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The fact that San Antonio has been a Tejano/Northern Mexican town for many generations as opposed to just a majority white and black town like Dallas or Houston is certainly significant on the culture of the city. The Tejano and Mexican culture is simply more ingrained. There is no escaping it regardless of if you live on the southside or Alamo Heights or Stone Oak or even out near Boerne. If you are white and your family has been in SA for many generations you are likely part Tejano yourself. In Dallas or Houston if you don't live in one of the communities with lots of hispanic immigrants you probably don't feel much of a presence. There might be a small element to those cities that is Tejano or Mexican but it is much larger in San Antonio and even larger as you get further south.
I think Dallas and Houston are more culturally southern, or were, historically. Maybe transplants and immigrants have changed that. I do agree that the Tejano and German cultures that have existed in San Antonio make it less southern. But it's still southern. Oklahoma has lots of Indians and Midwesterners,who are also likely German, but still has a southern feeling. New Orleans has the whole Cajun thing going on, as well as lots of immigrants historically that were French, Irish, and Italian, and they are still southern. Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA also have lots of Irish descendants but nobody says they aren't southern. Are they less southern than they would be otherwise because of these Irish immigrants? Sure. Still southern though.
Right, I agree that it's still Southern even if less Southern than say, Harlan County, Kentucky.
Also, even Atlanta is less "Southern" than it was 20 years ago.
It is technically semi-arid grassland and just outside of the technical definition of desert based on precipitation. As someone who has lived in the Chihuahuan desert for 30 years, I would probably refer to the open lands around Odessa as "desert" in a vernacular sense even if technically it isn't.
Obviously not Mexican immigrants but their kids yes. Ever hear of rapper Kap G from College Park, Georgia? He is 2nd gen (children of immigrants) and he obviously has a Southern accent.
There you go again using rappers as a valid comparison when projecting them onto the majority of Mexicans is downright stupid. Offering opinions on something you have no experience with is ridiculous. I have never lived anywhere where there wasn’t a ton of Mexicans (LA, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston). The trends are NO DIFFERENT. People who grow up in black neighborhoods will be more likely to have accents that are akin to those black people have.
There you go again using rappers as a valid comparison when doing so is downright stupid. You don’t have experience here and you should stick to what you know. Offering opinions on something you have no experience with is ridiculous.
1st generation people who grow up in black neighborhoods will be more likely to have accents that are akin to those black people have. Atlanta is not Texas. It’s not the same. Don’t try to compare it.
But not being Atlanta doesn’t make it any less southern. In a region so big, it would be ridiculous to expect everything to be the same.
In the movie Easy Rider, there's a scene at a diner in Morganza, Louisiana and the real life locals are extremely Southern. Most of them in the credits have French and Italian last names.
The idea that only places settled by people of British Isles stock can be real Southerners is silly.
European immigration caused a die-off of Native Americans, whose immune systems could not protect them from the diseases the Europeans unwittingly introduced.[44]
The predominant culture of the original Southern states was British. In the 17th century, most voluntary immigrants were of English origin, and settled chiefly along the eastern coast but had pushed as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains by the 18th century. The majority of early English settlers were indentured servants, who gained freedom after working off their passage. The wealthier men who paid their way received land grants known as headrights, to encourage settlement.[45]
The Spanish and French established settlements in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. The Spanish settled Florida in the 16th century, reaching a peak in the late 17th century, but the population was small because the Spaniards were relatively uninterested in agriculture, and Florida had no mineral resources.
In the British colonies, immigration began in 1607 and continued until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775. Settlers cleared land, built houses and outbuildings, and on their own farms. The Southern rich owned large plantations that dominated export agriculture and used slaves. Many were involved in the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, the first cash crop of Virginia. Tobacco exhausted the soil quickly, requiring that farmers regularly clear new fields. They used old fields as pasture, and for crops such as corn wheat, or allowed them to grow into woodlots.[46]
In the mid-to-late-18th century, large groups of Ulster Scots (later called the Scotch-Irish) and people from the Anglo-Scottish border region immigrated and settled in the back country of Appalachia and the Piedmont. They were the largest group of non-English immigrants from the British Isles before the American Revolution.[47] In the 1980 Census, 34% of Southerners reported that they were of English ancestry; English was the largest reported European ancestry in every Southern state by a large margin.[48]
British people and African people are the two main groups that give the south its culture. I have never seen the movie you speak of but Morganza is near Baton Rouge which is not historically a French city, it is southern/British. There are plenty of British people in the area even if some of the people in the movie don't have British names. Also, you can be mostly British and not have a British name.
Louisiana was mostly settled by the British and the French, French mostly in the south and British mostly in the north. This is why northern Louisiana is more like Mississippi, Arkansas, or east Texas than it is southern Louisiana.
You can be French, Italian, or Mexican, and be southern, but it was the presence of southerners with origins originally from Britain that caused these people to assimilate into the southern culture.
My own family is half southern/British and the other half is a mixture of southern/British, Tejano, and various other Europeans that came in the late 19th and early 20th century. I believe the southern and Tejano elements are the strongest in my family and this is likely from those two groups dominating the culture of south Texas in general which is where my family is from. I don't really have anything in my family that is Scandinavian, Austrian, or Czech, despite that ancestry being more recent than the others. They assimilated into the predominant southern and Tejano culture.
What does the Mexican culture being "older" matter?
It means it is far more ingrained in its culture more than the original southern culture was.
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