Becoming Texas
93
only Jesus Christ can take us “to infinity and beyond.” Here in this very parking
lot Southern Christian values clashed with Wild West immorality (with a little
rhetorical inspiration from Disney’s Buzz Lightyear!).
The majority of San Angeloans, who are of European-American descent,
are also ambiguously connected to the Hispanic implications of San Angelo’s
Chihuahua desert region identification. The city is approximately 25 percent
Hispanic, and many of the Mexican-Americans here have active family
connections to the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Moreover, San Angelo has a
Hispanic name. The city was originally named Santa Angela, in honor of the
city’s founder’s late wife, a Mexican-American woman from San Antonio who
died before her husband came to San Angelo. Almost immediately, however, the
English speakers of San Angelo muddled the correct Spanish of the original
name and began to call the new town San Angela, which was “corrected” to San
Angelo when the town was granted its first post office. Now, many Anglo
residents call the city either Sanangelo (one word, pronounced SaNANgelo) or
just Angelo, as in Angelo State University. The same kind of alteration occurred
with the name of the Concho River—the correct Spanish word is concha.
Nevertheless, San Angelo’s European-American residents patronize the dozens
of excellent Mexican restaurants, the city supports a Mexican-American radio
station, and even in the most prestigious Anglo neighborhood, one of the
wealthiest streets retains the original Hispanic name—Paseo de Vaca (cow
path)—to commemorate the time when the street was literally a path used by
Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) to bring cattle to the river.
The Permian Basin Texas Oil Country enters into San Angelo’s popular
culture in an even more qualified, though clearly recognizable, manner. The
city’s older, wealthier neighborhood that Paseo de Vaca winds through and in
which the many antebellum style homes mentioned above are located, is named
Santa Rita after the famous oil well, Santa Rita #1, located on University of
Texas land in Reagan County (just west of Tom Green County, just thirty miles
southwest of San Angelo itself). Moreover, Ira Yates, the famous original owner
of the Yates Oil Field in Pecos County, who became a millionaire almost
overnight in 1926, was, several years before his oil discovery, a cattleman and a
city marshal in San Angelo, afterwards becoming a philanthropist in the city.
Indeed, much of San Angelo’s wealth came from the oil boom of the 1920s. The
Transcontinental Oil Company had a West Texas office here during that period.
The Santa Rita neighborhood was built during that time, and the city’s
connections to oil wealth are imprinted on the grandeur of its homes.
Nonetheless, in San Angelo’s current product advertisements and the city’s
representation by the Touri