Houston Bound

Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations-particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles-complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston's blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics.
This interdisciplinary book provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.

List of IllustrationsIntroduction: When Worlds Collide Part One 1 • The Bayou City in Black and White 2 • Old Wards, New Neighbors Part Two 3 • Jim Crow-ing Culture4 • "We Were Too White to Be Black and Too Black to Be White" Part Three 5 • "All America Dances to It" 6 • "Blaxicans" and Black Creoles
Conclusion: Race in the Modern City AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex