Barbara Karkabi: Long Before Katrina, Texas Served As Home For Migrants
Bernard Tebo was 7 when his family moved from a little town outside Lafayette, La., to Texas.
Tebo is 99 now, but he remembers that day in 1914 when his family put everything they owned on the train and landed in what looked like wild country.
"My daddy came to Texas for free school and cheap land, but there was nothin' here to do," Tebo recalls. "The living was better in Louisiana, but there were more (job) opportunities here."
The Tebos arrived in Ames (in Liberty County) a little earlier than some, but like many from Louisiana, they came for cheap land, jobs in the oil fields or to flee floods. And they brought their style of "better living" with them - from toe-tapping Zydeco music to cuisine like boudin and gumbo.
The recent arrival of some 230,000 evacuees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is only the latest in a series of migrations from Louisiana that began at the end of the Civil War, says Merline Pitre, dean of liberal arts at Texas Southern University. Pitre moved to Houston from Opelousas, La., in 1976 to teach at TSU.
"We have always had a steady stream of migration," she said, "because after Reconstruction there was a claim that the economy in Texas was better."
The relationship between the two states has been written about, sung about, mythologized and handed down in stories from one generation to another.
There are rogues like the pirate and slave smuggler Jean Lafitte, who left Louisiana and operated out of Galveston for a time. Local folklore claims a number of his men started families, built homes and maybe even buried pirate gold.
And oil workers who have flooded into Houston were immortalized in Steve Earle's song "Telephone Road". It's written in the voice of a young man who grew up in Lafayette and is now working and partying at the honky-tonks on Telephone Road.
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From the beginning, Houston has always found a place - culturally and economically - for newcomers.
After World War II, young men from rural Texas and Louisiana came to Houston looking for jobs in the oil industry.
"They were people like my dad who wanted to get out of farming and needed a good job," said Joe Pratt, Cullen professor of history and business at UH. "Usually that meant finding a job where there was a friend or family member."
Throughout the oil boom, migration into Houston was mainly domestic, said Rice University's Stephen Klineberg. After the collapse in the early '80s, almost all immigration came from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean.
Hurricane Katrina's evacuees add a sudden and interesting twist, he said, though no one knows how many will stay in Houston.
"It's complicated, because a lot of people from New Orleans had contempt for Houston because it's so modern and spiffy, but the jobs are here," said John Boles, Rice University history professor and editor of the Journal of Southern History.
Tebo is 99 now, but he remembers that day in 1914 when his family put everything they owned on the train and landed in what looked like wild country.
"My daddy came to Texas for free school and cheap land, but there was nothin' here to do," Tebo recalls. "The living was better in Louisiana, but there were more (job) opportunities here."
The Tebos arrived in Ames (in Liberty County) a little earlier than some, but like many from Louisiana, they came for cheap land, jobs in the oil fields or to flee floods. And they brought their style of "better living" with them - from toe-tapping Zydeco music to cuisine like boudin and gumbo.
The recent arrival of some 230,000 evacuees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is only the latest in a series of migrations from Louisiana that began at the end of the Civil War, says Merline Pitre, dean of liberal arts at Texas Southern University. Pitre moved to Houston from Opelousas, La., in 1976 to teach at TSU.
"We have always had a steady stream of migration," she said, "because after Reconstruction there was a claim that the economy in Texas was better."
The relationship between the two states has been written about, sung about, mythologized and handed down in stories from one generation to another.
There are rogues like the pirate and slave smuggler Jean Lafitte, who left Louisiana and operated out of Galveston for a time. Local folklore claims a number of his men started families, built homes and maybe even buried pirate gold.
And oil workers who have flooded into Houston were immortalized in Steve Earle's song "Telephone Road". It's written in the voice of a young man who grew up in Lafayette and is now working and partying at the honky-tonks on Telephone Road.
...
From the beginning, Houston has always found a place - culturally and economically - for newcomers.
After World War II, young men from rural Texas and Louisiana came to Houston looking for jobs in the oil industry.
"They were people like my dad who wanted to get out of farming and needed a good job," said Joe Pratt, Cullen professor of history and business at UH. "Usually that meant finding a job where there was a friend or family member."
Throughout the oil boom, migration into Houston was mainly domestic, said Rice University's Stephen Klineberg. After the collapse in the early '80s, almost all immigration came from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean.
Hurricane Katrina's evacuees add a sudden and interesting twist, he said, though no one knows how many will stay in Houston.
"It's complicated, because a lot of people from New Orleans had contempt for Houston because it's so modern and spiffy, but the jobs are here," said John Boles, Rice University history professor and editor of the Journal of Southern History.