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Title: Moving West: Who Moved to California in the 1930s, Where They Came From, and Why We Think They Moved
Citation Type: Conference Paper
Publication Year: 2019
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Abstract: This paper is about the people who moved to California between 1935 and 1940, asking questions about who they were, where they came from, and how migrants to California differed to people moving elsewhere. Much of the lore of migration in this era focuses on people leaving the drought-stricken southern U.S. Plains to work in cotton and vegetable fields in California. Despite the historical endurance of this image, significant numbers of people were leaving large cities to move westward, and rapidly growing cities in California were attracting more people than their hinterlands. The precise nature of these migration dynamics are crucial to understanding the development of California and the changing demography of the United States in the 1930s. The paper makes use of data from the digital full-count version of the U.S. Census of 1940, made available by the IPUMS project at the University of Minnesota, which asked where people enumerated in 1940 had lived five years earlier, in 1935. The main findings of this paper are that while migrants to California resembled their counterparts moving elsewhere, they were disproportionately young, white and less educated, and were more likely to originate in areas affected by drought. This paper concludes that the environmental shocks of the 1930s interrupted the longer-term system of migration that built modern California by temporarily shifting its population to one that was younger, less-well educated, and more agricultural in origin.
Url: http://paa2019.populationassociation.org/uploads/191726
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Authors: Gutmann, Myron P; Clement, Kerri; Connor, Dylan; Cunningham, Angela R; Mikecz, Jeremy
Conference Name: PAA 2019
Publisher Location: Austin, TX
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other, Population Mobility and Spatial Demography
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