Houston bound : culture and color in a Jim Crow city / Tyina L. Steptoe.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : when worlds collide -- The Bayou City in black and white -- Old wards, new neighbors -- Jim Crowing culture -- "We were too white to be black and too black to be white" -- "All America dances to it" -- "Blaxicans" and Black Creoles -- Conclusion : race in modern Houston.

"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

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