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