belated part II

I've been working quite and I've written a lot (with pen and paper) on trains and in hotels, but haven't had time to put them on the blog.  I'll try to do better. 

What is my culture?  It don’t think it’s easy to define, but I know what it is when I’m in it

On a return trip from spending a week in Canada, we stopped in Oklahoma.  As I walked into the store, I saw a good ol’ boy wearing a faded NASCAR t-shirt getting out of a beat up pick-up.  Now I’m not a racing fan, but seeing that guy made me realize that I was getting close to home.  Back to where I felt comfortable.

I remember being at Heidelberg castle in Germany and hearing a group of women speaking to each other in English, but it wasn’t just English I was hearing, it was Texican.  I approached them and asked where they were from, and it turned out that they were from Lubbock, the same place I was living at the time. 

Is a Texas drawl part of my culture?  I’d say yes, but I’d also say that the Spanish language is part of my culture.  I’m nowhere close to being fluent, but upon each of my return trips from Europe, I remember how comforting it was to hear Spanish spoken.

  

However, even within Texas there are cultural divides.  Austin is weird, East Texas is hillbilly, West Texas is tough, Dallas is big city, San Antonio is Mexico, and El Paso is still as rough and violent as it was that night long ago when Marty Robbins saw the “blacker than night eyes of Felina”.

Waco claims to be the Heart of Texas, and it is, demographically.  Brady also claims to be the Heart of Texas, and it is, geographically.

The slogan for Amarillo’s convention and visitor’s bureau is “Step into the Real Texas.”  What do they mean by that?  There are no native blue bonnets and no native pecan trees.  It is 10 hours away from the Alamo, and its Palo Duro canyon was still unknown to gringos when Texas was an independent Republic.  Do they really mean that the Texas that existed all of those years prior to Amarillo’s incorporation was an imposter?

I remember Social Studies lessons from elementary school about different Native American cultures.  We were taught that the plains Indians were excellent horsemen, living in teepees as they followed the buffalo.  We were taught that they used arrowheads made of flint to kill the animals and knives made of flint or obsidian to skin and butcher them, and that the coming of the white man destroyed the Native Americans and their culture.

What we were not taught was that tribes like the Cheyenne and Comanche had no horses before the Spaniards brought them, and by the time they evolved into a horse culture they also had iron and steel from Europeans and used that for their arrowheads and knives.  The truth is that there were no Plains Indians, and therefore no Plains Indian culture until the Europeans came and gave them the horse and steel that made a plains culture possible.

Did you know that in the early part of the 19^th century, after fighting two wars to separate from Britain politically, Americans sought ways to separate themselves culturally as well?  One of the ways they did so was to change the spelling of some words with Dan Webster leading the way with his dictionary in 1828.  That’s why we have color and shop, and they have colour and shoppe. 

Did you know that we “arrogant” Americans were not alone in this strategy?  When Mexico gained independence from Spain, its leaders reached back to medieval Spanish and threw out the j’s and put in x’s so we ended up with Mexico and Bexar instead of Mejico and Bejar.

There is more to come, but I'll end here for tonight.  

This week's song is from Gentleman  George.  Enjoy.