What Motivates All These Threads on Whether or Not Texas Is A Southern State? (Houston: fit in, high school)

[busterkeaton]

Originally Posted by High_Plains_Retired

Texas wouldn't be Texas if Texans easily surrendered. The Mexicans learned this the hard way at the Alamo. Most of those "Texans" at the Alamo were not even native Texans but they were still willing to die. There's nothing sad about loyalty to your home place but I doubt that Travis would have drawn a line in the sand over silly arguments regarding which hamburger chain is best or whether or not Texas is a southern or a southwestern state. I think the motivation for these goofy arguments are simply boredom.

I don't know if it's just boredom. It gets pretty heated up in here at times just to be because of boredom. I'd say stubbornness and pride have a bit to do with it, too. I mean, we all possess those attributes, the world over....not only Texans; but Texans do know how to carry those attributes to the extremes. I'm sure, though, that you're right about boredom being the catalyst.

[elan]

Originally Posted by doctorjef

Well, Busterkeaton, you seem to be taking another approach to my thesis that much of this is to do with individual subjective identity. However, I'm asking more specifically for posters to reflect on why the question is so important to them, not whether it objectively has any merit at all.

Okay, I've thought about it some more. We all have OCD.

[TexasReb]

Originally Posted by TexasHorseLady
Not really. FACT is that the people who made up the state of Texas came from many different places and cultures, not just or even primarily the south.

Originally Posted by Nairobi

You just described a good deal of the south outside of Texas. I guess Louisiana isn't the south, and neither is much of Florida.

Actually though, Nairobi, this so-called "FACT" of the other poster is historically incorrect, and it is telling -- but par for the course -- that no emipirical evidence is offered in support of it.

I don't have time to at the moment (as I have a half-work today) but when I can later on, I will provide detailed figures (From Terry Jordan's Georgraphy of Texas) showing that at least 70% of the free immigrants to Texas during the days of early statehood were from the Upper and Lower South. I say at least because I am using the least number possible (as there is some room for interpretation) to make the point. It could be as high as 80 percent or above.

And further, this does NOT count the number children born to these southeastern pioneers nor -- equally important in the scheme of things -- of blacks from the southeast who came here as well.

The real "FACT" is the American South influence outweighed all others combined. But like I say, I will post the exact numbers from each state a bit later.

[TexasReb]

RE: Empire State of the South first applied to Texas in 1858

Originally Posted by Nairobi

Not even I knew that.

I didn't either until not too long ago. LOL

I first read it in Randolph Campbell's book "Gone To Texas"...a contemporary written history of the state. After seeing it (in a chapter of the same title" -- Empire State of the South), I did a little more research and found more about it.

Here is good quote which sums it up (with the source!):

In 1846, after a decade of desultory independence, Texas joined the United
States, expanding the South's cotton-slave frontier westward and promising to take its place as the most bountiful plantation region in the country. From 1850 to 1860 the state tose to become the fifth-leading cotton producer in the nation, and observers predicted even more spectacular growth as more slaves and better transportation opened up more of Texas's fertile lands to agriculture.

Texas, as the editor of the Austin Texas State Gazette prophesied, was destined to become the "Empire State of the South." On the shores of this potential empire of cotton and slaves, Galveston also awaited the fulfillment of its promise. Located on a barrier island about 300 miles west of New Orleans, the city possessed one of the best natural harbors on the Gulf of Mexico, and its boosters crowed that if Texas became the South's Empire State, Galveston would be its New York City. Galveston, another editor predicted, "will undoubtedly, at no distant day, become the center of commerce rivaling in extent that of many of the first

--- On Empire's Shore: Free and Unfree Workers in
Galveston, Texas, 1840-1860
Cleveland State University
History Faculty Publications History Department
4-1-2007
Robert S. Shelton

[doctorjef]

Originally Posted by High_Plains_Retired

Texas wouldn't be Texas if Texans easily surrendered. The Mexicans learned this the hard way at the Alamo. Most of those "Texans" at the Alamo were not even native Texans but they were still willing to die. There's nothing sad about loyalty to your home place but I doubt that Travis would have drawn a line in the sand over silly arguments regarding which hamburger chain is best or whether or not Texas is a southern or a southwestern state. I think the motivation for these goofy arguments are simply boredom.

Yes, admitted, there's a big element of time-killing. But, still, that begs the questions why one would spend time on particular types of threads as opposed to others. After all, I'm not interested in debating the merits of hamburger chains.

And yes, of course, Anglos at the Alamo weren't native Texans because such a creature didn't really exist at that time. There were Tejanos who were natives, but the Texians as they were then called were settlers who'd come into the territory following the land grant to the Austins. These Anglo-Americans might be thought of as Yanqui imperialists.

This gets into why I'd prefer to see Texas move toward a Southwestern culture, one which will be a more thoroughly creolized culture in which the longstanding Hispanic and Indigenous elements are assimilated into the cultural identity of the Anglo-American inhabitants, and in which a genetically creolized population will increasingly be in the ascendency, breaking down the old lines of ethnic identity to a considerable degree.

The thing not to emulate is the stance of the Anglo cultural imperialists in places like Arizona, who establish an antagonistic position vis a vis the Hispanic population, a project that will ultimately fail as "white people" inevitably lose their ethnic hegemony in a multi-ethnic America.

The old Southern culture is about white dominance and identity politics along black-white ethnic lines. The Southwestern culture at its best has been about multiculturalism, moving in the direction of cultural integration and synthesis.

[Johnhw2]

Texans like to be different from other parts of the country. Calling Tx southern makes is sound like other states which many dont like. IMHO calling Texas southern is an over simplification. I cant imagine someone traveling all over west Tx and Big Bend and calling Tx southern.

[Nairobi]

Originally Posted by Johnhw2

Texans like to be different from other parts of the country. Calling Tx southern makes is sound like other states which many dont like. IMHO calling Texas southern is an over simplification. I cant imagine someone traveling all over west Tx and Big Bend and calling Tx southern.

Only if you have an oversimplified view of what it means to be southern.

[TexasHorseLady]

Nope. One can call Texas southern only if one has oversimplified the reality of Texas in order to try to fit it into that one tiny box.

[Nairobi]

Still waiting on those facts, THL.

[Johnhw2]

Originally Posted by Nairobi

Only if you have an oversimplified view of what it means to be southern.

Not to mention over simplification of Texas...what part of the south is like Midland/Odessa or Lubbock or Amarillo or Big Bend or El Paso? Still waiting on the evidence of what is viewed as an oversimplification of the south to call Texas southern