Monty Python, the sketch where someone asks what flavour the albatross is. 
The Texas Tourism Board used to have a slogan “Texas, It’s Like a Whole Other Country.”
Being a lifelong Texan, I think that is is unique. However, if I had to chose, I would say Southwestern due to the cowboy and cattle ranching history.
Until 1865 Texas was definitely part of the South. After that they tried to pretend they were really part of the Southwest. But they aren’t fooling me.
Still the South in so many ways and don’t fit in with the rest of the Southwest very well at all.
From data from the 2000 U.S. Census, we have the single largest ancestry group by county (I’m pretty sure these are all self-reported). In the inset map in the top right, we have the high level view (by state), and in much of “the South” the single largest ancestry group is African American; in the Upper South, the single largest self-reported ancestry group is just “American”. In much of the rest of the country (“the North”) it’s German. In the Southwest it’s Mexican, and on this scale, Texas is Southwestern. But on the main map, where the data is broken down by county, we see that the prominent “Black Belt” of African American ancestry (in purple) extends into East Texas, as does the belt of self-reported “Americans” which sort of surrounds and interpenetrates with the Black Belt. Throughout the South, the self-reported largest ancestry group for non-African-Americans is just “American”; in the traditional South, you were either “White” or “Black”, without much room for “White Ethnics”. On the county level large areas of Texas are, of course, plurality Mexican-American, especially down towards the Rio Grande. Oklahoma is plurality American-Indian in the east, and is self-reported plurality “German” in the west, along with a huge swath of the Midwest, extending all the way east back to Pennsylvania. Note also the “German” patch in central Texas; the Texas Hill Country is distinct from East Texas in a lot of ways. The Cajun Country of Louisiana also stands out; southern Missouri is “American” (the typical pattern for White Southerners), while much of the state is “German” like the rest of the Midwest; Florida of course is demographically very complicated, and the geographic north of the state is more “Southern”. Kentucky and most of West Virginia look “Southern” (and White Southern, not African-American Southern), although the northern and eastern parts of West Virginia are more Midwestern/Northeastern, with those blue “German” counties.
Another map (you’ll need to scroll down a bit), showing religious adherents by county. The big red blob are the counties where the Southern Baptist Convention is the single largest religious denomination. East and North Texas are within the Southern Baptist Belt, as is nearly all of Missouri. On this map Kentucky is “Southern” but West Virginia is not (Methodists are the plurality in a lot of that state). Blue is Catholic (meaning a plurality, not necessarily a majority); the gray area around Utah and Idaho are of course the Mormons, and the orange patch in Minnesota and the Dakotas are the Lutherans.
Finally, some of the less pleasant aspects of being “Southern”. Texas not only sought to secede and join the Confederacy, it was one of the seven “Deep South” states which declared secession before Fort Sumter. When Loving v. Virginia ruled “miscegenation” laws unconstitutional, a number of states in “the North” (Northeast and upper Midwest) had never had such laws; a number of other states had gotten rid of such laws by 1887, and much of the Western United States (and Indiana and Maryland) did not repeal those laws until after World War II. And then there’s that big angry red bloc of states in the South–including Texas–which actually still had such laws right up until Loving. Missouri, again, was “Southern” (so was Delaware; although not a place most people think of as such these days, Delaware was a “Border State” in antebellum/Civil War terms). Kentucky and West Virginia also aligned with the South when it came to miscegenation laws. Before Brown v. Board of Education, Texas was once again part of a solid bloc of states in the South where segregation was required by law (with the South here joined by all the “border states” including Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware).
In short: Texas is in some ways a “Southwestern” state, but it also has deep and longstanding ties to “the South”.
(Texas is also part of the “call all carbonated soft drinks cokes” region of the country.)
/thread
Interesting. What region to put the anchors of the Southwest, Arizona and New Mexico, in? Beyond that, the Southwest gets a little fuzzy, but I’d consider parts of California, Utah, Colorado, Nevada. It’s that whole dry, arid, heavily Hispanic influenced area down there. But Arizona and New Mexico are unequivocally Southwest. I suppose you can call all that “West,” but to me, that’s not descriptive enough. There’s West Coast, Pacific Northwest, the Mountain States, and the Southwest. There is some overlap between these regions (a state can be in more than one), but the Southwest region is distinct. I mean, there’s even a whole “Southwestern cuisine” as a sub-set of American cuisine.
Silly me, I meant to say Aransas Pass, but I lived in Anahuac, too.
You know, ask just about any born and raised Texan, from any part of the giant state, if they are part of the South or part of the Southwest, and they are likely to simply say “I’m Texan.” All these other label arguments just seem silly.
This song explains it all . . .
Texas is a State of Mind (Ray Wylie Hubbard):
Texas is a state of mind that I have been livin’ in
Dallas is a woman
She got cognac in her veins
Houston is an oil field
Austin is a cocaine deal
Fort Worth’s a hooker
San Antonio’s a train*
- not positive about this lyric
I’d say that the classically Southern parts of Texas lie not much further east than I-45, and that the classically Western parts lie west of I-35.
The area in between is Central Texas, more or less, and is more or less where those two areas meet- somewhere like say… Marlin or Waco falls between the very Southern places like say… Beaumont or Tyler and more Western places like San Angelo or Abilene.
Overall as a state, I think it’s neither strictly Southern, nor Western/Southwestern either, although it has elements of both.
They’re obviously South by Southwest.
The geographical center of the contiguous US is just northwest of Lebanon, KS. If one were to draw a crosshair with that as the center, all of Texas would fall below the north/south line. The east/west line would basically cut the state in half. Based on that, I would say TX is “south by southwest”.
According to Gallagher, “Texas doesn’t want the South. Texas wants Mexico.”
This bit from the movie Bernie pretty well sums it up: Map of Texas. “The People’s Republic of Austin” cracks me up.
maybe it alludes to alcoholism