Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 93

Becoming Texas: The Fusion of Regional Identities in San Angelo’s Popular Culture The city of San Angelo, Texas, has recently received national media attention as the setting of the custody hearings for the children from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compound in Eldorado, located 65 miles to the south, and the place where these children were temporarily housed at Fort Concho, San Angelo’s historic 19th century Western fort. Nevertheless, even though greater San Angelo (the city and the adjoining community of Grape Creek) has a population of around 100,000, few Americans (or for that matter, Texans) who live on or east of the Interstate 35 corridor, can place San Angelo on a map. Texans’ lack of familiarity with the city or its vicinity seems singularly strange given that most know of Sonora, Texas—a town of just under 3,000—because of the caverns there and because it is on Interstate 10, and of Abilene, a slightly larger city of 116,000—located on Interstate 20—yet many have apparently never even heard of San Angelo, located right between them— 85 miles north of the former and 85 miles south of the latter. Of course, for many Texans, especially for the state’s majority of “Texas Hill Country” enthusiasts, it would only take finding out that San Angelo is in the west part of Texas to lead them to assume that the city must be as barren of vegetation, windy, and dusty as the high plains or the rolling plains to its north, the Permian Basin to its west, or the arid rangeland to its south where the Yearning for Zion Ranch is located and the 2007 film, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name, is set. Anyone who travels to San Angelo, however, will find a surprisingly wooded pocket of Texas within a more arid surrounding landscape. The city was built at the fork of the branches of the Concho River, and therefore features pecan trees, evergreen oaks, and abundant vegetation. Moreover, geographically, the city and its river valley is in the northwestern part of the Edwards Plateau, the geological formation that created the hills in central Texas (“Texas Hill Country” being just the vernacular name for the southeastern part of the plateau where the hills and rivers are most concentrated), and thus, it is technically the western part of the watershed of that beloved river region though it is not definitively identified with it in Texas popular culture or, oddly enough, with any other part of Texas. Nonetheless, for its citizens, San Angelo’s “place” in the cultural landscape of Texas—its collective popular culture identity—is fascinatingly ambiguous and pliable, making this city an ideal case for studying both the limitations and creative potential of regional identification through popular culture within the nation and within individual states. San Angelo’s popular culture has come to embrace a multi-regional Texan identity because the city is located in a marginal zone just outside of multiple, well-defined geographical and cultural borders: the border between the