves to the Revolutionary War Minutemen who fought the British on Lexington Green—a role filled in this case by the neighboring city of San Jose—adopted the image of Daniel Chester French's Minuteman statue, that stands near the site of the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA, as part of the official city seal.

[16] Starting in 1955, with the construction of the Ford Motor Assembly Plant, and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, extensive residential and retail development took place.

"Union leaders met with Ford Executives and negotiated an agreement permitting all 1400 Richmond plant workers, including the approximately 250 African Americans, to transfer to the new facility.

Once Ford's plans became known, Milpitas residents incorporated the town and passed an emergency ordinance permitting the newly installed city council to ban apartment construction and allow only single family homes.

Because Milpitas had no apartments, and houses in the area were off-limits to black workers-though their incomes and economic circumstances were like those of whites on the assembly line-African Americans had to choose between giving up the good industrial jobs, moving to apartments in a segregated neighborhood of San Jose, or enduring lengthy commutes between North Richmond and Milpitas.

[19] The first deed of property sale in Milpitas is found in the Santa Clara County Records General Index 1850–1856 (K-143) and is dated February 14, 1856.

Monument Peak is a prominent summit in the eastern Milpitas hills, and is the location of antenna broadcasting television stations KICU and KQEH to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Milpitas occasionally experiences odorous air traveling downwind from bay salt marshes, from the Newby Island landfill, from the anaerobic digestion facility at Zero Waste Energy Development Company, and from the San Jose sewage treatment plant's percolation ponds.

Most malodorous during the autumn, it is especially pungent west of Interstate 880 because of its close location to the San Francisco Bay and the direction of the prevailing winds out of the north-northwest.

The City of Milpitas would like to remedy this air quality problem to the extent it can and encourages its residents to file odor complaints.

Showers and cloudy days come and go during this season, dropping most of the city's annual 15 inches (380 mm) of precipitation, and as spring approaches, the gentle rains gradually dwindle.

In summer, the grasslands on the hillsides dehydrate rapidly and form bright, golden sheets on the mountains set off by stands of oak.

[35] Milpitas is home to the headquarters of Adaptec, Aerohive Networks, FireEye, Intersil, SonicWall, IXYS Corporation, Viavi Solutions and Lumentum Holdings (formerly JDSU), KLA-Tencor, Linear Technology, LTX-Credence, SCA, Sigma Designs, and Flex.

Many other companies have corporate offices in Milpitas including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Western Digital, Cisco Systems, Renesas, Infineon Technologies, Varian Medical Systems, Teledyne, Quantum, LifeScan and International Microsystems Inc. Milpitas is also home to one of Santa Clara County's two correctional facilities, the Elmwood Correctional Facility,[36] which houses over 3,000 inmates.

The Celebrate Milpitas Festival is held annually every August, featuring vendors of crafts-type merchandise and providing local talent with a performance venue while selling visitors samplings of exotics like garlic fries or lumpia and even offerings from one or two Californian wineries.

Many old businesses include Main Street Gas (operated by the Azorean Spangler brothers), Smith's Corner Saloon, and Kozy Kitchen.

[41] The city's seal shows Daniel Chester French's Minuteman statue, musket in hand, standing in the Santa Clara Valley, with the golden hills of Milpitas rising to the east.

Residents of Milpitas have complained about the smell of the landfill, which is located underneath a highway leading to San Jose and Fremont.

Odor mitigation will include updating the gas collection system and also modifying the composting operation to use forced air static piles.

On Earth Day, April 22, 2009, the public-private partnership Silicon Valley Unwired announced the rollout of a free municipal WiFi wireless network for the entire city.

In the quiet town of Milpitas, California, a gigantic creature is spawned in a polluted, overflowing waste disposal site.