Cultural elements that are unique to Texas among southern states?

[TexasHorseLady]

I hold that Texas is not a southern state because there are so many other influences strongly at work in making it up what it is (nothing magical about it, you just have to ignore most of the influences on Texas other than the south in order to claim that it's a southern state), I AM educated, and I was born and bred in East Texas all the way back past San Jacinto. So you would lose that bet.

Oh, and last I looked, West Texas was part of Texas. And it was five states, not four, that Texas could be divided up into - but wasn't, so it's still all one state and that's what we're talking about because that's the reality.

[curtbr72]

Originally Posted by TexasHorseLady

I hold that Texas is not a southern state because there are so many other influences strongly at work in making it up what it is (nothing magical about it, you just have to ignore most of the influences on Texas other than the south in order to claim that it's a southern state), I AM educated, and I was born and bred in East Texas all the way back past San Jacinto. So you would lose that bet.

Oh, and last I looked, West Texas was part of Texas. And it was five states, not four, that Texas could be divided up into - but wasn't, so it's still all one state and that's what we're talking about because that's the reality.

What influences do you speak of? Surely you don't speak for the majority of Texans because they live on the eastern half. And the influx of immigrants is new. Please give me an example of these influences you speak of other than Mexican food? And last I checked, Texas was a southern slave state. You can live in a fantasy world all you want but Texas is as southern as you can get.

[TexasHorseLady]

German influences, French influences, Spanish influences (much more than "Mexican food", if you've done any research at all) come immediately to mind.

I just noted in another thread that the Texas State Historical Association (founded 1897) apparently considers Texas to be a Southwestern state, if anything other than just Texas.

[Nairobi]

Originally Posted by TexasHorseLady

German influences, French influences, Spanish influences (much more than "Mexican food", if you've done any research at all) come immediately to mind.

I just noted in another thread that the Texas State Historical Association (founded 1897) apparently considers Texas to be a Southwestern state, if anything other than just Texas.

So I suppose you feel the same way about Louisiana, Florida, and other enclaves of the South?

[TexasReb]

Originally Posted by TexasHorseLady

German influences, French influences, Spanish influences (much more than "Mexican food", if you've done any research at all) come immediately to mind.

I just noted in another thread that the Texas State Historical Association (founded 1897) apparently considers Texas to be a Southwestern state, if anything other than just Texas.

I am copying and pasting something from another thread. And oh yeah, just to preface, THL? How could it be possible that Texas was part of the same Southwest (or considered by the editors of the Southwestern Historical Association) with New Mexico and Arizona (which is apparently how you define it), and those states were not even states until almost 20 years later?

But anyway...


Whoever said Texas wasn't/isn't a 'Southwestern State"? What is being said (by at least some of us), is that the term "Southwest" has evolved over the years, and that the relationship to the South or Mountain West may take on varying definitions.

At one point in time, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana were considered the "Southwest." It literally meant the western part of the South. Heck, even still today, the Southwestern Athletic Conference are made up of historically black colleges in the western part of the South. And later, so was the original (but now defunt), Southwest Conference:

Southwestern Athletic Conference - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Southwest Conference - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In a nutshell, it was a description used to distinguish the western South from the eastern South. But only in the sense that they were "twins" of the other half. Which in turn was never thought of as being anything more than the overall "South".

On a related tangent, as Raymond Gastil put it in his book "Cultural Regions of the United States"

Unlike the Interior Southwest, neither aboriginal Indian nor Spanish-American culture played a central role in the definition of the area. The people of Texas are mostly from the Lower, Upper, and Mountain South and these Southerners easily outnumbered the Spanish speaking and Indian people even before the state joined the Union. Therefore, when we refer to a large Spanish-speaking population in Texas, we are primarily speaking of a relatively recent immigrant population, quite different from the core areas of the Interior Southwest."