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

"Texas is a suburban state" (3). This is the provocative thesis and the investigatory challenge posed by Paul J. P. Sandul and M. Scott Sosebee in this important edited volume. Aimed directly at purveyors of Texas exceptionalism, the contributing authors collectively advance an argument that the under-analyzed suburban story is actually the central history of post-World War II Texas. Traditional historiographies that center on the range, cowboys, and the Alamo, they assert, deny Texas its place in another paradigm of United States history, thereby obscuring the state's suburban past. Lone Star Suburbs offers a primer in connecting Texas to larger historical paradigms.

Rapid decentralization in the early twentieth century produced intense competition between large cities and independent communities for land control and development, tax revenues, and market influence. In the postwar period, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio annexed large tracts of land to stifle and discourage incorporation drives by communities that had developed outside city limits. Although Houston and San Antonio proved relatively successful and were not heavily burdened by the economic investment that followed annexation, Dallas proved only moderately successful in dominating the metropolitan region. Irving is a case in point of the Disneyland model of growth-machine politics that became a hallmark of suburban development. Rather than being an accidental byproduct of urban development, the Dallas–Forth Worth Metroplex resulted from intentional planning and investment in development that yielded its iconic Texas Stadium, which then served simultaneously as a means to satisfy consumer desires and to generate further economic development, in part by luring capital away from Dallas and relocating it to the suburbs.

Federal investment further incentivized decentralization. The Federal Aid Highway Acts of 1944 and 1956, with twin objectives of creating adequate defense infrastructure and facilitating international and local commerce, hastened suburbanization. As in many places throughout the United States, urban construction projects slowed. Wartime imperatives redirected funds to defense. Urban planners used the lull in development to assess traffic needs and plan solutions for road congestion. Freeway planning in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio transformed the built environments for increased suburban auto mobility.

As in every region in the United States, the racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of the Texas metropolis defined suburbia as much as, if not more than, the built environment and political investment. From the "yee haws" and "Amens" of cowboy churches to Black folks who challenged redlining and its legacies to Vietnamese commercial activity that carved out an ethnic space for refugees, Texas's suburban cultural milieu now shows signs of tremendous diversity with significantly more topics to explore.

As important as this text is to the literature, its aim is to inspire further investigation. For example, as a significant part of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, Latinx suburban experiences in Texas surely abound but await scholarly inquiry. Affluent suburbs like the Sonterra development in northside San Antonio, affectionately referred to as 'Sonterrey' by the may monteregianos who have settled behind the walls of the closed community, have become important landing sites for Mexianos who have fled various hot spots of narcotics related violence. Undoubtedly, as the historiography of Lone Star suburbia develops, fresh topics will enter the discussion and bring more weight to bear on the swaybacked old horse of Texas exceptionalism.