Becoming Texas
97
and economic endeavor. Indeed, this city’s positing of itself as the central point
of a fusion of regional Texas identities demonstrates that its citizens have sought
to create a place that illustrates Doreen Massey’s notion of place as not an
“inward looking enclosure,” but “a subset of the interactions which constitute
space, a local articulation within the wider whole.”17
This fusion of Texas identity surfaces in the rapidly growing popular music
scene in San Angelo. Blaine’s Pub, a local bar, has become a center for Texas
music, a subcategory of country music that defines itself as an alternative to
Nashville country music, since the pub opened 10 years ago. Texas acts, such as
Pat Green and Cooder Graw, find the San Angelo crowd invigoratingly focused
on their (Texan) vibe.18 The latest, even more explicitly Texan music venue and
business is the Texas Coffee Company, a state-themed high-end cafe that
features casual early evening concerts of Texas acoustic acts as well as gourmet
coffee, tea, etc. This place’s logo, which is modeled after the famous
Luckenbach, Texas (a tiny Hill Country town) logo, puts its identity squarely in
a Texan context, and has been a factor in this cafe’s unusually dramatic success
for a business of this type in its first three years of operation.19
Perhaps the best example of commercial popular culture to consider in this
context is the San Angelo-based pickled okra producer, Talk o’ Texas Pickled
Okra, the largest okra pickling company in the world. The Southwestern cowboy
imagery on the label clashes symbolically with the distinctly Southern
associations of okra, but the use of Texas in the product’s name provides the
magnetic force holding the two poles together.20 And even more significantly,
the initial S