Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

and many exist today, still in use. The fundamentalist Protestant Texanshad grave doubts about the Germans’ love of dancing, beer drinking, andfrolics on Sunday! In the 1880s, large numbers of Czechs and Poles arrived,lured by land sold by railroads. In the 1890s, numbers of Russian Jews fledpogroms and became active merchants in many towns and cities. Anothergroup, without which Texas culture is unthinkable, are the African Americanswho came first as slaves of the American settlers. Their contributionsto Texas would take many pages to describe.The final group to mention is Mexican. The last decades of the 19thcentury saw the American Texans take lands and rights away from the Mexicans,and South Texas had a civil rights movement that paralleled that ofAmerica, only it was the Mexican Texans regaining rights. Today, of course,the picture is far different from when I was a child. Then the actual border,the cultural border with Mexico, was just south of San Antonio. Today it isnear Austin!Texas had its Protestant, northern European century; now it is rapidlybecoming more Mexican by the day. In another century it will be a fardifferent place. Even the geography has changed under the environmentaldamage of the coastal petrochemical industry and the ravages of improperfarming elsewhere. The dominant feature is urban growth, no longer limitedto Mexican, European, and African peoples, but now including Caribbean,Central and South American, Vietnamese, and many others. The dominanceof oil, which superseded cotton farming, now gives way to high tech inAustin and Dallas. Today the diversity of Texas’ culture is becoming moreextended than ever before, even surpassing its geography.81