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No hat, no cattle: Texas's venerable myth, rooted in our rugged, wide-open spaces, is seriously in need of a big-city makeover.

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Retro Texas, meet metro Texas. For generations the history-redolent mythology supposedly hardwired into every Texan's brain has hallowed our rural wide-open spaces, even as the eastern third of the state has experienced an unprecedented explosion of urban culture. But retro Texas's claim on our collective psyche is finally being challenged by its metropolitan alter ego. A sleeping demographic giant that has long considered itself an old cowhand is waking up to discover that it is really a city slicker. [paragraph] This identity crisis is long overdue. After all, Texas has boasted three of the nation's ten largest cities for nearly two decades. But it is more eye-opening to look at the real measure of metropolitan might, the Census Bureau's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. With the nation's fifth- and eighth-largest MSAs (Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington and Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land, respectively), Texas is the only state with more than one of the nation's ten most populous metropolitan areas. Add San Antonio and Austin-Round Rock, and you have 13 million Texans residing in our four largest MSAs alone, a city-centered population that would amount to the nation's fifth-most-populous state. We're no longer just an urban state; almost two thirds of us inhabit the culture of an ultramodern megalopolis. [paragraph] Our megalopolitan culture is beginning to produce such political anomalies as Houston's Hubert Vo, the Vietnamese-refugee developer who recently ended Republican budget-slasher Talmadge Heflin's 22-year tenure in the Texas House of Representatives. Or consider the iconic position of Dallas County sheriff: She's now a gay Latina Democrat (see "The Gay Non-Issue," page 82). Whether this is a trend or a speed bump on the road to eternal Republican hegemony is irrelevant, however, because megalopolitan culture is reinventing Texas where it really counts: on the bottom line. Pressed to compete in a global marketplace for everything from...

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