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The Wolfram|Alpha Team

Zoom In: Taking a Closer Look at Diversity

September 18, 2013 —
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Happy Hispanic Heritage month! To celebrate, Wolfram|Alpha would like to spread some Hispanic computational knowledge! We’ve got some pretty nifty geographical gems to show you.

We’ll be using Wolfram|Alpha’s integrated data from the American Community Survey (ACS). Let’s start with a map of the US, then whip out a magnifying glass and take a closer look:

US Hispanic Population Fraction

From this map, it would appear those of Hispanic ethnicity tend to cluster in areas South and West across the US.

But hang on; not only is this taking averages of data on a large scale, it’s also important to note that “Hispanic” is a rather all-inclusive term that lumps a number of unrelated Spanish-descended regions into one group. With Wolfram|Alpha, we’re going to zoom in to see how they stack up on a smaller scale.

So let’s narrow this down to just those of Puerto Rican-Hispanic heritage:

US Puerto Rican Hispanic Population Fraction

Now, this tells a completely different story–Puerto Rican-Hispanics tend to primarily dominate the East Coast. We can do more, though. How about sorting Cuban-Hispanic populations by city:

US City w/ largest Cuban Hispanic Population

Or perhaps observing Mexican-Hispanic descendants by ZIP code, where we can observe that there are even quite drastic variations that occur inside the borders of cities:

ZIPs in LA w/ Mexican Hispanic Population Fraction Over 75%

ZIPs in LA w/ Mexican Hispanic Population Fraction over 25%

America is a melting pot on a large scale, but culture can only be shared so long as there are people who remember the traditions. There are pockets of history everywhere–zoom in, and find that every town, city, and ZIP code is brimming with undiscovered diversity. Yours too!