A recent immigrant to the state of Texas will typically display an admixture of feelings – temptation with a new frontier, spoiled by a loathing for the superficial wealth and the mental poverty, petty chauvinism and bigotry that Texas evokes for many people. Later, a closer familiarity with the state will suggest that Texas is not adequately represented by the noisy nouveau-riche ranchers and oilmen who promenade their dolled-up women around the tourist spots of the world, carrying with them their white Stetsons, their beer bellies and their defiant ignorance of local custom. In fact those loud tourists do accurately reveal the dominant culture of about half of the state. I tell myself that I am fortunate to live in the other half; still, the sun-hardened oil and cattle towns have their fascination, born of a history that their inhabitants are happy to forget.
We white folks first came to Texas from three directions: Spanish hacienda owners and their vaquero servants from the south; poor corn and cotton farmers who grew in from the east; and the railroad pioneers who swooped down from the north. The Spanish influence was the strongest in most of the state, and although haciendas are now called ranches and their owners will proudly proclaim their lack of Mexican blood, the cattle barons of the past 150 years have in fact perpetuated a form of life that dates back to the Conquistadors: very wealthy land owners surrounded and embellished by the dusty poverty of those who work for them or around them.
From time to time, the divine order of the hacienda has been upset by the winds of economic change. Sometimes these winds have blown in from elsewhere, as with the railroad boom that created Dallas, or the sea trade routes that built first Galveston, then Houston. More often, however, the impetus to change has been entirely local: oil. A hard-scrabble cotton farmer named Bubba discovers that his land sits atop enough oil to make him richer than the fat rancher whose family has scorned his for generations. Naturally, Bubba goes to great lengths not to adopt the manners of the rancher; rather, he does what he has always done when a spot of money comes his way: He goes into town to get drunk and screw. He does this until his money runs out; and since the oil economy is as cyclical as any other, and since oil patches are annoyingly finite, each new oil boom brings a different crop of lucky peasants to the golden glow of seven-figure bank accounts. This has gone on for so long now that a clear majority of the state’s population has at one time either been touched by oil money, or been in a position to envy someone who has.
The result has been a pervasive culture of quick wealth and boorish consumption that has become the norm for a good half of the state: The god of oil has blessed the redneck ethic, and the redneck is proud of it. And it is a culture, properly speaking, englobing the arts, literature (try Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show), religion, courting behavior, and of course, politics. Texas has its own unique political character, as everyone knows: Where else would they elect a dead man to the state legislature? Where else is political integrity defined as the ability to “take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and still vote against the bastards”? Columnist Molly Ivins, whose book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? comes highly recommended, calls the “Lege” (the state legislature) the best free entertainment in the state; indeed, Ross Meurant could take some lessons here. And when you watch the fun – the rednecks and the poets; the oil money that talks, loudly; the occasional fisticuffs on the Lege floor – you understand that we are not, after all, that far from Mexico.
Like the Mexicans, however, the Bubbas of Texas are by and large a friendly and generous folk, and although they tend to small-mindedness when it comes to politics or religion, their simple and unaffected manner renders their bigotry less intolerable. In place of intellectual curiosity one finds an almost nihilistic humor and sometimes, surprisingly, a sparkling wit. Bubba does not take himself seriously; to do so would not only place him in the unwanted company of the despised ranch boss, but would also set him up for a fall when the price of oil takes its next dive.
Bubba’s culture touches a region far larger than Texas, but then, Texas itself is larger than its state boundaries would lead you to believe. Texas was an independent nation from 1836 to 1845. If you look at a map from that period, you see that Texans (or at least their mapmakers) claimed a territory that far exceeded even the present broad outlines of the state. In addition to biting off two-thirds of present-day New Mexico, the nation’s frontier spread out in a step-like formation to the northwest, beyond Oklahoma into Kansas, Colorado, and even Wyoming. The area of this Greater Texas corresponds roughly to the limits of the ranch economy and to the extent of the oil deposits underneath.
Texas is dotted with nineteenth-century towns, each of which was convinced it would be the next Chicago. Abilene, Texas, named itself after Abilene, Kansas, which it presumably thought was the prototype for the new American railroad metropolis. The good residents of one dusty West Texas town named their budding city Ozona, apparently to convince Easterners that they had lots of fresh “ozone” to breathe. The result of this epidemic boosterism was a network of charming little cities, designed on a grand scale with broad avenues, theaters, opera houses, railway stations, and imposing central squares with magnificent courthouses now often used for museums of local history. (The one in Abilene has a wry exhibit on the history of the town’s self-promotion.) Much of this vanity has fallen into disrepair, like so many Oamarus; but the wonderfully restored Paramount Theater in Abilene shows what potential these buildings have. The courthouse in Lampasas, the opera house in Anson, the old Route 66 office buildings and coffee shops in Albuquerque, and the riverfront in Carlsbad, New Mexico, are also fine examples of the architecture of wishful thinking.
The world has given Texas the reputation of a dull prairie, a vast extent of desert and semi-arid plains whose flat monotony is broken only by the occasional saguaro cactus. In fact the state, even in its present reduced boundaries, is as large as Germany, and its physical geography is not only diverse but also subject to sudden change, as if some mathematical god had invented catastrophe theory while dallying with the region. The interminable cotton fields of the Panhandle area border the magnificent Palo Duro Canyon; the dry West Texas flatlands erupt suddenly into the graceful Davis Mountains or the limestone formations of the Guadalupe chain; the uncomfortable winter heat (99º F, 37º C) of Austin gives way to a snowstorm in Amarillo, in the time it takes to drive between the two. The social geography of the state is as varied as is the physical. East Texas is a continuation of Mississippi and Alabama, a part of old Dixie; the Rio Grande Valley is and always has been Mexico, the convenience of the river as an international boundary notwithstanding; the Hill Country and the coastal parts of the state have been a melting pot to rival the industrial Midwest, with stolid German towns like Fredericksburg, the Irish who have been in Victoria for over 150 years, the cultural ferment of Austin with its thriving university scene, and the town with the wonderfully pan-linguistic name of San Augustine. Bubba doesn’t live in these parts.
Then, west of a line running from Dallas to San Antonio, Texas is what the movies say it is – cowboy boots and oil derricks, shiny pickup trucks in suburban driveways and Cadillacs growing out of a wheat field, the prosperous stench of refineries and cattle manure. This is the Texas that has grown to fill the 1836 mapmaker’s vision. This is where you can find bumper stickers that read “Please, God, Give Me One More Oil Boom,” and underneath, “This time I promise not to piss it away.”
Austin, December 1995
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Copyright © 1995 T. Mark James