Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 96

92 Popular Culture Review people here, especially people 40 and older, self-identify as Southerners. This group has decidedly Southern accents. They listen to popular Nashville country music on the four country radio stations here. Also notable are the 18 Southern Baptist churches, and the dozens of other Southern-based Christian churches, including the Tree of Life church, whose handsome, charismatic pastor has doubled as a televangelist on local television. Thus, despite the historical fact that the frontier town of San Angelo was not settled by Southern AngloAmericans until a generation after the end of the Civil War, the city’s Southern identity is highly visible, and audible. Just as noticeably, however, the city projects itself as part of the Texas mountain region of the Chihuahuan Desert, the home in the nation’s imagination to sublime sunsets over rugged mountains, frontier forts, cowboys, outlaws, bordellos, cactuses, and twisted mesquite trees.3 While the physical landscape partly justifies this regional identification—San Angelo does have two buttes and a few small ridges within view, and ample growth of a variety of cactuses as well as mesquite—the popular culture is far more liberally sprinkled with these interrelated images than the physical geography merits. Images of cactuses abound in local advertising, including even Saguaro cactuses, a species that grows only in the high desert of Southern Arizona, as if the city were truly in a desert region. Similarly, fantasy visions of the area’s two buttes abound throughout the city in popular culture images. The buttes are frequently called the “twin mountains” and are represented as much larger than they are. In fact, in the popular imagination, as in the logo for San Angelo Stock Show and Rodeo, they have undergone what one could call butte augmentation.4 And just as San Angeloans are proud of their buttes, they are proud of their less fantastical frontier past, the time when the fledgling town was a prominent player in the Indian Wars, the open range cattle drives, buffalo hunting, and the outlaw entertainment industries of gambling and prostitution. The city has one of the best preserved and restored cavalry forts in the American West, Fort Concho, which was the home to several of the famous African American regiments (called Buffalo soldiers by the American Indians they fought). And one of the city’s other main tourist attraction is Miss Hattie’s, a restored upscale bordello that once catered to the officers at the fort and continued in operation into the 1950s, and which, through a series of secret passages connecting the bordello to an adjoining bank, allowed local politicians and other influential citizens to enjoy the hospitality of the establishment. Predictably, the Southern Christian aspect of the San Angeloan identity causes many here to be chagrined about the “sinful” past of the city, as well as the present-day adult entertainment venues. For example, a few years ago, the charismatic Southern televangelist described above used some of his church’s money for a large billboard in the parking lot of a strip club then called “Infinity,” on which he informed the patrons of the club and other passersby that