Lone Star Suburbs: Life on the Texas Metropolitan Frontier ed. by Paul J.P. Sandul and M. Scott Sosebee (review)

Texas is a state I have been very interested in and have kept a close eye on for many years, simply because, for more than half a century, it has been a shining star in the Sun Belt, and even in the whole nation, in terms of solid and rapid economic and metropolitan growth. However, the metropolitan areas of Texas do not seem to be popular subjects for historians, for whom the focus has been on the "'Texas Myth,'" one "dominated by cowboys, the frontier, Texas Rangers, and above all the Alamo and the Texas Revolution" (p. 4). Obviously, Texas metropolitan areas, especially the booming suburbs, have not gotten the attention they deserve. This volume, edited by Paul J. P. Sandul and M. Scott Sosebee, is the first book featuring the comprehensive story of suburban Texas, which includes essays on planning, politics, governing, ethno-racial diversity, transportation, religion, and environmentalism.

The first essay, by Sandul, serves as the introduction to this volume, and it explores the historiography of the Lone Star State, especially suburban Texas and the suburban demographic situation, in detail. The historiographical section is successful and informative, but other parts are not. Some readers might not be satisfied with the census population data as the only material used to describe the rise of Texas suburbs after World War II.

Other essays are uneven in quality. The best one is the second essay, by Robert B. Fairbanks, an established urban historian, who examines suburban planning in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area in detail. He challenges, with concrete evidence, the conventional view that suburban cities are accidental or not well planned. The suburbs examined are "intentional communities nurtured by their energetic civic leadership, shaped by their location within a growing metropolitan area, and formatted by professional urban planners hired by local booster governments to create what became a new urban form—suburban cities" (p. 62). The third essay, by Andrew C. Baker, presents readers with a struggle between city and suburb in Chateau Woods, a small rural subdivision north of Houston. This struggle was a response to the issues of incorporation and annexation, which have been raised by Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985) but have been neglected by historians for many years. In Baker's view, "the story of Chateau Woods serves as a case study in the perils of hyper-local, amateur-led democracy," and "incorporation was not always an answer to suburban problems on the metropolitan fringe" (pp. 87, 88).

Three essays discuss the suburbanization of two ethnic groups in Texas. Chapters 4 and 9 focus on the migration of African Americans to the suburbs of Dallas and San Antonio, respectively. These two essays are narratives detailing African American migration patterns but lack analysis of the effects of migration on the employment and education of African Americans in suburbs, which is often a significant part of black suburbanization; chapter 4 does mention the influence of black poverty in the city. Compared with the suburbanization of African Americans, the suburbanization of Asian Americans is a fairly new phenomenon. Chapter 10 tells the story of the formation of an "ethnoburb," a new Asian community in Texas, with an emphasis on the Vietnamese in Houston. Son Mai argues that the development of this neighborhood was for economic activity and cultural preservation, rather than protection against racial discrimination. This essay, without any firsthand resources, is quite weak in terms of originality.

Chapter 5, by Tom McKinney, provides a detailed account of the development of transportation facilities in Texas, including the background, process, and effects of construction of urban freeway systems during the suburbanization of the Lone Star State. As the title of this chapter, "The Czars of Concrete: The Texas Highway Department's Engineer-Manager Program and the Development...