About Texas

While I was in Syracuse, when people asked me where I was from, I replied, “Texas.” Many people wanted to know more about Texas, and I tried to give them a fair description - but I really did not do a good job. This has bothered me since returning to my native state, and I have been searching for a decent description of the state. I discovered this passage about Texas in a book I just finished, titled The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough.

It’s hard to tell people about Texas. It is. It’s hard to explain what it means to be a Texan. To anyone who grew up in the North, it probably means nothing. The idea of a state “identity,” or that a state’s citizens might adopt it as a part of their own self-image, seems a quaint, almost antebellum notion. Folks in Iowa don’t strut around introducing themselves as Iowans, at least none I know.

But if you grew up in Texas, as I did, it becomes a part of you, as if you’re a member of a club. It’s a product of the state’s enduring, and to my mind, endearing, parochialism, a genetic tie to the days when Texas was a standalone nation borne of its own fight for independence, which produced its own set of national myths. Ohio doesn’t have an Alamo. I’m not sure Ohioans, as wonderful as they are, have a distinct culture. As a child I was always vaguely ashamed I wasn’t born in Texas. I’ll never forget the day a boy in my fifth-grade class actually called me a carpetbagger. How on earth would he even know what that was?

I thought that was somewhat insightful into the identities of many Texans. Although, to be fair, I am a native Texan, though I am not one who has a bumper sticker to prove it.

- Jason Dean