Writing History through Autobiography

Abstract: One of the reasons I think people are puzzled by Texas is that it has an image that’s very in the minds of people all over the world. I took part in a language study program in France when I was in college, and what they knew about Texas was cowboys. They think about cowboys when they think of Texas. I say in the book that Texas is a White man; it has been constructed as a White man. And what does it mean to be a place where people who are not White men are living? I’m a Texan, but I’m not White and I’m not male. So what did that mean for many people like me over the years? Women? Black people? Hispanic people. Texas portrayed as a White man who is involved in the cattle industry: cowboys or ranchers. The other image that might come to mind would be the oil man, and I’m sure many of you have seen the movie Giant , which tells some of the history of Texas. It’s sort of like an origin story, in which once upon a time there were cowboys and ranchers who ruled the land, and then they found oil. And the cowboys and the oil men and the ranchers hated each other, until they found oil on the land of the ranchers and then they became friends, they became as one. That’s the arc of Texas history, but what’s left out of that is another person, and that would be the plantation owner. Texas is a White man, but Texas is also western Texas, it’s not just eastern Texas, where I grew up, which is the South. I don’t think many people think about Texas as a part of the South, and if you don’t think of Texas as part of the South, you don’t think about slavery. And if you don’t think about slavery, you don’t think about an African American presence in that place and what that meant for reforming the history and the attitudes and the thought processes of people who live in Texas. What I wanted to do was to bring that back and to explain to people that a lot of the things that are going on today in Texas, a lot of the racial problems, problems of voter suppression, problems of banning books, the fight over what can be taught in schools, grows out of shame, guilt, and concern about the portrayal of Texas history, of things that actually happened in the past.