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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