Texans One and All is a collection of brief stories about the peoples who came to, lived in, and created Texas over the past 12,000 years. This is a sample of the materials produced by the Institute of Texan Cultures: publications, illustrations, exhibits, curriculum units, audiovisuals, and special events.

The Institute of Texan Cultures was formed as the exhibit of the State of Texas at HemisFair '68, the world's fair held in San Antonio. Simultaneously, ITC was defined as a permanent research and production center dealing with the history of the peoples who make up Texas.

The Institute's charge as an educational center has not changed. And the peoples of Texas remain fascinating and complex. Texas is, of course, a land, a state, once a nation, a huge and mixed ecology, a ritual happening, a stereotype, an economy, a state of mind, a way of life—and people.

The land is huge and varied—with more than 12,000 years of immigrant history—and remains one of the remarkable crossroads of the world. Here are individuals, families, and settlements representing every major cultural, geographic, ethnic, and political group in the world...and nearly all smaller groups as well.

Change has always been a part of Texan cultures. Groups have blended with others, leaving hardly a trace; others maintain a strong identity. All people are immigrants, and the group arriving today changes, or is changed by, other arrivals. This process has created understanding, tolerance, and enjoyment as well as occasional misunderstanding, unease, and outright hate. Some cultural traits have been honored among all peoples; some customs have been insulted and destroyed.

As a vast generalization, native groups came to Texas first, hardly as a single culture but as settlement waves displacing each other as living patterns changed for more than one hundred centuries. European colonization, since the start of the 16th century, shifted dominance to Spanish, then Mexican, rule and settlement.

In the early 19th century, Anglo-American immigrants (predominantly descendants of northern Europeans) re-created Texas in their image quickly—and enduring to the present time.

And in all years in settlements large and small, individuals and families, freedmen and slaves, legal and illegal arrivals came to make a new home. Texas attracted investors and cattle raisers, miners and lumbermen, cotton growers and stonemasons, homemakers and teachers, criminals and ministers. . .women and men in every category. And they came from everywhere in the world.

The population of Texas consists of people from a hundred origins from Afghan to Zimbabwan, “native” to “foreign-born,” “unknown” to “born at sea.” But they are Texans—one and all.

Where groups or communities exist, they always change in number and in way of life—and occasionally in preferred name. In this there is nothing unique. People have often moved to new, more empty lands to find a future. Some run from old troubles, and a few simply need new horizons.

In Texas this complex settlement history bloomed with heroism, sacrifice, creativity, and excitement. It is laced with a fair supply of wild stories and extremes: treasures and ghosts, brutality and kindness, failure and success.

The mission of the Institute of Texan Cultures is to tell these stories through permanent and traveling exhibits, publications, audiovisuals, curricula, interpretive programs, and public events including concerts, symposia, and the Texas Folklife Festival.

Twenty-six Institute exhibit areas are outlined here as brief narratives. A few, only a very few, questions are answered: What are the major settlement groups in Texas? Where did these people choose to live? Why did they come and when? What's a good story about . . . ? But this is only a beginning. The stories here are expanded in other productions of the Institute—but even then, only somewhat.

To know Texas, whether a “native” Texan or not, one must walk the land and talk to the people. One must, to know Texas, know Texans one and all.

The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio
801 South Bowie Street
San Antonio, Texas 78205-3296
(210) 458-2300