Deeper in the Heart of Texas

As someone who has lived all her life on the West Coast, I have shared my friends’ and neighbors’ opinion of “anywhere but Texas.” That’s where none of us wanted to live. Why? Because it was full of cowboys, which we all knew were uneducated rednecks, right? Bigots. Treated their women badly.

How terrible. To think that, to carry that opinion for all these years without ever checking it out. My aunt and uncle and cousins moved here and lived here the rest of their lives, and unfortunately they exhibited the behaviors and mindsets that I considered were Texan or Southern: teen pregnancies, never finishing high school, not marrying the other parent of their children, their own kids repeating this pattern.… But several of my cousins in California did that, too.

My grandmother lived in Texas for quite a while; she worked for a contractor to NASA. It is obvious that educated people live in Texas. And just because one wears jeans and boots and a cowboy hat doesn’t make one uneducated or a bigot or a wife beater. I think that is a conceit of early urbanites, of people who lived very far removed from animals and farming and dirt. Perhaps began as a way to distance oneself from rural areas, from tradition, from dirt and animals and subsistence. But I find I rather like cowboy boots and cowboy hats…I think I’d like some to wear for myself! (I already wear jeans—Levi’s 501s to be exact.)

What about racism? When I worked for a year at the City of Seattle, I worked with a group of analysts regarding the solid waste and recycling programs that were being initiated in Seattle that year. In a group of about ten people, two were Asian and one was African American. The latter analyst, Mozelle, had grown up in Seattle, but when she was sixteen she convinced her parents to let her go live with family in the South. She said that the big difference she noticed between the two regions was that in the South, you at least saw bigotry—where it exists—in the open, unlike in Seattle. One thing I’m finding about the Southwest is that there is far greater social integration among ethnic groups than I have generally seen in the PNW.

Sexist? I don’t know yet. But certainly I see gender issues everywhere. And while the US talks up greater rights for women more vocally than other countries, other countries were laughing at us during this last presidential election because we were making such a big deal over a potential woman presidential candidate and woman vice presidential candidate: even in countries where young girls are still sold into marriage, there have been women in leadership roles, including women leading those countries. I don’t see gender issues as being strictly tied to geography. Nor to education levels: there are plenty of people with recessive ideas of gender roles and capabilities in all levels of economic, social, and economic levels.

So here I am, in a state I never thought I would go to, challenging lifelong prejudices and thoughtless opinions, and I’m liking it—all of it. Suppose I decide to stay here? What will my family think? What will my friends think? ;) What will I think?