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In his essay, Steve Estes revisits the controversy over the admission of women to The Citadel from a unique perspective: the gay male cadets whose presence also contradicted the stereotypes of southern manhood upheld by the defenders of tradition. Photograph courtesy of The Citadel.

The South is changing, we all know that. Legalized Jim Crow, which once seemed monolithic and immovable, crashed and burned a generation ago and as many on all sides predicted at the time, change has seemed continuous ever since. Prosperity erupted in expected and unexpected places, from Atlanta to Houston to Hilton Head, but the old industrial economy of textiles and the like took a beating. New voters split the Solid South wide open and black congress members and legislators again strode the halls they were banished from in a previous century. Women captured governors' mansions and seats in the Senate. If the politics of race did not disappear, it changed its shape in a new two-party system. Even more remarkable, Charlotte became a banking capital, Mississippi embraced casinos, and NASCAR went upscale. Topping it all, Catholics outnumbered Methodists in places, even beyond Louisiana.

Change is not really new in the South, of course. It has happened before and will happen some more. The cotton gin changed the forests primeval. The War changed everything, and so did electricity, the automobile, and the New Deal. Southerners have cultivated an image of changelessness that has never truly existed, even though a few antique customs regarding race and gender—and hunting, liquor, sin, good manners, and redemption, along with quite a few other things—have sometimes seemed as eternal as the laws of the Medes and the Persians. A fondness for things as they are, for the way they always seem to have been, lies at the heart of southern conservatism and exerts a steady pull whenever change intensifies.

The essays in this issue of Southern Cultures all deal with aspects of change in the contemporary South, from sweeping developments like immigration to particular incidents with emblematic force, like a new admissions policy at The Citadel. Through them all: a question over how much change the South can take and still be kin to its old self, with enough continuity to be recognizable. The authors don't take their stand on this question; they just tell us what they see. In the end, southern persistence will happen—or not—with southerners themselves and not with authors alone.

Harvey H. Jackson III starts us off with a meditation on the Gulf Coast's "Redneck Riviera." He remembers it as the sunburned, hardscrabble haunts of fishermen and salt-of-the earth revelers but traces their evolution as prosperity lifted them up and hurricanes ground them down. The Great Recession and its real estate collapse have clipped the Gulf Coast's energies, but the good old days do seem gone for good—at least so long as a gated community can stave off a new boat landing by invoking the fate of a threatened beach mouse.

The South's changing population is the subject of Susan Harbage Page's full-color photo essay from the Mexican border, which Bernard L. Herman introduces. "Our" South was once a place that people moved from, to populate distant places from Chicago to Los Angeles. Too suddenly for some people, the southern United States is now a destination, not only for Yankee snowbirds, but for millions more from the even deeper south of Latin America and the Caribbean. Page captures the pain and loss involved in the journey made by these newest southerners as they try to shed old identities on the north shore of the Rio Grande. When illegal immigrants cross the river, it seems, they trade their wet clothes for dry. And if they are caught, they must empty their pockets. Both kinds of discarded belongings form the subject of Page's eloquent exploration. In her perceptive lens, an empty wallet, a disowned identity card, a threadbare tee-shirt all testify to hopes raised and...