Lone Star Suburbs: Life on the Texas Metropolitan Frontier

Abstract

Pushing back against the “Texas Myth,” memory, and history that focus on the frontier, cowboys, and rural life, contributors to Lone Star Suburbs present the reality that most of the state's residents lived in suburbs by the turn of the twenty-first century. According to the 2010 Census, 85 percent of Texans lived in cities and 90 percent in metropolitan areas. Because Texas cities had liberal annexation powers, they expanded to include the boom of mid and late twentieth-century suburban growth.The most interesting essays in the collection consider how Texans’ “rural values” are intertwined with suburban culture and politics. Other contributions do the necessary work of documenting the history of suburbanization in Texas and add to recent scholarship on the suburban experience of African Americans and immigrants. Paul J. P. Sandul provides a historiographic overview and discusses how the Texan embrace of “rugged individualism” and use of “the rural image as a way to mark themselves as different and as better than people from other states”—as “real Americans”—leaves them “hesitant to identify the suburban in their state” and instead “minimizing the suburban side of their history” (11, 13).The planning and boosterism that accompanied the expansion of Texas's metropolitan areas are addressed in several chapters. Tom McKinney tells the story of the Texas Highway Department's engineer-managers who oversaw the urban highway planning that facilitated and encouraged suburban growth. Looking at midcentury planning in Arlington, Irving, Garland, and Grand Prairie, Robert B. Fairbanks demonstrates that suburban growth was not accidental. In fact, well-planned “suburban cities” were envisioned and encouraged by local boosters. For example, Philip G. Pope explains how Irving's chamber of commerce leveraged the identity the city gained as home to the Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium, thus transforming it from a bedroom community into an important center within the greater metropolis. Andrew Baker provides a through discussion of how new suburban areas were governed—expansion of county powers, special tax districts, annexation, or incorporation—and their relative merits.Holding rural identities and valuing rural spaces influenced politics and policy at the metropolitan fringe. Baker's case study of the local debate around disincorporation in Chateau Woods includes an official who self-identified as a “country boy,” reluctantly entering politics to address government abuses. Andrew Busch writes about the grassroots origins of environmental protection in Austin, which included limiting the loss of rural spaces to suburban sprawl. He also notes its problematic aspects: when environmentalists managed to overcome their paradoxical opposition to both sprawl and increased density, additional development was directed toward minority and low-income spaces, leading to displacement.The racial and ethnic diversity of Texas's late twentieth-century suburbs is addressed by several essays. Two chapters use oral histories to document the motivations for African Americans’ moves to Texas suburbs: Theodore M. Lawe and Gwendolyn M. Lawe look at Dallas and Herbert G. Ruffin II studies San Antonio. As they note, more work is needed to understand the relationship between the African American suburban middle-class and economically distressed Black working-class urban neighborhoods. Son Mai adds to the growing literature on “ethnoburbs” with his excellent work on Houston's “Little Saigon,” which demonstrates how these suburban ethnic communities differed from older, urban Chinatowns.The most novel essay of the collection is Jake McAdams's history of the cowboy church movement, informed by oral histories gathered from church members. With its roots in come-as-you-are rodeo worship, cowboy church leaders and congregants embraced rurality, its trappings, and its attributed values—even though most of them lived and worked in the suburbs. He suggests that the cowboy church “appropriates tropes and ideals that have been at the heart of suburban rhetoric and growth” (162) and, like the suburbs, is “rural performance with the comforts of more ‘civilized’ areas” (161). McAdams argues that Cowboy Christians “blame city dwellers and other suburbanites for destroying the nation's morality and their beloved rural landscape,” yet they themselves—and almost all Texans—are also living in the suburbs (161).This anthology successfully achieves the goal its editors set for the volume—it is a “conversation starter” that should lead to additional research (ix). The population of Texas's late twentieth century was suburban; this recognition and accompanying paradox, that so many residents continue to embrace a “rural culture” and the “Texas Myth,” ought to inform a wide breadth of future historical scholarship.