Boosting the West: Using Full Count U.S. Census Data to Explore Migrant Sources and Sectoral Shift in Southern California

Daniel MacDonald, California State University San Bernardino

By the early 1900s, boosterism of Los Angeles and the nearby inland counties of San Bernardino and Riverside had transformed the region into one of the most populous and wealthiest areas of the United States. Scholars have analyzed the effects of boosterism on the geographic sources of Southern California's migrant population and economy, drawing on summary statistics to support their hypotheses. This paper uses full count U.S. Census data between 1870 and 1930 to reassess claims about boosterism's impacts. The paper confirms prior claims that Los Angeles' population had a lower percentage foreign-born due to boosterism's explicit aim of attracting Anglo-Saxon migrants from rural areas of the Midwest. The paper also provides a more precise timing of the Midwestern and later Southern migrant "waves" to the region, and it shows that there was geographic variation in the timing of these waves between Los Angeles and the inland counties. Finally, it argues that internal migration was pivotal to the region's sectoral shift away from agriculture, which may have begun earlier than previous studies suggested. This analysis not only refines our understanding of Southern California's demographic and economic evolution, but also highlights the underappreciated role of internal migration in reshaping regional economies beyond the agricultural sector.

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 Presented in Session 20. Making the West: Spatial Perspectives