Houston Bound ─ Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City

From World War I through the twentieth century, 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 is also a story about music and sound, tracing 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 and carved out new communities and politics. 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.

Students and readers will appreciate this interdisciplinary book, which provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a place located in the former Confederacy.

Tyina Steptoe is Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies at University of Washington. This is her first book.