Becoming Texas
95
charming German name, where German hams and Czech and Polish fine pottery
are abundantly displayed.9
Significantly, however, the shared major industry of the “Texas Hill
Country” and the Concho Valley, ranching, is practiced differently in the two
regions. Though the Concho Valley supports some cattle ranching, the region is
in fact an international leader in sheep and goat ranching. Cattle are not as well
suited to the Concho Valley’s vegetation, which is tougher and sparser than that
of the wetter Texas Hill Country. However, this fact does not deter the cattle
ranching image from dominating the popular culture of the city. As in the Hill
Country and the rest of Texas, steakhouses are a mainstay of the restaurant
industry. Likewise, in a symbolic gesture, the city secured part of the official
State of Texas Longhorn cattle herd to be kept in San Angelo State Park.10
Photographs of cattle and cowboys can be seen throughout the city’s public
spaces and publications, and, although the area’s cattle ranching industry has
shrunk because of the recent longstanding drought, which has abated only in the
past few years, the San Angelo Rodeo has expanded. The cash prizes now
offered rival or exceed those offered by the major Western rodeos (including
San Antonio), and thus San Angelo is attracting the best rodeo talent from
around the country. 11 The two-week event is covered extensively by the news
media, and the schools are closed on the final Friday of the event so that
teachers and students can attend.
This showcasing of the rodeo supports the most crucial claim of this
argument—that San Angelo, has posited a compensatory, unambiguously Texan
identity to counter the multiplicity of its marginal, multi-regional identity. The
city’s Chamber of Commerce has dubbed San Angelo “The Shining Star of
Texas,” and, in the past decade one of the most recently well-known
representative groups of Mexican-American popular culture and two of the most
prominent representative individuals of Anglo Texas popular culture are from
the Concho Valley: respectively, the band Los Lonely Boys, writer Elmer
Kelton, and reality-show star Colby Donaldson.
Most notable is the recent rapid rise to fame by the Grammy-winning
Latino-rock fusion band, Los Lonely Boys, three brothers who have been
mentored by Texas music icon Willie Nelson and who have been compared by
music critics to their legendary Chicano predecessors, Los Lobos, who emerged
out of Southern California, a region that vies with Texas as t