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However, with its increasingly growing Latina population, and history of colour prejudice, add a frontier spirit that is boon to a uniquely attractive cowboy culture of free enterprise and outdoor adventure, Texas is exactly the model to study when searching out a microcosm that paints a picture of where the world is headed these early 2000s. Texas is also changing demographically, as is much of the USA, so much so, that the State could well become Democratic in approaching years with its first Latina American Governor.

Texas possesses one of the most powerful regional economies within the USA: dominating in oil, technology, tourism, agriculture, education, and more.  And were Texas independent from the USA, it would be one of the powerhouses of these spectacular Americas.  Texas is the second largest state in the Unites States, after Alaska.

Now, James Michener was a Legendary American writer of historical narrative and history based fiction. His target audience was clearly the white patrician and upper class readership. However, anyone who has the patience to read the thousand and more pages that is a feature of Michener’s voluminous books will discover exciting characters, important historical themes, and majestic and tumultuous lands. Michener paints a mural of ever changing geographies and societies, from their genesis to the present day.

The famous Author wrote a gripping, powerful, and sweeping saga, in his more than one thousand page novel titled ‘’TEXAS.’ This was a majestic and magnificent book: a story and mural of a tempestuous time in American history. TEXAS was written in the early 1980s.

Michener’s TEXAS takes the reader on a journey of well over four hundred and fifty years in the story of these majestic Americas.   ‘’TEXAS,’’ is a drawing of both Texas and Mexico from the early 1500s: a painful and tragic, but also optimistic and hopeful picture of a powerful, colorful, and tumultuous Central and North America.  A monumental work, and an opus, put together by a master storyteller.

TEXAS is a work of art and history, and geography and society. From cover to cover it is a wonderful piece of storytelling the reader will find difficult to put down. The novel interestingly is a conduit bridging a world fully dominated by an Anglo Saxon and Protestant Modus Vivendi pre the 1990s, to today’s much more complex world of many competing economic powers and social themes.

The story begins with a Texan governor inviting four whites and a Latina: four males and one female, five persons in total, to the formidable and imposing Capitol Building in Austin, the capital of Texas. Austin is the seat of the University of Texas: a university city, with a culture of football, coupled with a charm and hubris that is uniquely Texan. Austin is a center of business and technology with a number of Fortune 500 companies having headquarters or regional offices in the city: Dell, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, to name a few.   

The five are to take up appointments on a high powered committee working from the Capitol. Their task is to draft a report for the Governor on how to instill pride in the uniqueness and history of Texas through the school curriculum, learning environment, and education in general. This is a tough and complex assignment that will entail a tremendous amount of travel around the state, and a lot of research.

This high powered committee is comprised of five persons in all: two of the whites are very wealthy men, one a billionaire oil man, and the other a multi millionaire rancher: both are reactionary, right wing types.

The other whites are a male college professor with international pedigree; and a female and grand dame in her sixties; a powerful La femme, a patrician, and daughter and granddaughter, of US Senators. The woman is another wealthy and privileged white.

The sole minority is a Latina male. He is a Sociology Professor at Texas A & M University; a brilliant mind, who is needed because of his Mexican background. Throughout the meeting of minds in the Governor’s Office, the wealthy whites appear to behave condescendingly towards the Mexican American. They do this unknowingly through nuance and attitude: a superiority complex brought about by more than two hundred years of white dominance of American life and society.

The only blacks in the vicinity, despite the critical contribution made by Negroes to the evolution of Texas and the wider South, are the butler, steward, and bell hop. These are black males in white jackets and black bow ties, fawning types, who amble about the Governor’s offices and conference rooms unassumingly and silently. Texas in the early 1980s was a place where a significant percentage of the black population was still living in servitude, both socially and economically.

Thirty years later, and the power disparity between the white, and minority black and Latina, especially in terms of wealth, remains exponential. The US Senate, a bastion of privilege, is overwhelmingly white, with not a single black senator. And according to a recent Pew Research paper, the net worth of the average white in the USA is twenty times that of the Latina and twenty two times that of the black. Paradoxically, blacks have become worse off under the Obama Presidency. In simple terms, for every dollar a black possesses, a white possesses twenty two.  Despite political advances since the 1960s, Black and Latina minorities still have a mountain to climb before any type of social and economic equality with the Anglo Saxon Caucasian can be achieved. 

However, the billionaire oil tycoon and the wealthy rancher, add the cultured progeny of a US political dynasty, typically Republican voters and right wing types, would have laughed to a bursting, had anyone dared to suggest at that time, in the Governor’s conference rooms, that in under 30 years, an African American family would be the powerful inhabitants of a fortified White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The first two term African American President is the result of a shifting and changing US demographic that has placed political power into the hands of Liberal whites, Latinas, minority women, and blacks who vote Democrat in overwhelming numbers.   That power shift had already begun in the early 1980s, but was probably not apparent, especially to those wealthy and powerful whites, who were on that high powered committee sponsored by the Texan Governor.

In any event, as of March 2013, the Western world very much remains ruled by rich white guys who own and control all of the most powerful businesses and corporations.

To be continued...

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