The (Mostly) Brighter Side of Race Relations in Texas
Does this red state offer a path for avoiding racial dystopia?
Having previously lived in highly diverse (and racially fractious) California, and now living in very non-diverse Montana, getting to spend ten days in Texas recently with my family was a fascinating glimpse into a different type of American racial politics. While it has some very substantial downsides (which I’ll address in a future post) The red state multiculturalism of contemporary Texas offered a generally a far more hopeful vision of that than California or any of the blue metros “back east” I’ve spent time in.
My forthcoming book details many of the negative aspects of our current racial politics, and I think that sadly there are far more of these than reasons for optimism, but if you wanted to lean towards a more optimistic view, parts of Texas provide it.
In Austin, I had the opportunity to hang out with my good friend
and about 30 of his merry band of reactionary freethinkers (somehow not a contradiction in terms.) It was a multicultural bunch to be sure, and as a right-winger, it was energizing to be hanging out with a diverse assembly of very talented people with officially unapproved views on everything from science to the economy to U.S. racial politics. Counter-elites are made of such material.Yes, when touring the state Capitol, there was a loud group of illegals and their supporters protesting Texas’s immigration bills that will allow the state to do the work of deporting illegals that our federal government refuses to do.
And an almost entirely white group called “Undoing White Supremacy Austin” had a table nearby. But while Austin as a whole certainly leans left, unhinged leftism like that on display at the Capitol was not the overall dominant sentiment in the area. And Austin has perhaps one of the largest collections of high-end, smart, and influential anti-regime dissidents out there, starting with the one and only Elon Musk.
In California, *generally speaking* when you entered into an heavily African-American or Hispanic area you entered into an area of more concentrated poverty, and one that felt, for lack of a better phrase, less American.
Texas, and San Antonio in particular, where our family headed after Austin, could not have offered a sharper contrast. While a heavily Hispanic city (San Antonio is only 22% white and 66% Hispanic according to the most recent census numbers), much of the city, even beyond the obvious tourist destinations, feels very American. This makes sense, since large numbers of the Mexican Americans in San Antonio have been American for generations.
San Antonio was founded in 1718 by the Spanish and was one of the original settlements of Spanish Mexico and later Mexican Texas. Thousands of descendants of the Canary Island natives who originally settled San Antonio in the early 1700s still live in the area. The city has been majority Hispanic for decades. More than 90% of San Antonio Hispanics are citizens and 86% are U.S Born—and they have embraced—and help to make, a Texan culture that is a mixed Anglo and Hispanic, with significant cultural interchange between the two.
At one San Antonio Museum, we watched a video exhibit of an interview with a wealthy, conservative Hispanic Texas cattleman in the area whose family had lived on their land grant for 14 generations under six national flags.
Walking through a market area, I heard an older Hispanic woman, clearly foreign born, singing to an appreciative crowd (heavily Hispanic, but made up of a huge variety of ethnicities—though few whites were obvious) But she was not singing Mexican music, but country music standards like Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues, Buck Owens’ Streets of Bakersfield and Texas Legend George Strait’s All My Exes live in Texas. Occasionally she was throwing in a few phrases in Spanish. The crowd was eating it up.
Overall San Antonio was clearly prosperous and thriving, an increasing magnet for both human capital and economic growth—a city with a clearly Hispanic heritage that was also clearly an American one. Bexar County itself, the dominant population center and home to the City of San Antonio, is moderately Democratic, but all of the surrounding counties of suburban San Antonio are Republican and the region as a whole voted slightly Republican in the most recent gubernatorial election.
While in San Antonio, we caught up with some old friends of ours from our California days, conservative Christians who had, like us, left in part because the political climate was not hospitable. The couple (one African American and One Caucasian) loved living in the San Antonio suburbs and neither they nor their kids had any interest in coming back to CA. While far from perfect, it represents as “best case scenario” for American multiculturalism
And yet the history of San Antonio itself is hardly without racial conflict. while a substantial number of Hispanic Texans fought and died for Texas independence (and these stories are understandably amplified today at the Alamo in San Antonio), the substantial majority of Hispanic Texans sided with the Mexicans during the Texas revolution. Henry Smith, later the first American Governor of Texas would comment that
“Actions always speak louder than words […]. They [Tejanos in Bexar] have had, it is well known, every opportunity to evince their friendship by joining our standard. With very few exceptions they have not done so, which is evidence, strong and conclusive, that they [Tejanos] are really our enemies.”
There was also a fair bit of racial discord in more recent times, and while Texas Hispanics are far more conservative than say, their California brethren. Gov Greg Abbott took 66% of the white vote in his 2022 re-election but just 40% of the Hispanic vote. I don’t want to sugarcoat what I saw—and again I’ll share the downsides in a future post. Texas may offer a better version of multiculturalism than what’s on offer in blue states, but it is still a prospect with many risks and downsides.
And Hispanic identity, even in a very American place like San Antonio, is still very contested. I saw a t-shirt for sale in a couple of places in San Antonio that embraced Mexican rather than Latino (“Anglo Europeans from Italy” or Hispanic “Anglo Europeans from Spain” identity. “A proud indigenous people. The culture of our own choosing. . . Because it feels good to be Mexican.”
“Mexican”—not “American”-- on a shirt printed in English and sold in a major American city.
Clearly, the final story of multiculturalism in Texas is still to be written.
ADDENDUM: After writing this, I got a note from a friend of mine who had grown up in San Antonio and who echoed my views here
“What's interesting is Hispanics in Bexar County are quite conservative for the most part, even if some vote Democrat. My Hispanic high school classmates tend to be VERY pro-Trump. Perhaps even more so than the white kids I went to school with.”
That shirt declaring a stark Mexican identity instead of Latino or Hispanic isn't quite wrong to assert a more pinpoint definition of ancestry for people with roots below the US southern border. A fascinating book on the creation of these umbrella labels that clumped so many different cultures and distinct ethnic groups explains the process that was ignited by the Civil Rights Act of 1965 - an Act that we can trace the current DEI, AA, and numerous other identity-centric programs.
"Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American" by G. Cristina Mora, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, recounts the journey of how the multiple labels came into being. From the Amazon description:
"How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category―and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.
Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America."