Welcome to the world of S-H-O-R-T,
Texas where them trill ass niggas be livin naughty.

I must say as to what I have seen of Texas, it is the garden spot of the world. The best land & best prospects for health I ever saw is here, and I do believe it is a fortune to any man to come here. There is a world of country to settle.

Kisses sweeter than Tupelo honey.
Little bit crazy like New Orleans.
Memphis blue and Daytona sunny.
Soft as cotton in some cut-off jeans.
Don't you know, ain't nothing in the whole wide world like a Southern girl.

We have now become pretty well acquainted with the sugar-growing part of Texas. The life of a planter who has a fair start in the world is one of the most independent imaginable. We here find the pleasures of fashionable life without its tyranny. I doubt, however, whether a person of Northern education could so far forget his home-bred notions and feelings as ever to be thoroughly Southern on the subject of slavery. We have seen none of “the horrors” so often described, but on the other hand I have seen nothing to change my Northern opinions.

I am a seventh generation American and so I don't have any 'real Mexican' roots. So this is what happened to someone living at the border like me: My ancestors have always lived with the land here in Texas. My indigenous ancestors go back twenty to twenty-five thousand years and that is how old I am in this country. My Spanish ancestors have been in this land since the European takeover which pulled migration from Spain to Mexico. Texas was part of a Mexican state called Tamaulipas. And Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and part of California and Colorado, were part of the northern section of Mexico. It was almost half of Mexico that the U.S. cheated Mexico out of when they bought it by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. By doing so they created the borderlands. The Anzaldúas lived right at the border. Therefore the ones of our family who ended up north of the border, in the U.S., were the Anzaldúas with an accent, whereas the ones that still lived in Mexico dropped their accent after a while. As the generations then went by, we lost contact with each other. Nowadays the Anzaldúas in the United States no longer know the Anzalduas in Mexico. The border split my family, so to speak.

The exquisite smell of the south, clean but funky, like a big woman.

Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger,
Out where the smile dwells a little longer,
That’s where the West begins.

From Frances Swadesh's research on southwestern cultures we know that mestizas in the southwest enjoyed a very liberalized existence as compared to Mexico and other parts of the United States in the 1850s. Women like pony rider mail carrier Candelaria Mestas and "La Tules" in New Mexico blew the Chicana stereotypes. In the 1880's socialist and labor organizer Lucy Gonzales Parsons was actively organizing women workers in Chicago. Her very presence and activity as a leader in the labor movement for thirty years propelled both the feminist and labor causes.

“It’s a Texan’s attitude toward risk, reward and failure I’m talking about. It’s how they handle life. They live it big.

Redheaded women buck like goats.

I ultimately left with my family's blessing. I didn't really realize at the time how final that trip was for me. I think Texas is beautiful and there is a part of the Lone Star State that I will always carry with me. I am very proud of being Tex/Mex. The difficult part for me was being a very aware child while growing up in Texas in the '50's and '60's. Racism was prevalent. I felt it and saw it in big ugly ways and I felt it and saw it in subtle, painful injustices that affect me to this day…

The cactus of the high desert is a small grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it the wrong way. Yet from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born once each year a splendid flower. It is unpluckable and except to an insect almost unapproachable, yet soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites

Houston women I wine-and-dine and take to the house
My moral compass is janky, it breaks in the South

Growing up in Texas gave me many things I'm thankful for. And one of them is an appreciation of the Hispanic culture. In Texas, it's in the air you breathe; Hispanic life, Hispanic culture and Hispanic values are inseparable from the life of our state, and have been for many generations. The history of Mexican-American relations has had its troubled moments, but today our peoples enrich each other in trade and culture and family ties.