# Rock, Rap, or Reggaeton?: Assessing Mexican Immigrants' Cultural Assimilation Using Facebook Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09453/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Home and destination attachment: study of cultural integration on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11398/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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-`a-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.