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"Balancing a stunning variety of variables—ancestry and color, legal and customary segregation, rural and urban origins, religious and musical traditions—Tyina L. Steptoe explores in fine detail the making and unmaking of 'this thing we call race.' Contrasting recurrent ethnic conflict in several spheres with shared musical performances among Creoles and blacks, Mexican Americans and Mexicans, this book tells the story of multicultural production like no other that I know of. Houston Bound opens new historiographical conversations and complicates old ones."—Kevin Mumford, Professor of History, University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign
"Houston Bound is an important and pathbreaking example of the new Southern Studies. Steptoe reveals how cultural interactions between Texas blacks, Louisiana Creoles, and Mexican and Tejano migrants to Houston in the twentieth century produced fluid and changing understandings of racial identity even as whites passed Jim Crow laws to try to fix a black-white racial binary."—Grace Elizabeth Hale, Commonwealth Chair of American Studies and Professor of History, University of Virginia
"Steptoe probes deeply and insightfully into the cultural and racial dynamics of Creoles of color, black Texans, and ethnic Mexicans where these communities transformed conventional understandings of racial space and place in the Jim Crow South, often despite differences in language, religion, racial identity, and especially musical expression—from jazz, blues, and 'la-la' to Tejano soul, orquesta, zydeco, and the cross-racial music of Beyoncé and Chingo Bling.
Houston Bound is a historical tour de force that reveals the Bayou City and its intricately entwined cultures as a close cousin of New Orleans."—Neil Foley, author of
Mexicans in the Making of America
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: When Worlds Collide
Part One
1 • The Bayou City in Black and White
2 • Old Wards, New Neighbors
Part Two
3 • Jim Crow–ing Culture
4 • “We Were Too White to Be Black and Too Black to Be White”
Part Three
5 • “All America Dances to It”
6 • “Blaxicans” and Black Creoles
Conclusion: Race in the Modern City
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Tyina L. Steptoe is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona.
Summary
Drawing on social and cultural history, this book shows how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations - particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles - complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race.
Additional text
". . . Attention to place informs the essential new work by historian Tyina L. Steptoe . . . This valuable addition to the historiography builds on the literature of race, ethnicity, and migration as well as the growing scholarship on the musical construction of race. Weaving together oral history interviews (some conducted by the author), census data, high school yearbooks, and especially musical recordings, Steptoe amasses a creative source base to tell intimate stories within the broader history of what is today the fourth most populous city in the United States."
