Deep in the Heart of Texas, the Popular Destination Is Suburbia

SUGAR LAND, Texas —  The Lone Star State has become a place ever more divided by great stretches of highway and fortune, booming in both glitzy high-tech suburbs and ramshackle border colonias, while its old cattle towns lose people and influence.

That, accompanied by a surge in Latino residents that surprised even Latino leaders, is the portrait of Texas that emerges from figures released Monday, among the first detailed numbers made public by the Census Bureau from its nationwide count of the American people.

Famous for all things big, Texas became really grande in the 1990s as only the second state to surpass 20 million people. And it added a staggering 2,018,310 Latino residents, a leap of 47% in a decade, making “Tejanos” nearly a third of the state’s population.

As such, the changes in Texas offer a preview of the likely census report on California due out next week. And they reflect national trends: The Census Bureau reported Monday that 3 in 10 Americans are now members of minority groups, mostly because of rapid growth in the country’s Asian and Latino populations.

For Texas, these big numbers are changing the political flavor: The growth concentrated in its suburbs promises to boost the Republicans’ ascendancy across the state. At the same time, it puts great pressure on the state and its local governments to educate and house and provide basic infrastructure for the swelling communities.

Latinos became the largest ethnic group in the state’s two largest cities, Dallas and Houston, for the first time.

“There are, in a sense, two Texases now,” said Steve Murdock, director of the Texas State Data Center. “Just like there’s two nations.”

Demographers predict that as early as 2005, whites will no longer be a majority in Texas and that the state will become the fourth with no ethnic or racial majority. The others are California, New Mexico and Hawaii. The suburban version of the new Texas can be found in the outskirts of Houston, Dallas and Austin, where many cities have doubled or tripled in population over the last decade, growth fueled in part by the success of computer companies such as Dell, Compaq and Texas Instruments.

The population of the Austin suburb of Cedar Park, for example, increased by more than 400%.

And Sugar Land, a teeming suburb built on former horse pastures and sugar cane fields outside Houston, helped drive a 57% leap in the population of surrounding Fort Bend County.

“And it’s not going to stop any time soon,” said Louis Garvin of the Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce. “We’re building the elementary schools, the middle schools and the high schools just as fast as we can.”

Fort Bend County also has a satellite campus of the University of Houston in the works.

Sugar Land, once the center of vast cane plantations, now draws thousands of baby boomers each year to a cookie-cutter landscape of wide residential streets and faux ranch homes built around artificial rivers and lakes. Billboards advertise new housing developments with names like “First Colony” and “New Territory.” Others tout the future site of “the cool, new Sugar Land Town Square,” the city’s new downtown, to be built completely from scratch on what is now pasture.

“It’s just unbelievable,” Garvin said of the growth. “If we can keep pouring enough concrete to build the freeways, we’ll keep the people coming out there.”

Rising from another green pasture is the 2-week-old Wal-Mart Supercenter, where twentysomething Alex Morales has his first-ever job as a cashier. “Everything here is brand new,” he said, referring to the hangar-sized store.

Around the fringes of Sugar Land are a few surviving symbols of the old Texas: scattered horse farms and the towering silos of the Imperial Sugar mill, looming over yet another cluster of new homes.

Despite a recent boom in its Oil Patch, the slow decay of rural Texas is plain to see in the population figures released Monday.

In all, 28 of Texas’ 254 counties lost population in the last decade. The overwhelming number of those counties, said Murdock of the state data center, were in rural west Texas in the state’s panhandle region. Pampa, east of Amarillo in the panhandle, lost 56% of its population.

State Rep. Delwin Jones of Lubbock expects rural Texas will lose five seats in the 150-member Legislature when the committee he chairs begins to draw new district boundaries later this month.

When Jones was first elected to the state’s House of Representatives back in 1965, “it was basically a rural Legislature,” he said. Now it’s dominated by big-city politicians. And Jones, elected as a Democrat, has since become a Republican.

Houston and Dallas seem likely to gain state and local districts in their Latino neighborhoods. In Harris County, which makes up most of metropolitan Houston, Latinos displaced blacks as the largest minority group.

The 47% surge in the Latino population caught many Latino leaders by surprise.

“We’re already under siege for services,” said Gilbert Moreno of the Houston-based Assn. for Advancement of Mexican Americans. “We’re the largest provider of adult literacy services in the city and we’re out of room. It makes you wonder how we will continue to serve a population that is growing at an unprecedented rate.”

Growth was even faster in traditionally Latino communities along the Texas-Mexico border.

Laredo, founded in 1755, is at once one of the oldest communities in the United States and one of its fastest-growing.

Figures released Friday showed the Laredo metropolitan area had grown 45% since 1990.

Throughout Texas, much of the growth is made up not just by Latino immigrants, but also by millions of domestic migrants, including many transplanted Californians, demographers say. “I wasn’t born in Texas,” reads one popular bumper sticker, “but I got here as fast as I could.”

Texas will gain two seats in Congress. Most observers agree at least one of the new seats will be carved out of the suburbs north of Dallas--a place analogous to California’s Inland Empire, which is expected to be the site of the Golden State’s one additional congressional seat.

The second Texas seat may be carved along the corridor between Austin and San Antonio, or perhaps along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley.

In all likelihood, the seats will be won by Republicans.

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How Texas Is Changing

The map shows percentage change in population by county, with the greatest increase shown in black.

*

Change in total state population, 1990-2000:

1990: 16,986,510

2000: 20,851,820

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Race and ethnicity:

52.4% White*

30.1% Latino***

11.3% Black*

3.0% Other/ Multiple Race**

2.7% Asian, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander*

0.3% Native American*

*

*Non-Hispanic

**Non-Hispanic and Hispanic

***Hispanic-White and Hispanic-Other

*

Source: Census Bureau, 2000 Census figures; data analysis by RICHARD O’REILLY/Los Angeles Times