What It Means to Be a Texan Is Changing in Surprising Ways

By J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval and Robert Gebeloff, The New York Times

White people make up a declining minority in Texas, even among those born in the state. And all those people moving in? They’re as likely to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.

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Understanding the reality of Texas matters. With a population of over 30 million, Texas is increasingly shaping the cultural and political direction of the country. Its economy is one of the largest in the world, growing faster than the nation’s as a whole.

The state has long been defined by demographic change, particularly its growing Hispanic population. But the nature of those changes, and how profound they have become, has often been misunderstood, even by those who follow the state closely.

The New York Times collected years of census data, analyzed migration patterns and traveled to communities across Texas to understand what is happening in the nation’s second most populous state, a place that offers an important window into the future of both national politics and the attempts to deal with questions of identity and diversity.

What stood out was the degree to which Texas already has become a state of immigrants, a population that is now multigenerational.

The fastest growing demographic group is made up of the children of immigrants, predominantly Texas-born Hispanics. That means that white people, who had long been the state’s largest demographic group, are now outnumbered by those who are Hispanic, even among native-born Texans, a change first documented by the U.S. Census Bureau this year. […]

Texas also leads the nation in the growth of its Black population, surpassing Georgia and Florida. And unlike Black transplants to other states, who are often either poor or rich, those coming to Texas are more likely to be middle class, census data shows. In Houston, Black-owned businesses have been thriving, with the city now rivaling Atlanta as a destination for Black families and young people.

Read more about Texas’ changing demographics in the original article.

Learn about the modern forms of segregation these groups are working to overcome in this virtual exhibit.

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