Another Texas?
Exploring the Rich Diversity of the Lone Star State (1970s-2020s)
Nov 6, 2026, Université Paris Cité
2027, INU Champollion, Albi
A Two-day Symposium
Organized by Emilie Cheyroux (INU Champollion, Albi),
Marine Soubeille (Université Paris Cité) and
David Roche (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, Institut Universitaire de France)
While Texas is undeniably one of the most conservative states in the U.S. today (with Governor G. Abbott leading drastic immigration and education policies since 2015, pursuing the legacy of R. Perry and G. W. Bush), its portrayal in the media, and notably in Europe, tends to construct it as a homogeneous place where only the most reactionary laws are passed and political debates are settled at gunpoint. This, in any case, is what renowned TV shows such as Dallas (CBS, 1978-1991) and Walker, Texas Ranger (CBS, 1993-2001) would have us believe. The Lone Star State has certainly, throughout its tumultuous history, given its detractors arguments when it comes to civil rights, border policies and political culture. However, Texas has also always been a place of political, ethnic and cultural diversity reflecting its wide and heterogeneous geography, ranging from the wide-open plains of the Panhandle to the piney woods of East Texas, from the urban skylines of Dallas and Houston to the sandy beaches of the Gulf Coast. It was Lyndon B. Johnson, former Texas Congressman and Senator, who instigated the Great Society welfare programs at the national level after Kennedy’s assassination, and pushed the Civil Rights Acts in 1964 and 1968 (while refusing to disengage from the Vietnam War). Ann Richards, the last Democrat Texas Governor to date (1991-1995), upheld a legacy of change felt throughout the 1970s and 1980s in the state, where the coexistence of modernity and tradition, of hippies and cowboys, according to Jason Mellard, started reshaping the state and its identity (Mellard, 2013). And when Annise Parker became mayor in 2010, Houston was the largest city in the US to have an openly gay mayor.
This two-day symposium seeks to explore the singularity and complexity of the second largest US state from the pivotal decade of the 1970s to this day, in order to shed light on the elements that would contradict the stereotypes which have affected its reputation as a Red or even “redneck” state, and keep feeding the dominant narrative. It encourages scholars from a wide range of fields (history, geography, sociology, gender and race studies, literature and music, visual arts and film studies, etc.) and who adopt varied perspectives and methodologies (archival research, participant observation, interviews, formal analysis, discourse analysis) to tackle portrayals of the state displaying different oppositional tendencies and the rich culture that exists there. Contributions may focus on cultural productions and events either produced, written and/or performed in Texas, ranging from literature to film, from music to plays and the festivals that showcase them, from animated series to reality TV and documentaries, as well as on the cultural policies which encourage such dissident portrayals and productions.
The symposium will be divided into two days focusing on the following themes:
- Day 1 (Paris Cité, Nov 6, 2026): Representations of Texas and its identities in cultural productions
- Day 2 (INU Champollion, Albi 2027): State/regional/local cultural policies shaping Lone Star culture
Call for Papers :
Day 1:
For Day 1, we welcome papers dealing with representations of Texas’s multicultural identity in a counter-stereotypical perspective. Because the Republic of Texas itself underwent seven allegiances in its history, before it was admitted into the Union after the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and during the United States’ westward expansion, Texas history has, from the start, been ethnically diverse. Like the rest of the country, the state was founded on the erasure of indigenous tribes, with popular history only remembering the most famous tribes (the Apache or the Comanche) and ignoring others (including the Jumano, Caddo, Kickapoo and Tonkawa tribes). While such tribes mixed with several generations of Hispanic colonizers, giving the Mexican population already present in the Texas region a double heritage, the current Latino population (from Mexican, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, Dominican or Cuban origins) now makes up 40% of the total population of Texas, including several generations of Latin American immigrants. Descendants of the Mexican people which inhabited the region before it became a US state insist that “they did not cross the border” but that “it crossed them,” calling out conservative politicians which tend to consider every Latino as an undocumented immigrant by reminding them of their own history. In Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (1836-1986), published in 2010, David Montejano shows how Mexicans contributed to the development of the state. A few decades before, in 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote the seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which already called into question the state’s hegemonic narrative. As a queer Mexican-American woman who grew up in the borderlands, she saw the US-Mexico border not as a barrier separating people but as a zone of contact, in opposition with the growing militarization policies of the border at the time. By defining the borderlands as a “third space,” she paved the way for the reconsideration of border dynamics, turning the US-Mexico border as a case study for border studies while emphasizing the historical hybridization of culture that can come from the encounter between cultures through language, food or music–referred to, in Texas, as Tejano/a culture.
Yet Anzaldúa’s vision of Texas borderlands, backed by the 1983 La Paz agreement which officially declared the 200 kilometers around the US-Mexico border a borderland (Arreola, 2016), is constantly being challenged by the conservative policies and politicians who have been occupying the Governor’s office since Bush’s first term in 1994. The latest in date, Gregg Abbott, has been a strong advocate for increasing security at the border for over a decade, launching Operation Lone Star in 2021 and recently deploying 400 Texas National Guard Troops at the southern border. As the vindictive narrative against a “Latino invasion” has been gaining the higher ground during Trump’s first and second terms, many cultural productions also work at telling a different story, such as Lone Star (1996), The Three Burials of Melquadies Estrada (2005), Machete (2010), Tejano (2018). Immigrant rights documentaries of the 2010s also offer a different portrayal of the border and borderlands than the war zone they claim it is. Can the new generation of documentaries about Texas, including Linklater, de Sosa and Stapleton’s documentary series God Save Texas (HBO, 2024), be considered a reaction against Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric?
Additionally, as one of the early slave states, Texas has long been the home of a growing African-American population which arrived on the territory with the white settlers at the beginning of the 19th century. It must be recalled that slavery was one of the reasons for the state’s own revolution against the Mexican government that forbade such practice, and for its delayed entry in the Union (Campbell, 2003, Flores, 2010). Yet African-American characters, contrary to Mexicans or Tejanos/as, have seldom been the main focus of Texas films, books or series whose idea of cultural hybridity often only encompasses Latino identities. Papers on African-American representations, which would fill in the gap of Black visibility in Texas, are thus warmly encouraged, as well as those giving voice and visibility to Native Americans of the Texas region, enslaved in the Catholic missions by Spanish colonizers, then evicted from the territory and its history by generations of Anglo-Americans. The same goes for Asian / South-Asian communities in Texas which, although they were very scarce in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, surged in the 1970s thanks to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolishing quotas, and already made up nearly 7% of the population of the Houston area in 2010, justifying a necessity for cultural and historical investigation, but also representation on all media. Why do Texas representations still resist portraying multiculturalism, including—but not limited to—Latino identities? What types of productions do portray them, and what types of audiences do they reach? What do contemporary cultural productions have to say about Texas identity today? These are some of the questions that Day 1 seeks to discuss.
Finally, stereotypes of Texanness seldom depart from the rugged masculinity best embodied by the Cowboy (and its lawful variant the Texas Ranger), a figure which belongs to Texas folklore as well as that of the American West. While scholars have noted the Mexican origins of actual cowboys (Clayton, 1998), and the existence of African-American cowboys on ranches in Texas (Massey, 2000), mainstream representations still overwhelmingly construct this democratic hero as a laconic, straight white man (in Walker, Texas Ranger, Lonesome Dove (1989), or Space Cowboys (2000)). Film, television, literary or musical productions which question this type of masculinity by reinventing the cowboy or getting rid of the hero altogether also necessarily question Texas identity, whether it be in terms of race, gender, or sexual orientation. While the homoerotic tension between Dunson and Matt comparing pistols in Red River (1948) is still debated by scholars and Western fans (Springer, 2005), independent documentary films such as Hummingbirds (2023) delicately yet openly explore the queering of identities (national and sexual) in the borderlands.
Day 2:
Cultural representations do not merely spring from the will of their creator or from social and political contexts, but are also enabled by the local cultural policies that shape what is being published, shown or broadcast. Day 2 will thus focus on the cultural policies that fashion the state of Texas, both reflecting and constructing its identities. As Sean P. Cunningham argues in Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right, “Texans’ fundamental concepts of party politics—their impressions, interpretations and attitudes—changed in dramatic ways during the 1960s and 1970s,” following JFK’s assassination in Dallas (Cunningham, 2010). The perception of liberalism and conservatism came to favor the right in Texas, while the conservative Texas of urban cowboys became the state’s international image with the Dallas series by the end of the decade. Yet the most influential cultural policies which have shaped Texas culture today and massively transformed its cultural productions also took place in the 1970s, with the creation of the Texas Film Commission and the CinemaTexas film program in the early 1970s, the South by Southwest festival (SXSW) in the 1980s, thereby giving birth to another narrative of state identity (Mellard, 2013).
The role of the Texas Film Commission, founded in 1971 as part of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development to encourage state-based film production and location shooting, and of other organizations that seek to develop cultural production in Texas, requires in-depth investigation. This is especially relevant since the latest passage of Senate Bill 22 in March 2025 which expands the film and television incentive program and plans to allocate $1.5 billion in the next ten years to projects (films, tv shows, animation projects, video games, commercials) that do not “portray Texas or Texans in a negative fashion,” embracing a form of cultural and ideological regulation which was so far implicit in the Commission’s guidelines. While the requirements to meet the standards of the grant are not new (quotas of in-state staff, in-state spending), the codifying of the review process to assess the “Texanness” of the project has raised doubts among Austin Democratic Senator Sarah Ackhardt who wonders “whose values” will be taken as a baseline (Fornoff, 2025). Supported by Taylor Sheridan, Elizabeth Avellán and Matthew McConaughey, such initiatives testify to the state’s need to be competitive in the battle to attract film productions, especially with the neighboring state of Louisiana. In an article about Fort Worth’s Film Commission, Tricia Jenkins and Kimberley Owczarski demonstrate how “local film commissions are stepping beyond their traditional roles” and can transform conservative cities into “media hubs” (Jenkins and Owczarski, 2025). In a context characterized by the increase of alt-right policies and the multiplication of big budget conservative cultural productions favored by such incentives (The Chosen, Sheridan’s 1883 and Landman), the question of how dissident voices and alternative ways of portraying the state might emerge or survive is crucial and necessary, even as it paints, on the state level, a miniature image of the sharp political polarization of the Trump-Biden-Trump era and of the “culture wars” taking place on the national level.
Focusing on state institutions and initiatives may also invite researchers to focus on the local scale, and more precisely, within the state’s major cities. The idiosyncrasy of the city of Austin, nicknamed “the blueberry in the tomato soup” also needs to be explored. In spite of the gentrification that Austin has gone through in the past decades, the state capital does not reflect the state’s political tendencies, and strives to keep its “weird” identity and its peculiar “sense of place” alive (Long, 2010), a unique identity coming from its historically creative visual art and music scene. Austin is, for instance, the only UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts in the US. The apparently anecdotal movements of resistance towards the arrival of Californians from the tech industry to Austin, with hashtags such as #DontCaliforniaMyTexas, reflect a desire to protect Austin’s identity, even while the city was able to remain a strong independent film hub and a vibrant scene for music and film festivals. Its largest festival, South by Southwest, which has been celebrating the film and television and the music industries, as well as interactive media since 1987, remains one of the most prestigious platforms for creatives in the country and testifies to the city’s endeavor to position itself as a cultural hub. The city’s Cultural Arts Funding Program also supports smaller festivals, such as the Latino film festival Cine Las Americas (1998–), which is part of a myriad of events that makes Austin vibrant and culturally diverse. The city also boasts about being the Live Music Capital of the world, hosting Austin City Limits, one of the largest music festivals of the country, with an impressive line-up of up to 130 artists. Therefore, we encourage presentations that explore the impact of the cultural life of the city on its growth and identity.
One could also mention the multicultural cities of Dallas and Houston, with Dallas harboring the widest African-American community in the state, and Houston often praised in national city-rankings for the diversity of its population, making interracial couples feel welcome (Heckler, 2025). Dallas was, in fact, one of the first Texas cities to attract film investors to the state in the 1980s, with the construction of the film studios Las Colinas (Graham, 1984), and displays a wide range of art museums and exhibition spaces. The cities of San Antonio and El Paso are, on the other hand, culturally coded as Latino cities, claiming their Mexican and Tejano legacy and celebrating the Mexican origins of the state. Studies of these cities, their cultural institutions and policies as well as artistic initiatives would constitute a welcome addition to Day 2.
On both state and local levels, efforts are constantly being made to make Texas life and history more inclusive and accessible to diverse communities: QR codes were recently added on commemorative plates all over the state for people to be able to read monument signs in Spanish, while historical sites are erecting Tejano and Chicano monuments—granted, among the statues of Confederate soldiers—to commemorate their role in the making of the State. In the Bullock museum in Austin, the battle of the Alamo is now narrated from the Tejano point of view of Juan Seguín in the main exhibition theatre, marking a clear attempt at telling a more inclusive history. Such symbolic cultural initiatives deserve academic attention and in-depth analysis, in order to understand at which level they were decided, what needs they responded to, and the kind of resistance they face in their application, as illustrated by the recurrent vandalization of the Martin Luther King statue on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin since its erection in 1999.
While the image of Texas and what constitutes “Texanness” appears to be a fluid and changing idea that we scholars are constantly trying to grasp and redefine to the best of our knowledge, its overwhelmingly conservative and homogenous nature can be disputed as it does not resist thorough scrutiny. Thus, all proposals that investigate lesser-known aspects of Texas culture and its diversity, whether in representations or in local and state initiatives (and included or not in this call for papers) will be considered, in the hope of broadening our understanding and collective recreation of the Lone Star State.
300-400-word-long abstracts, accompanied by a brief bio-bibliography, should be sent to emilie.cheyroux@univ-jfc.fr , marine.soubeille@u-paris.fr and david.roche@univ-montp3.fr . Proposals for Day 1 should be sent by May 15, 2026 and proposals for Day 2 by December 15, 2026.