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Popular Culture Review
institution, an insurance company, uses the images for regional flavor.5 This
moral discomfort with the oilman and the machinery around him is, of course,
native to Texas itself, as the classic 1950s movie Giant, and the 1960s movie
Hud, based on Texan Larry McMurtry’s 1961 novel, Horseman Pass By,
demonstrate.
San Angelo is far more comfortable and emotionally attached to its “Texas
Hill Country” identification, as well as to its Southwestern identity. Competing
icon for icon with Southwestem/Texas desert mountain imagery in the city’s
popular culture is the imagery of the “Hill Country”—the spring-fed creeks,
scenic rivers, weathered stone houses, limestone, cedar, metal windmills, and
abundant evergreen oaks. That the Concho River happens to have mussels in it
that produce pink and purplish pearls facilitates our deep attachment to the river
culture of the Texas Hill Country as well.6 San Angelo’s landscape is not as
rolling (the geographical term is “dissected”) as it becomes just 20 miles
southeast of the city in southern Tom Green County, but clearly the people of
San Angelo are happy to be as close in distance and thus in spirit to the Texas
Hill Country as we are. The Hill Country has a special home-like quality in
Texas popular culture, as David Syring’s 2000 cultural study of the region
elaborates:
The Hill Country is where most Texans would choose to live
if they could pick anywhere in the state. If you come from
East Texas .. . you love the feeling of space and openness the
region gives.. . . When you approach the area from the west,
the small, well-kept towns remind you civilization does exist
in Texas, and the startling sight of spring-fed streams and
rivers soaks into you like a cold drink for your parched West
Texas soul.7
Thus, it is not surprising that the Texas Hill Country’s landscape and cattle
ranching ideal are found everywhere in advertisements and other logos, and that
Hill Country images seem to be particularly central in apartment complexes’
signage and advertisements.8
The shared ethnic background of the white population here is an important
connector of the city and the Texas Hill Country region—the same mix of
Southerners with mainly English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry from the mountain
regions of the South (generally Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri) as well as
mid-19th century German and Czech immigrants originally settled both San
Angelo and the Texas Hill Country. As Fredericksburg, the best known of the
German-American settlements in the Hill Country, still celebrates its
Oktoberfest in honor of its ethnic heritage, San Angelo and neighboring towns
stage annual Czech heritage celebrations. Moreover, one of the main attractions
of the city’s historic downtown area is Eggemeyer’s General Store, with its