What Can We Learn About Mexican Immigration From Restaurant Names? (Part 1)
The United States has always been an immigrant nation. Despite this truism, American immigration looks very different based on the time period one is referring to. No longer does one immediately think of a Swede when one pictures an immigrant, as one might have in the late 1800’s in the upper Midwest. Today, when one thinks of an immigrant, they probably picture a Latino, probably from Mexico.
This view is well reflected in reality: in the past 30 years, most immigrants have in fact come from Mexico (and many travelled through Mexico to get to the U.S.). As the chart above shows, the Mexican migration from the 1980’s to early 2000’s may be the strongest, most intense wave of immigration from a single country the U.S. has ever seen.
This wave of immigration, like all waves before it, will alter our country in profound ways. In the same way that nearly every area that received an Italian immigrant now has a pizzeria, it’s not hard to imagine something similar for Mexican food. To learn more about what these changes will look like in the future (and are currently happening), I will examine the home regions of Mexican immigrants in different areas of the United States through their associations to Mexican restaurants in select U.S cities.
While most Americans are unaware that Mexican immigrants come from many different regions, it’s an important fact to remember: Mexico is a large, diverse country, both geographically and culturally. The Mayan Yucatán, cosmopolitan Mexico City, indigenous and mountainous Oaxaca, and arid Chihuahua are all quite distinct from each other. Did people from all of these regions come to the U.S. in equal proportion? Are there regional patterns within the U.S.? This blog series will attempt to answer all of these questions through a historical and data driven approach. I will do so by trying to find references to cities or regions in Mexican restaurant names in San Francisco, New York City, Dallas, and Chicago.
Part 1 of the blog series will describe the process by which I use data science to shed light on Mexican immigration to the United States. In Part 2, I will analyze the results and review the history of Mexican immigration to the United States. For a condensed history of Mexican immigration to the U.S., I encourage the reader to check out this blog post.
Why This Question is Important
This question is relevant for any community in the U.S. that is home to a significant number of Mexican immigrants. The cultural footprint left by the Mexicans living in the U.S. can be quite different depending on the home region of the immigrants from Mexico. As the chart below shows, Mexican food, for example, varies significantly by region (the details of which can be found here). Additionally, the heritage and culture of the people themselves significantly varies by region due to different histories, despite being in the same country today. Both are often overlooked aspects of Mexican immigration.
Why Restaurants?
Restaurants are a public display of one’s culture and are at least somewhat authentic to the place they display. Even if they aren’t particularly authentic, they are at least appealing to potential customers by referring to that city or region. Thus, it represents a connection with a region of Mexico either by the restaurant owners/staff, the customers, or, ideally, both. With this in mind, I examine the regions associated to Mexican restaurant names in Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and San Francisco.
Why These Cities?
Mexican immigration, and in fact nearly all immigration to the United States, is predominantly centered in metro areas. The top 20 metro areas account for 65% of the total immigrant population in 2017. Therefore, it makes sense to compare metro areas that have approximately the same number of Mexican immigrants. The cities chosen represent different regions of the U.S.: San Francisco for the West, Chicago for the Midwest, Dallas for the South/Southwest, and New York for the Northeast. Would more traditional Mexican strongholds like California and Texas be significantly different in the origin of Mexican immigrants than Chicago and New York?
Outline of project
- Gather a list of names and places in Mexico and organize them by region
- Gather a list of Mexican restaurants in the U.S. cities
- Match the restaurants to regions in Mexico
- Analyze results
Names and Places Associated with a Region
The most obvious place to look for a connection to a region are the cities and the name of the region itself. With this in mind, I found a few datasets that did just this: SimpleMaps, GeoNames and WorldCities. In addition, I was able to collect demonyms (e.g.: “New Yorker” for someone from New York) through GeoNames. After cleaning and standardizing the data, I collected each term for a region and saved it under that region’s heading.
Gathering the List of Restaurants in Selected Cities
Gathering the restaurant names was originally a very difficult task. My first approach was to scrape the web to find these restaurants. After scraping both Yelp and Google, however, I found that the results were woefully inadequate (Yelp returned 5 Mexican restaurants for all of New York City!). The approach that is much more successful and easy uses the restaurant inspection data provided by these cities. Of course! Who else would have a more complete list of restaurants! Therefore, I limited the data to Mexican restaurants, if possible, and then compared the words in the names to the values in my list of terms associated with regions. The regions, the matching word, and the matching restaurant were all saved together. After some initial pruning of clearly incorrect data (e.g.: “tequila” probably refers to the drink, not a small town in Jalisco), I had my data.
Not all restaurants were associated with a region, however. For NYC, only 8% of restaurants were matched with a region in Mexico (the other cities did not categorize the restaurants by cuisine). Despite missing such a large range of data, it is my hope that this sample of restaurants is representative of all Mexican restaurants in NYC. The reason is that restaurant owners from all parts of Mexico are (probably) equally likely to add a regional identifier to their restaurant name. Further testing would be needed to verify this assumption.
In this blog I described the background to Mexican immigration along with my method of answering the question. In Part 2, I will examine the results and discuss their significance. If you would like to learn more about the history of Mexican immigration to the U.S., I encourage you to read this blog post.
Thanks for reading!
On March 12th, 2021 this article was published in El Diario NY.
