moved on, and by 1930 only 1,219 remained, including a scant eight children born in Hawai'i. Most Spanish people left for the promising fields of California to make higher wages and live among relatives and friends who had settled in greater numbers there. Additionally, Andalusians formed the major component of Spanish immigration to certain parts of Spain's American and Asian empire and the largest group to participate in the colonisation of the Canary Islands. Principally, Andalusians and their descendants predominate in the Canary Islands (Spain), Mexico, the Caribbean islands (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba), and the circum-Caribbean area (Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and in Venezuela). They were also predominant in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay and in the coastal areas of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador. Migration rationale Some descriptions of the south of Spain highlights the landownership system, in the past often formed by large estates called latifundios, as a relevant force in shaping the region and migratory past dynamics. These wide expanses of land have their origins in landowning patterns that stretch back to Roman times; in grants of land made to the nobility, to the military orders, and to the church during the Reconquest (Reconquista) as well as in laws of the nineteenth century by which church and common lands were sold in large tracts to the urban middle class. The workers of this land, called jornaleros (peasants without land), were themselves landless. This economic and cultural system produced a distinctive perspective, involving class consciousness and class conflicts as well as significant emigration. In contrast to the much smaller farm towns and villages of northern Spain, where the land was worked by its owners, class distinctions in the agro-towns of Andalusia stood out. The families of the landless farmers lived at, or near, the poverty level, and their relations with the landed gentry were marked by conflict at times. Conditions were often improved by the opportunities to migrate to other parts of Spain, or to other countries in Western Europe. Some of this migration was seasonal; in 1982, for example, 80,000 farmers, mostly Andalusians, migrated to France for the wine harvest. Part of the migration consisted of entire families who intended to remain in their new home for longer periods or perhaps forever. Economic growth and social mobility, although dispersed and not homogeneous in the region, fundamentally