Houston Bound - (American Crossroads) by Tyina L Steptoe (Paperback)

About the Book

"From World War I through the 1960s, Houston was transformed into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show 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. This migration history also traces the emergence of Houston's blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres--like zydeco and Tejano soul--that arose when migrants forged shared social space. Houston's location on the Gulf Coast, poised between the American South and the West, provides for a particularly rich examination of how the histories of colonization, slavery, and segregation produced divergent ways of thinking about race"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show 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. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston's blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics.

This interdisciplinary book provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.

From the Back Cover

"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

Review Quotes

"Employing vivid scholarship and strategic sources on race and ethnicity in Houston through sound, Steptoe successfully proves her vigor as an historian and scholar while simultaneously displaying her skills as a writer."-- "Houston Review of Books"

". . . 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."-- "South: A Scholarly Journal"

"Tyina L. Steptoe's Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City offers a welcome corrective to this historiographical oversight by examining, in fine detail the centrality of migration to understanding Houston's history."-- "Journal of Southern History"

"Houston native Tyina L. Steptoe's masterful work . . . honors, among others, her ancestors--Creoles of color--whose determination, work ethic, cultural ingenuity, and activism made her success possible. With the use of an impressive array of records and sources . . . the author reconstructs the complex, interwoven histories of four groups of Houstonians whose appearance during the Great Migrations helped shape the historical contours of what would ultimately become the nation's fourth largest city."-- "Southwestern Historical Quarterly"

"Steptoe beautifully details the social and sonic history of race and migration in Houston between the 1920s and the 1960s."-- "American Historical Review"

About the Author

Tyina L. Steptoe is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona.