Becoming Texas
91
reflected in several venues of its popular culture, San Angelo is perhaps the most
resolutely Texan of cities. The images found in San Angelo’s Chamber of
Commerce publications, in the advertisements of local businesses and social
groups, and in representations of local celebrities imply that San Angelo is the
state’s popular culture center, what one could call the “Texasmost” city in
popular culture—the popular culture complement to Fort Worth, the historically
“Texasmost” city (as Leonard Sanders has claimed the latter city to be2).
Relying on San Angelo’s central location, about 70 miles from the
geographical midpoint of the state, San Angelo residents use popular culture to
associate the city with the most iconically Texan of these four regions’
enterprises: the cotton farming of the plains, the cattle ranching of the Hill
Country, the oil production of the Permian Basin, and, of course, Texas frontier
and cowboy tourism, which aims to capture the rugged beauty and romance of
the trans Pecos (i.e., west of the Pecos River) desert region. In short, San Angelo
and the Concho Valley have some cotton farming typical of the rolling plains,
some oil production (though not as much as the counties immediately west),
some cattle ranching like the Hill Country, though sheep and goat ranching are
more profitable here, and some desert mountain scenery similar to the
northeastern portion of the Chihuahua Desert. This early and continuing
financial stake in so many facets of the Texas economy, despite the city’s
location on the margins of the regions from which these economic resources
originate, has become the basis for the multi-regional, yet determinedly unified
Texan popular culture of the city.
San Angelo’s popular culture is full of striking images of the symbolism of
all four regions. For example, prominent restaurants include Southern
franchises—Luby’s, Kettle Country Cafe, and Grandy’s, which feature Southern
cuisine, as well as several local Southern style restaurants, a particular favorite
being Mr. T’s, a neighborhood place that serves Southern food as well as
Texan/Westem dishes, such as chili and King Ranch Chicken. Perhaps even
more noticeable is the abundance of Southern plantation-style architecture
characteristic of the Deep South. In two neighborhoods, one downtown and one
just across the river, built from the 1920s to the 1940s, several large houses with
enormous white columns and romantic live oak trees in the yards are found
mixed in with Southwestern adobe-style houses with red tile roofs, and Texas
Hill Country stone houses.
Moreover, several businesses use Southern names, such as the Dixie
Hardware Company, Southwind Construction, and Goin’ South Storage, not to
mention the entire section of town named Southland, with dozens of businesses
using that name there. Tom Green County (for which San Angelo is the county
seat) is named after the famous Texas Confederate brigadier general, and one of
the main streets in the city, Beauregard Avenue, is named for another
confederate general. One of the city’s middle schools is named for Robert E.
Lee, as is an entire small town just 31 miles to the north of San Angelo. Many