Article discusses the continuing demographic change in Texas from White Majority to White Minority, and nonwhite immigration to the state. I really really am hungry for some TexMex now.
www.nytimes.com
What It Means to Be a Texan Is Changing in Surprising Ways
White people make up a declining minority in Texas, even among those born in the state. And all those people moving in? They’re as likely to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.
White people make up a declining minority in Texas, even among those born in the state. And all those people moving in? They’re as likely to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.
A group of chambelanes waiting before a quinceañera in Midland, Texas.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
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By J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval and Robert Gebeloff
The reporters traveled across a broad expanse of Texas for a look at the new reality reflected in U.S. census figures.
- Nov. 13, 2023
All 80 employees of their company, Premier Energy Services, are Hispanic, reflecting a shift that has slowly transformed Texas’ oil-rich western expanse. Where a roughneck — the grease-stained symbol of Texas’ economic identity — was once typically a white man hoping to strike black gold, the average oil field worker is now a Hispanic man who was born in Texas.
“Growing up, my dad used to take me to work in the oil fields. It was a white man’s industry,” said a foreman, Alfredo Ramirez, 31, a third-generation Mexican American. “Today it is us Latinos.”
Mark Matta, a city councilman in Odessa, chuckled as he described a television series about a Texas oil rig in which most of the workers were white. “That show flipped our reality,” he said.
The state has long been defined by demographic change, particularly its growing Hispanic population. But the nature of those changes, and how profound they have become, has often been misunderstood, even by those who follow the state closely.
The New York Times collected years of census data, analyzed migration patterns and traveled to communities across Texas to understand what is happening in the nation’s second most populous state, a place that offers an important window into the future of both national politics and the attempts to deal with questions of identity and diversity.
Children of Immigrants Shift Texas Demographics
Hispanics born in Texas outnumber white people born in the state.
What stood out was the degree to which Texas already has become a state of immigrants, a population that is now multigenerational.
The fastest growing demographic group is made up of the children of immigrants, predominantly Texas-born Hispanics. That means that white people, who had long been the state’s largest demographic group, are now outnumbered by those who are Hispanic, even among native-born Texans, a change first documented by the U.S. Census Bureau this year.
A visitor to the state 30 years ago would have encountered two born-and-bred white Texans for every Latino born on Texas soil. Today, those groups are of nearly equal size.
