96
Popular Culture Review
four-time winner of the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy
Hall of Fame, was voted “All-Time Best Western Author” by the Western
Writers of America, and according to Texas Governor Rick Perry, “is truly a
Texas Legend.” His photograph taken at historic Fort Concho, as well as the
accompanying feature on his writings, in the San Angelo’s Chamber of
Commerce’s 2006-2007 magazine, Images o f San Angelo, demonstrate the
city’s regional identification with his quintessentially Texan image.13
Moreover, it is entirely logical to Concho Valley residents that Christoval
native, Donaldson of Survivor (Australia) notoriety, had perhaps more than the
requisite, proverbial 15 minutes of fame because of his handsome representation
of all things Texan. As he himself famously announced during his run on the
reality show: “When I wake up in the morning, there are two things I’m thankful
for: One that I’m alive and the second that I’m a Texan.”14 When Donaldson
used the large Texas flag, one of the few items he had selected to take with him
into the wilderness, as a tent to shelter his team members, he demonstrated his
uniquely Texan appeal not only to American popular culture but also to the
Texan popular culture that San Angelo defines itself by. Indeed, female fans of
Donaldson from San Angelo have confessed to me that they became teary-eyed
when he unfolded his Texas flag.
These tears suggest the impulse behind the unusual abundance of Texas
flags and Texas state shapes one sees all over San Angelo in commercial and
private spaces. Like the rest of Texas, San Angelo’s cultural and commercial
popular culture is festooned with icons focusing on the shape of the state of
Texas or featuring the state flag. As Richard Francaviglia has argued so
persuasively, Texans have learned to attach many values related to state identity
to the outline shape of their state. Calling this phenomenon “Tex-map mania,”
Francaviglia has posited that the horizontally substantial, graphically balanced,
and immediately recognizable map shape of Texas represents to Texans (and
most Americans) the literal and figurative “expansiveness” of the state—its
large, territorial dimensions and the audaciously big ideas/ambitions associated
in state and national popular culture with its early settlers and later residents—
“reminding] us that Texas is both space and place” and projecting a “unity of
what are, in reality, disparate [regional] Texas identities.”15
It’s hard to prove absolutely that San Angelo’s commercial and other forms
of popular culture feature more images of the flag or the map of the state of
Texas than any other Texas city, but one senses that there could hardly be more.
From contractors, to air conditioning companies, realtors, clogging groups, etc.,
the Texas state flag and shape of the state abounds in local marketing throughout
the city.16 Though many Texans east of the 1-35 corridor do not even know
where San Angelo is, these ubiquitous Texas shapes show that San Angelo
posits itself in its popular culture as the essence of Texas, reveling in both its
urban embodiment of an idealized Texan place and its geographical location in
the center of a yet-to-be-developed, expansive space, symbolic of future cultural