Dallas is pretty darn Southern to me. San Antonio presumably isn't, although I have not been there. Houston in some ways is less Southern to me than Dallas. In some ways, it even has kind of an LA ambiance. To me, where the primary minority is blacks, it's Southern, where Hispanic, and the cattle start running in lieu of crops, it's Western, and in the Panhandle and the flat as a pancake wheat growing belt, it's Midwestern plains.
Dallas was arguably a Southern city originally, but the oil boom and the image the rest of the country projected onto it with the TV series Dallas led to a more Hollywood-version-of-Texas-on-steroids vibe. There's more money in Dallas than in the big Southern cities (Atlanta, New Orleans), but it's newer money and with less gentility or manners. Had JFK not been killed there, it would probably have retained more of a Southern image. But people forget how much hatred was projected onto Texas in general and Dallas in particular after 1963, and the city engaged in a thorough scrubbing of its image afterward.
San Antonio has a vibe that might be described as Ibero-German. Its Hispanic culture is more firmly rooted in the old culture of imperial Spain - you see it in the architecture and when you encounter what might be described as blue-blood Hispanics whose families have lived in Texas longer than just about any Anglo family has. The white settlers in SA were Germans, rather than Scots-Irish or French as was the case in much of Texas; it doesn't have the legacy of a free-wheeling frontier town like Fort Worth or a slow-moving plantation like East Texas. Add in the military bases that were built in the area during the 20th century and the high proportion of active and retired soldiers, and there is an almost Prussian air about the place.
Houston was never as Southern as the rest of that region, but it's a port city and port cities never have the same level of cultural purity as the neighboring inland areas. Too many outsiders coming and going. Before air conditioning and modern plumbing, the place was basically unlivable for half the year unless you wanted to die of malaria or cholera. So Houston more or less didn't exist up until the early 20th century - I can't think of a single building around here that was built in the 19th century and has made it to the 21st. Old money is never all that old. Everyone is from somewhere else. I'm sitting at Starbucks writing this while a black man listens to music at the table to my right and a group of Vietnamese gentlemen converse at the table to my left. My coffee was prepared by a Hispanic woman. A couple of South Asian women in traditional dresses passed through here a little while ago. If a white guy wearing a Confederate flag belt buckle came in here, I doubt he would be well-received.
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