How far west does ” the south” go. Are dallas and Austin still culturally southern?

14 comments

1. Texas is Texas, and Austin is something else entirely.

2. Texas is usually a safe bet for ‘south,’ though as early as Dallas people start considering themselves ‘western’. The Dallas airport loudspeakers definitely say it’s western.

   A lot of the interior west received early waves of migration from southerners anyway, as far north as Boise and as far west as Southern California. So there’s not really a southern-western dichotomy, ‘the west’ is more a gradient or spectrum that starts to get noticeable around central Texas. A town or region can multi-class.

   For shorthand though, ‘the south’ typically means ‘the states that were part of the confederacy, plus a few debatable border states’ — so Texas and even Oklahoma count as south by that metric.

3. Texas is very “The South” aka ex-confederate.

   I’d say Texas has a distinct culture from other traditionally “Southern” states. The accents are quite different; you wouldn’t mistake my Carolina drawl for a Texas twang.

4. The south stops at Tucumcari.

5. You could say it ends in Texas. Texas is a huge state though, the east side and west side of the state have pretty different cultures. so what could be considered “Southern” eventually morphs into more of a Hispanic/Western influence on the west side of the state, but the east side could be considered more Southern in culture.

   Now Austin is something else entirely

   Edit: this was how it was explained to me by a Texan so I could be completely talking out of my ass

6. Texas is the end of the traditional South as New Mexico is considered to be in the southwest. Like everyone keeps saying here, Austin is very different from the rest of Texas. The culture there could almost be considered the opposite of most of Texas. Its a very progressive and liberal city compared to most of the state

7. West Texas – west of approximately Abilene – is neither Southern nor what we usually think of as Western (ie, in the sense of Montana/Wyoming/Utah – wagon trains, weird religions, and rapacious mining and resource extraction). It’s culturally more tied to the old Spanish mission culture of New Mexico, southeastern Arizona and northern Sonoma and Chihuahua. So that’s a definite boundary on Southernness.

   It also depends how specific you want to get about what “Southern” really is. If you mean the coastal plantation economies and their modern descendants, they never got more than a couple hundred miles inland. Western North Carolina, most of Tennessee, and northern Arkansas are culturally Appalachian, which is very different from plantation-style Southern.

   On the other hand, if you’re using “Southern” to mean Trump-voting, anti-abortion Christians, that’s everywhere rural. That kind of “Southern” extends from rural California to rural Vermont and everywhere in between.

8. In Texas, we know the real South begins behind the Pine Curtain in East Texas (the Piney Woods region). Dallas and Austin are Southwestern cities. Dallas could also be considered the southernmost metropolis of the plains.

9. The part that has trees. East of Houston was like being in the jungle!

10. When most people here think of the “south” they think of the states that seceded with the Confederacy during our Civil War. So like Arizona (my state) is geographically south, but we weren’t even a state yet during that time. We are considered the “southwest” based on our geography and the by stereotypical visual that we are a located amongst barren, cowboy filled deserts.

    Texas was definitely a Confederate State so they are, in my mind, a “Southern State”.

11. Texas is Southern

    Dallas and Austin are Commiefornian

12. https://preview.redd.it/b886eal75q2a1.jpeg?width=1439&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=af1024bea99fca8291789f49537fbda17075a339

    This is the cultural map I come back to every now and then.

13. Anywhere east of Texas. IMO Texas has its own culture that overlaps broadly with general “southern” culture but has enough differences to make it something else.

14. Texas, and Oklahoma, is very much part of the South.

    Historically they were settled by Southerners or forced to like the [five civilized tribes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Civilized_Tribes) and these states/territories were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War. The new [Juneteenth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth) federal holiday comes from when the Union Army proclaimed freedom to Galveston slaves, after all.

    Even today, the Federal government (like the U.S. Census) categorizes both states as part of the South.