South Texas
Based on Wikipedia: South Texas
Before Texas was Texas, before the border was the border, the land south of San Antonio belonged to people who called themselves Tejanos. That name—the Spanish word for Texan—came first. The English version came later, imposed by newcomers who would eventually outnumber them. This is the story of South Texas, a region where the past refuses to stay buried, where the Rio Grande serves less as a boundary than as a scar marking where two nations couldn't agree, and where more than five million people now live in a landscape that ranges from subtropical palm groves to parched brush country.
Where Exactly Is South Texas?
Here's a question that sounds simple but isn't: where does South Texas begin?
The southern and western edges are easy. The Rio Grande—that muddy, contested river—marks where Texas ends and Mexico begins. To the east, the Gulf of Mexico provides another definitive boundary, its warm waters lapping against barrier islands and salt marshes.
The northern boundary is where things get fuzzy. Most people agree it starts around San Antonio, with an imaginary line extending east toward the coast and west toward the Mexican border near Maverick County. But ask a dozen Texans and you'll get a dozen different answers. Some insist Houston belongs to South Texas because businesses there use "South Texas" in their names—the South Texas School of Law, for instance. The federal court system even places Houston in the Southern District of Texas.
But Houstonians themselves would likely disagree. Their city belongs to Southeast Texas, a subregion of East Texas, with its pine forests and Cajun influences bleeding over from Louisiana. South Texas is something else entirely.
A Land of Three Parts
Picture South Texas as a hand spread flat on a map. The region contains forty-one counties, all of them sitting on coastal plain—which means flat, flat, flat. But that flatness contains surprising variety.
The fingertips reaching toward Mexico form the Rio Grande Valley. Don't let the name fool you—it's not really a valley in the mountain sense. It's the floodplain of the Rio Grande, where centuries of the river's silt have created some of the most fertile soil in Texas. Drive through in winter and you'll see citrus groves stretching to the horizon, their dark green leaves heavy with oranges and grapefruits. The valley produces most of Texas's citrus crop, a fact that surprises people who think of the state as nothing but cattle and oil.
The eastern edge, curving along the Gulf of Mexico, is called the Coastal Bend. Here the land becomes watery and indistinct. Salt marshes merge into estuaries. Bays indent the coastline like bites taken from bread. Wetlands provide crucial habitat for migratory birds, and the air smells of salt and sulfur and the particular richness of decaying vegetation. Corpus Christi, the region's coastal anchor, sits where the Nueces River meets Corpus Christi Bay.
Then there's the interior—the South Texas Plains, also called the Brush Country. This is the South Texas of popular imagination, a semi-arid expanse dominated by mesquite trees and prickly pear cactus. The mesquite is an invasive pest that ranchers have battled for generations, its thorny branches spreading across former grasslands. But it's also become iconic, its twisted silhouettes defining the visual character of the region. Beneath the brush, ranches stretch for miles, many of them descended from the great Spanish land grants of the eighteenth century.
The Climate Problem
South Texas weather is a study in extremes and contradictions.
Along the coast, the Gulf of Mexico acts like a giant humidifier. Summers are brutally humid, with temperatures regularly exceeding ninety degrees Fahrenheit and the air so thick you feel like you're breathing through a wet cloth. The Gulf also moderates winter temperatures, keeping coastal areas relatively warm even when Arctic fronts sweep down from Canada.
Move inland toward the Mexican border and the climate shifts to semi-arid. The technical term is Köppen classification BSh, which essentially means "hot and dry." The Sierra Madre Oriental mountains in Mexico block moisture from the Pacific, and the Chihuahuan Desert to the northwest contributes its own desiccating influence. Rainfall becomes precious, measured not in inches per year but in prayers answered.
What makes South Texas weather truly strange is its seasonality. Unlike most of the United States, where rain falls fairly consistently or follows a simple wet-dry pattern, South Texas experiences two mini wet seasons. The first comes in spring, from March through May. Then summer arrives with drought-like conditions, the ground cracking under relentless sun. A second wet season materializes in late August and October before winter brings another dry spell.
The summer of 2011 showed what happens when the rains don't come at all. On August twenty-eighth of that year, temperatures across most of South Texas hit one hundred ten degrees Fahrenheit, shattering records in city after city. Ninety-five percent of the state faced extreme or exceptional drought conditions. Lakes shrank to puddles. Cities imposed water restrictions. And wildfires—the inevitable consequence of heat, drought, and brush—swept across the landscape. Burn bans were eventually enacted in two hundred fifty of Texas's two hundred fifty-four counties.
When the Hurricanes Come
Every South Texan understands hurricane season the way Midwesterners understand tornado season—as an annual reckoning with nature's capacity for destruction.
The official season runs from June through November, but the Texas coast typically faces its greatest danger in August and September. This is when tropical systems organize in the Bay of Campeche, that warm bathtub of water in the southern Gulf of Mexico, or spin off the coast of Africa and begin their westward march across the Atlantic.
The flat terrain that makes South Texas easy to farm also makes it vulnerable. Storm surge can push inland for miles with nothing to stop it. The barrier islands that line the coast—Padre Island, Mustang Island, Matagorda Island—provide some protection but can themselves become death traps for anyone foolish enough to stay during a major storm.
And yet people stay. They always have. The combination of fertile soil, warm climate, and access to both the Gulf and Mexico has drawn settlers for three centuries, despite hurricanes, despite droughts, despite all the ways this land tries to kill you.
The People Who Were Here First
The Tejano history of South Texas predates the Texas Revolution by more than a century.
Spanish colonization began in the early seventeen hundreds, bringing not just Spaniards but also their indigenous allies from central Mexico—particularly the Tlaxcaltec and Otomi peoples, who had sided with Cortés against the Aztecs and continued their alliance with Spanish colonial projects. These settlers intermarried with local indigenous groups, particularly the Coahuiltecans, who were concentrated by Spanish missionaries into settlements called missions.
There's another layer to this history that's often overlooked. Among the Spanish colonizers were Sephardic Jews—descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who had converted to Christianity, at least publicly, and made their way to the New World. Some maintained crypto-Jewish practices in secret for generations. Their descendants are woven into the fabric of South Texas identity.
By the time Anglo-American settlers began arriving in significant numbers in the eighteen thirties, Tejano ranchers had already established the cattle culture that would later be claimed as essentially "Texan." The vaquero traditions—the horsemanship, the cattle drives, the equipment—all of it came from the Tejanos first.
The Border That Wouldn't Stay Put
The Mexican-American War of eighteen forty-six through forty-eight created a border, but borders, like rivers, have a way of being disputed.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war, was supposed to protect the property rights of Mexicans who suddenly found themselves living in the United States. It didn't. Anglo settlers poured in, and through legal chicanery, violence, and sheer demographic pressure, many Tejano families lost lands their ancestors had held for generations.
The territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande was particularly contested. For a brief moment in eighteen forty, this strip of land declared itself the Republic of the Rio Grande, an independent nation recognized by neither Mexico nor the United States. It lasted less than a year, with Laredo serving as its capital—a footnote in history that Laredo still commemorates today with a museum in the old capitol building.
Military figures who would later become famous cut their teeth in South Texas. Robert E. Lee, before he led Confederate armies, served as a colonel at Fort Ringgold in Rio Grande City. Zachary Taylor, before he became the twelfth president of the United States, commanded U.S. forces at Fort Brown in Brownsville during the Mexican-American War. The region was, in many ways, a proving ground for the officers who would tear the nation apart and then put it back together.
The Rangers and the Bandit Wars
The Texas Rangers occupy a complicated place in South Texas history.
To Anglo settlers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Rangers were heroic lawmen bringing order to a lawless frontier. To Tejanos and Mexicans, they were often instruments of terror, enforcing Anglo dominance through violence that ranged from summary execution to wholesale massacre.
The "bandit raids" that the Rangers were sent to suppress had their own context. Many of the "bandits" were Tejanos whose families had been dispossessed of their land, fighting back against a system rigged against them. Others were Mexican revolutionaries whose conflicts spilled across a border that seemed arbitrary to people whose families had lived on both sides for generations.
On May twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-six, a band of forty Texas Rangers rode north from Laredo into the Nueces Strip—that contested territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Their mission was to capture or kill John King Fisher, leader of a gang of cattle rustlers. The Rangers who rode that day were part of the Special Force led by Leander McNelly, a unit given exceptional latitude to "bring law and order" to South Texas. What "law and order" meant depended very much on who you were and what language you spoke at home.
Politics in Flux
For most of modern history, South Texas was Democratic territory. This wasn't the Democratic Party of the coasts—it was a local phenomenon rooted in machine politics, low voter turnout, and a heavily Hispanic population that felt abandoned by the party of Lincoln.
That began to change in the twenty-first century. Donald Trump, running for president in twenty sixteen, twenty twenty, and twenty twenty-four, improved his margins in South Texas each time. By twenty twenty-four, he had won the region outright—a shift that shocked political observers who had assumed Hispanic voters were a reliable Democratic constituency.
What happened? Explanations vary. Some point to the region's social conservatism on issues like abortion and immigration—yes, many Hispanic voters in border communities support stricter immigration enforcement. Others cite economic anxieties, particularly in communities dependent on oil and gas. Still others note that Democrats had taken South Texas for granted, investing little in outreach while Republicans made sustained efforts to win over Hispanic voters.
Whatever the cause, the political transformation of South Texas has become one of the most studied phenomena in American politics—a reminder that no coalition lasts forever and no constituency can be assumed.
Water and Life
In a semi-arid land, water is everything.
South Texas is dotted with reservoirs—artificial lakes created by damming rivers to store water for agriculture, drinking, and recreation. Choke Canyon Reservoir, Lake Corpus Christi, Falcon Lake on the border with Mexico, Lake Amistad shared with Mexico upstream near Del Rio. These lakes rise and fall with the rains, their shorelines sometimes retreating by hundreds of feet during drought years.
The bays and estuaries along the coast tell a different water story. Corpus Christi Bay, San Antonio Bay, Baffin Bay, Nueces Bay—these are the nurseries where fish and shrimp begin their lives, protected from the open Gulf by barrier islands. The Laguna Madre, stretching behind Padre Island, is one of the most hypersaline bodies of water in North America, its salt content sometimes exceeding that of the ocean because evaporation outpaces the trickle of freshwater reaching it.
The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway threads through this coastal maze, a protected shipping channel that allows barges to travel from Brownsville to Houston without braving the open sea. It's one of the busiest waterways in America, moving petroleum products, chemicals, and agricultural goods through the heart of South Texas.
The Rice Connection
Here's a story most Texans don't know: the Texas Gulf Coast rice industry owes its existence to Japanese farmers and a gift from the Japanese emperor.
In nineteen oh four, the Houston Chamber of Commerce and the Southern Pacific Railroad invited Japanese agricultural experts to help develop rice cultivation in the region. The farmers brought with them seeds from Japan, presented as a gift from Emperor Meiji himself. Production began at Webster in Harris County, just south of Houston.
The Saibara family is credited with establishing the Gulf Coast rice industry. Their legacy is rarely mentioned in Texas history books, which prefer stories of cattle barons and oil wildcatters. But every time you eat Gulf Coast rice, you're tasting the results of that early twentieth-century collaboration between Japanese expertise and Texas ambition.
Getting Around
South Texas is laced with highways bearing the ambitions of mid-twentieth-century America.
Interstate Ten crosses the northern edge, connecting San Antonio to Houston and, beyond that, to Los Angeles and Jacksonville. Interstate Thirty-Five runs north from Laredo through San Antonio to Dallas and eventually Minneapolis, one of the primary arteries for trade between Mexico and the American heartland. Interstate Thirty-Seven connects San Antonio to Corpus Christi, a concrete lifeline to the coast.
The border crossings are where the real action happens. Laredo alone has five international bridges connecting it to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. The World Trade International Bridge handles much of the commercial truck traffic, while the Gateway to the Americas and Juárez-Lincoln bridges serve passenger vehicles. Every year, billions of dollars in goods cross these bridges—automobile parts, electronics, produce, machinery—making Laredo one of the busiest ports of entry in the United States.
Similar crossings dot the border from Eagle Pass to Brownsville. Each has its own character: the Free Trade International Bridge at Los Indios, the Anzalduas International Bridge near McAllen, the bridge at Roma connecting to Ciudad Miguel Alemán. These aren't just transportation infrastructure; they're the physical manifestation of the economic integration between the United States and Mexico, the places where two nations meet and merge in a constant flow of people and goods.
What to See
San Antonio anchors the region with attractions that draw millions of visitors annually. The Alamo—that shrine of Texas mythology—sits in the heart of downtown, smaller than most visitors expect but heavy with meaning. The River Walk threads through the city, a below-street-level park lined with restaurants and shops that feels like a different world from the Texas heat above. Six Flags Fiesta Texas and SeaWorld San Antonio offer theme park diversions. The San Antonio Missions National Historical Park preserves four Spanish colonial missions that predate the Alamo and tell a more complex story of the region's history.
Corpus Christi offers its own attractions. The Texas State Aquarium showcases Gulf marine life. The USS Lexington, a World War Two aircraft carrier, sits permanently moored as a museum ship, its flight deck offering views of the bay. A statue called Mirador de la Flor memorializes Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano music star murdered in nineteen ninety-five, who remains beloved decades after her death.
The Rio Grande Valley draws winter Texans—retirees from the Midwest and Canada who migrate south to escape the cold—to communities like McAllen, Harlingen, and Brownsville. South Padre Island offers beaches. The Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville ranks among the best in Texas. And the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle in San Juan draws Catholic pilgrims from across the Americas.
Perhaps the most iconic South Texas destination is the King Ranch near Kingsville. Covering more than eight hundred twenty-five thousand acres—larger than the state of Rhode Island—it's one of the largest ranches in the world. Founded in eighteen fifty-three by Richard King, a steamboat captain who saw opportunity in the Brush Country, the ranch developed the first American breed of beef cattle, the Santa Gertrudis. Tours offer a glimpse into a ranching operation that has operated continuously for more than a hundred seventy years.
Education and Identity
South Texas is served by a network of universities that reflect the region's character.
Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, Texas A&M University–Kingsville (the old Texas A&I), and Texas A&M University–San Antonio all carry the maroon-and-white banner of the Aggie system. The University of Texas has its own presence: the University of Texas at San Antonio, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, which merged the old University of Texas at Brownsville and University of Texas–Pan American in twenty fifteen.
San Antonio's private universities add another dimension: Trinity University, St. Mary's University, Our Lady of the Lake University, the University of the Incarnate Word. Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, just northeast of San Antonio, serves the region's Lutheran community.
The community college systems—Alamo Community College District in San Antonio, Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, South Texas College in the Valley—provide the educational foundation for hundreds of thousands of students, many of them first-generation college-goers from working-class families.
One Team
For all its size—over five million people spread across forty-one counties—South Texas has only one major professional sports franchise: the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association.
The Spurs have been remarkably successful, winning five NBA championships between nineteen ninety-nine and twenty fourteen under coach Gregg Popovich. They've become a unifying force in a region otherwise divided by distance and demographics, their games bringing together the disparate communities of South Texas in shared celebration and occasional heartbreak.
Minor league teams fill some of the void—baseball in Corpus Christi and the Valley, hockey in San Antonio—but the Spurs remain the region's only big-league claim to fame, a silver-and-black thread connecting communities separated by hundreds of miles of brush and coastline.
The Character of a Place
What defines South Texas isn't any single feature but the combination of them all: the flat land and the fierce weather, the Hispanic heritage and the Anglo overlay, the border that divides and connects, the brush country ranches and the subtropical groves, the Gulf breezes and the desert winds.
It's a place where Spanish has never stopped being spoken, where Tejano music pulses from car radios and quinceañera celebrations pack church halls on weekends. It's where the food—breakfast tacos, barbacoa, cabrito, carne guisada—reflects generations of blending between Mexican and Texas traditions.
It's also a place of contradictions. It's deeply conservative on some issues and surprisingly progressive on others. It's proudly Texan and unmistakably Mexican. It's part of the American Southwest and also part of something that has no name, a transborder region that existed before there were borders and continues to exist despite them.
Understanding South Texas means understanding that the Rio Grande isn't just a river. It's a suture, holding together two pieces of a land that was once whole and may never be fully separated. The five million people who live here carry that history in their names, their foods, their music, and their politics—a living reminder that borders are drawn by men but the land remembers what it was before.