Abstract
Sustained migration of Hispanics and Anglos into Texas’s historical “German belt” has contributed to a significant decline in the proportion of Central Texans claiming German ancestry. Under these circumstances, ethnic festivals are playing an increasingly important role in maintaining the German-American identity of many of the region’s people and places. Organizers and participants frequently tout the events’ inclusiveness, claiming that anyone can temporarily cross ethnic boundaries to become “German for a day” within the festival context. However, participant observation and surveys of festival participants in three historically German-American communities (Brenham, Fredericksburg, and New Braunfels) suggest that ethnic-themed events mirror processes of racialization that have persisted in the region for more than 150 years. In this paper, I argue that, in helping to construct “German” identities for the region’s people and places, German-themed events in Central Texas are implicitly involved in the construction of “non-German” and, by extension “non-white,” ethnic identities. Further, event participation patterns reflect a long-standing black-white racial dichotomy in the region. Within this ethnoracial hierarchy, Hispanics have long occupied a liminal status that is reflected by their involvement in the production and consumption of German-themed events. I contend that Hispanics’ participation in German heritage festivals reflects not only a historical process of “whitening” their racial status but their increasing presence and power within the region.
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Notes
According to the Texas Historical Commission (2003), heritage tourism is the fastest-growing segment of Texas’ $40.4 billion tourism industry.
The events range in length from one day at Brenham’s Maifest to two days at Fredericksburg’s Oktoberfest, to 10 days for New Braunfels’s Maifest. I solicited survey participants for one day in Brenham and two days each in Fredericksburg and Oktoberfest.
This research protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of The University of Texas at Austin, and all data collection was conducted with the full knowledge, cooperation, and consent of the organizations sponsoring each event.
Of the 633 attendees who completed the brief survey cards, 326 completed and returned the full-length surveys, for an overall response rate of 54% (after purging 22 invalid mailing addresses). The response rates for individual festivals ranged from a high of 54.8% in Fredericksburg to 54.1% in New Braunfels to 47.8% in Brenham.
Unless otherwise specified, I use the term “German” to refer to any individual reporting German ancestry, whether alone or in combination with other ancestries. The reader is reminded that ancestries are self-reported by Census respondents and are thus based on one’s subjective—and oftentimes spatially and temporally fluid—sense of ethnic membership.
For the purposes of this study, a “local resident” is a survey participant whose mailing address has been assigned by the U.S. Postal Service to the community in which the festival took place.
Neil Foley (1999) documents how, in the first half of the twentieth century, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) encouraged Hispanics to claim distinct Latin-American identities in order to distance themselves from Mexican immigrants, blacks, Chinese, and Native Americans and to claim the privileges of whiteness.
Wilbur Zelinsky (2001) has further demonstrated how many scholarly definitions of “ethnicity” specifically exclude the dominant culture as an ethnic group and how the concept of ethnicity has rarely been applied to largely assimilated European-Americans. Such notions of ethnicity reinforce the normalization of whiteness and the designation of non-whites as “Others.”
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Adams, J.K. Conjunto culture: celebration and racialization in the German-Texan “Borderlands”. GeoJournal 75, 303–314 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9309-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9309-2