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Popular Culture Review
discouragement to their plan to represent Texas, to become the ultimate Texas
place. Many San Angeloans identify in an intensely personal manner with the
notion that the city embodies a distinctly Texan identity, even going so far as
choosing tattoos that use Texan images. For instance, one young woman
resident, spotted in a grocery store recently, sports on the back of her neck a
Texas map tattoo with “San Angelo” inked prominently in the center.
Similarly, though on the other end of the cultural spectrum, several years
ago city officials commissioned the building of a multimillion dollar,
architecturally magnificent, art museum, for which the primary materials came
from local sources: Texas mesquite for the wood floors, locally quarried
limestone for the exterior walls, and west Texas red clay blocks for the interior
walls. Donations to supplement the funding of the museum came from lower
and middle class residents as well as from the more affluent who typically
contribute funding to such projects. The remarkable roof structure of the
museum, which has received international acclaim from architectural critics,
resembles a covered wagon, symbolizing the city’s pride in its pioneer past.21
As the eminent human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes, “deeply loved places
[such as cities and smaller or larger locations] are not necessarily visible to
ourselves or others,” yet people are drawn to make their beloved cities and other
places associated with their personal and collective identities as visible as
possible by implementing three strategies, all of which are illustrated by San
Angelo’s attempts to embody a uniquely multiregional Texan identity: “rivalry
or conflict with other places, visual prominence, and the evocative power of art,
architecture, ceremonials and rites.”22 San Angelo’s rivalry with other Texas
cities, albeit not much noticed by those cities, is enacted in the city’s implicit
claim to be representative of four Texas regions at once, and this claim rests on
the featuring of sufficiently, though not spectacularly, visible landscape traits of
those four regions and of the Texas map shape and flag in texts that comprise a
major part of the city’s popular culture. This identification has also motivated
significant artistic expressions, from the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art’s
monumental structure, to Elmer Kelton’s popular and award-winning Texas
fiction and Los Lonely Boy’s Grammy Award-winning music. Though the city’s
national media exposure in the FLDS trial is unlikely to bring the city any long
term geographical recognition even within Texas, San Angelo will continue to
see itself as central to Texan identity long after the case is closed.
Angelo State University
Linda Komasky
Notes
1 The other two regions o f Texas are the Piney Woods in the east and the Gulf Coast/Rio
Grande Valley in the far south. Though these regions comprise a considerable portion o f
the state, they are not generally depicted in American popular culture texts as
representatively Texan as the other four regions are depicted.
2 See Leonard Sanders, How Fort Worth Became the Texasmost City, 1849-1920 (Fort