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Rock, rap, or reggaeton?: assessing Mexican immigrants' cultural assimilation using Facebook data

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Citation

Stewart, I. B., Flores, R. D., Riffe, T., Weber, I., & Zagheni, E. (2019). Rock, rap, or reggaeton?: assessing Mexican immigrants' cultural assimilation using Facebook data. In L. Liu, R. White, A. Mantrach, F. Silvestri, J. McAuley, R. Baeza-Yates, et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference WWW 2019: May 13-17, 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA (pp. 3258-3264). New York: ACM.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0006-B074-0
Abstract
The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebook. We use the relative levels of interest in musical genres, where a similarity to the host population in musical preferences is treated as evidence of cultural assimilation. Contrary to skeptics of Mexican assimilation, we find significant cultural convergence even among first-generation immigrants, which problematizes their use as assimilative “benchmarks” in the literature. Further, 2nd generation Mexican Americans show high cultural convergence vis-à-vis both Anglos and African-Americans, with the exception of those who speak Spanish. Rather than conforming to a single assimilation path, our findings reveal how Mexican immigrants defy simple unilinear theoretical expectations and illuminate their uniquely heterogeneous character.