California

Settlement & growth (pre-1960)

Long before European contact, California was home to one of the densest concentrations of Native American peoples north of Mexico, with hundreds of distinct tribes—including the Chumash along the southern coast, the Ohlone in the Bay Area, and the Miwok in the Sierra foothills—speaking some 80 languages. Spanish colonization began in 1769 with the founding of Mission San Diego de Alcalá, the first of 21 missions that stretched up the coast to Sonoma, forcibly converting and displacing indigenous populations. Mexico’s secularization of the missions in the 1830s created a rancho system that granted vast landholdings to a small Californio elite, centered in Los Angeles and Monterey.

The U.S. acquisition of California after the Mexican-American War (1848) and the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill triggered the first massive demographic shock: the Gold Rush of 1849. Tens of thousands of Anglo-Americans, Europeans (especially Irish, Germans, and French), and Chinese laborers poured into the Sierra Nevada foothills, founding Sacramento as a supply hub and San Francisco as a boomtown that grew from 1,000 to 25,000 in two years. The Chinese population, concentrated in San Francisco’s Chinatown and in mining camps like Placerville, faced violent exclusion after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which froze immigration for decades.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw agricultural expansion pull in new groups. Japanese immigrants arrived to work farms in the Central Valley, establishing communities in Fresno and Stockton, while Dust Bowl migrants—white families from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas—streamed into the San Joaquin Valley during the 1930s, settling in Bakersfield and Modesto to pick cotton and fruit. World War II transformed the state: the defense industry drew millions of domestic migrants, including Black workers from the South in the Second Great Migration, who settled in Oakland, Richmond, and South Los Angeles. The war also brought the forced internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, mostly from California, devastating communities in San Jose and Los Angeles that would later rebuild.

Postwar suburbanization, fueled by the GI Bill and the freeway system, reshaped the state. White families moved to new developments in the San Fernando Valley, Orange County (especially Anaheim and Santa Ana), and the East Bay suburbs of Walnut Creek and Concord. By 1960, California had surpassed New York as the most populous state, its growth driven by a combination of domestic migration, a baby boom, and the tail end of European immigration.

Modern era (post-1965)

The 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act fundamentally rewired California’s demographics. By abolishing national-origin quotas, it opened the door to mass immigration from Asia and Latin America. The first major wave was Mexican and Central American migration, which accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s, transforming Los Angeles into the largest Hispanic-majority city in the U.S. and creating sprawling barrios in East L.A., San Diego’s Logan Heights, and the agricultural towns of the Central Valley like Delano and Wasco. By 2000, Hispanics had become the state’s largest ethnic group, a shift driven by both immigration and higher birth rates.

Simultaneously, Asian immigration surged. Chinese and Taiwanese professionals arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, settling in San Francisco’s Sunset District and the suburban San Gabriel Valley cities of Monterey Park and Rowland Heights. Vietnamese refugees, beginning in 1975, concentrated in San Jose’s Little Saigon and Westminster in Orange County, creating the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam. Filipino immigrants, many in healthcare, clustered in Daly City and Union City. Korean immigrants established a major enclave in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. Indian (subcontinent) immigration, rising sharply after 1990, centered in the tech corridors of Fremont, Cupertino, and Sunnyvale, where Indian engineers and entrepreneurs now form a visible and economically influential community.

Domestic migration patterns also shifted. From the 1990s onward, California experienced net domestic out-migration, with residents leaving for Texas, Arizona, and Nevada, driven by housing costs and taxes. The people leaving were disproportionately white and Black middle-class families, while the foreign-born and their children continued to arrive. The Black population, once concentrated in South L.A., Oakland, and Richmond, has declined in share from 7.4% in 1990 to 5.3% today, as many families moved to the Inland Empire or out of state. Suburbanization continued, but with a new character: the outer suburbs of Riverside and San Bernardino became majority Hispanic, while the Bay Area’s tech boom created hyper-diverse, highly educated suburbs like Palo Alto and Mountain View.