I haven’t spent that much time in Dallas, Texas, over the years but the city has given me at least five flat tires. Cinder block shops offering cheap replacements dot the metroplex and do a swinging business when the temperature climbs in the summer past what aging rubber can withstand. But inside the Highland Park Village mall, the air is crisp and cool enough for deeply tanned dames to wrap real fur over their expertly sculpted décolletages, swinging their handbags on the way to Fendi, Dior and La Perla.
This is a city that can’t help its sharp contrasts. They seem baked into the marrow of the place by the shimmering southern heat, reinforced by the city’s towering freeway overpasses and grassy floodplain. The place we know as Dallas today was once home to the Caddo people, whose nation sprawled across present-day East Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. According to popular legend (of which there are no shortage in the Lone Star State) the Caddo word for “friends” became the word “Texas,” although historian Jorge Luís García Ruíz wrote a whole book on how it more likely stems from the Spanish word for yew trees.
Of course, there is much in Dallas’ history that is decidedly unfriendly. There were the Spanish missions, for one. There was the 1910 lynching of Allen Brooks, which was only just memorialized in 2021. Brooks’ was just one grisly murder in a culture of Klan activity so violent and prevalent that it earned Dallas the nickname “The City of Hate.” A 2017 D Magazine article summed up the city’s Roaring Twenties as a time “When Dallas Was the Most Racist City In America.”
We can’t forget, either, the assassination of John F. Kennedy—not exactly a warm welcome for the thirty-fifth president of the United States. And the city is still shaped, literally, but its penchant for building Seussical interstate highways through its Black and Latino neighborhoods—though Dallas was certainly not the only city in the country to come up with that particular strategy for undercutting non-white wealth.
One of these historically Black neighborhoods, Deep Ellum, remains one of the best corners of modern Dallas. It’s home to colorful murals, pizzas that live up to Texas’ size king reputation, and music venues graced by greats including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Erykah Badu. Here you will absolutely get a feel for modern Dallas’ friendly side, whether you’re shaking your ass to a rock show at Three Links, sweating it out at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival or sucking down a cold one at BrainDead Brewing.
Deep Ellum is my one non-negotiable neighborhood when I find myself back here. It’s where I fell for the city back in 2015, right when someone with whom I fell in love was showing me the sites. We weren’t well-matched, that man and I. For me, Dallas is forever tangled up in the contradictions of our relationship, and between the person I was back then and the person I became later in the aftermath of my Texas-Tennessee romance.
When I first started writing this issue of Passersby sometime last summer, I was still hoping to meet one of my best friends from Portland in San Antonio. She was going to be house-sitting for her folks during Fiesta, and I started making plans to swing through Dallas to confront a few ghosts on the way down to Alamo town. Some combination of career drama and COVID quashed our reunion, but few weeks after I started to plan my return to Texas, I discovered Amazon Prime was offering Dallas for free on streaming.
I hadn’t been to the eponymous city since at least 2016 and had never seen the campy primetime drama before, but somehow the fictional version of Dallas from 40 years prior resonated. It wasn’t the aesthetics, though ‘70s revival fashion is back almost anywhere you go, from Highland Park to Trinity Groves. It wasn’t the skyline either—Dallas was filmed before the Jolly Green Giant, the Pegasus and the Disco Lollypop joined the cast of buildings gazing down on the Trinity River’s wide bottom.
Maybe it was the show’s chaotic swamp of contrasts. Any given episode was swinging wildly between glamor and violence, nudging new money up against old values and beautiful women up against arrogant men. This was a show with such cultural cache and social currency that according to Rolling Stone scribe Rob Sheffield it indirectly introduced New Wave band New Order to rolling on molly. That’s right, as Sheffield put it, this was a show that became such a bonkers phenomenon “the Ewings helped introduce English rock stars to Ecstasy.”
Digger deeper, though, beneath the crusty layers of patriarchy in which Dallas is caked, I think the show felt familiar because of what its setting was just starting to become in the cultural imagination when the show took off.
It’s weird to think about now, but Dallas absolutely walked so Game of Thrones could run. The former clocked a solid 13 years of airtime and was filled with as many strong women, sexual assaults and questionable fashion choices as the HBO juggernaut. That’s not to mention how Dallas was packed with even more betrayals—both between the characters and of the audience’s credulity.
For a good chunk of that decade, Dallas captured America’s imagination. The show seemed to solidify a multitude of cultural eddies that were coalescing to make Texas more than a sum of its parts. The middle of the country was *very in* during the ‘70s, with sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show plunking their casts down in Minneapolis and Chicago, respectively. Even That 70s Show stuck to small-town Wisconsin for a period-appropriate setting when it came out in 1998 (just seven years after Dallas went off the air, if you can believe it).
Dallas was definitely a mid-size city at the southern end of the middle when the saga of the Ewing family put it on the pop-cultural map. Here was a chance for Texas to step out from under the Wild West reputation that was looming over it like a ten-gallon hat. At the time, Texas was well on its way to becoming a metonym for the country at large—indeed, the Dallas Cowboys were first called “America’s Team” in 1978, the year Dallas premiered.
Almost two decades prior John F. Kennedy used the legend of San Antonio’s famous Alamo as means of putting questions about his Catholic faith to bed for good. He was a speech that the authors of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth identify as the moment that “turned the Alamo into a national political symbol.”
That transformation was reinforced by Walt Disney’s wildly popular Davy Crockett franchise (fair warning, the theme song above is a complete cringe on race) and John Wayne’s own Alamo flick (not any better for racial sensitivity)—which Wayne intentionally released just before the election that put Kennedy in the White House. Suddenly, Texas history wasn’t just for Texans. That Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas just three years later only seemed to prove that.
Instead, the mythos of Texas’ founding was deliberately crafted into a Cold War-era expression of conservative American values with mass appeal. Like so much other state infrastructure, that particular narrative was built at the expense of Black and Brown communities, cutting an us-versus-them line as starkly as I-30 slices through Deep Ellum and West Dallas. To this day, the Forget the Alamo authors note, Latino schoolchildren are still getting steamrolled by a textbook narrative that casts them as the descendants of the villains who butchered a bunch of American all-stars.
Indeed, Dallas is still grappling with its legacy of racism from the classroom to the zoning board. A serious gentrification problem is nipping at the fringes of traditionally Black and Brown and working-class neighborhoods like Oak Cliff and Cockrell Hill. As in other growing cities squeezed by developers, history and favorite haunts are both getting paved over each day.
Condo development has shooed one of my all-time favorite pubs, Ten Bells Tavern (about which I once wrote for Chowhound, RIP), from its OG perch in the Bishop Arts District on the edge of Oak Cliff. Fortunately, they've secured a new location that’s not too far away for the owners to keep tending to the neighborhood’s feral cat population—one of the things that makes me love Ten Bells, almost as much as their righteous poblano mac n cheese.
I worry that one day I’ll come back to Dallas and find the colorful shops on Jefferson Street, the windows of which are full of quinceanera dresses, Tejanos cassettes, and pinatas, will have turned into another slick airspace nightmare. In the meantime, though, I’m just grateful I finally had the chance to pass back through on my way to Colorado this winter. Six months after I originally hoped to visit en route to San Antonio, I rolled in from a quick lunch in Texarkana ready to see what I’d missed in the six years since I first met Dallas.
It was chilly and rainy—a side to the city I’d never experienced before. At least I wouldn’t get another flat tire on this trip. I checked into the Deep Ellum Hostel and couldn’t get out on the street fast enough to see how things held up against my memories. There’s a particular pleasure in returning to places, but especially when you get to do so on your own terms for the first time. As I wrote on Instagram from my favorite bookstore and coffee shop,
Is there a long, complicated German word for the sensation of returning to a city where you have some history, that's loaded in the pop cultural consciousness, where you feel the gap between the self you were the last time you were here and the self you are now? The nostalgia, the relief, the weird call of the Texas grackles. You slip into some old familiarity and the novelty of being this version of yourself in this version of the city, seeing how some years look on you both.
When I first agreed to speak at an academic conference in the middle of the Metroplex in 2015, I never expected to meet someone. I never would have bet on Dallas becoming a place I keep coming back again and again. Whether through the physical act of travel, however, or through what I’m listening to, reading and watching, the Big D is often with me. Sure, Dallas lacks the slacker-to-hipster pipeline of Austin, the historic scenery of San Antonio, the essential Blackness of Houston. It’s hard to define even if we know its greatest (or is that worst?) hits by heart.
But I do relate somewhat to the frustration Dallasites feel about how their city is so often reduced to a lot of the things I’ve mentioned here as a preoccupied outsider. Dallas CultureMap recently griped at CNN for a parachute-journalism piece on how Dallas’s grandiosity, an article packed with some of the same “rehashed cliches” I’ve mentioned here myself— “Southfork Ranch [of Dallas fame], JFK, the Dallas Cowboys and BBQ.”
After all, who hasn’t yearned once or twice for someone to peer just a little beneath our surfaces and see what’s really cooking underneath? Isn’t that how I fell into the wrong love so very fast, because I was so very hungry to be seen? Who hasn’t occasionally felt frustrated when they are referred to by some old babyish nickname that no longer fits? Isn’t that why I went out of my way to come back here, to see this place with fresh eyes—to prove to myself that I’ve grown and changed?
Perhaps one of the side-effects of Texas’, and particularly Dallas’, metonymic reputation is that it feels knowable, or maybe just ownable, to outsiders. Perhaps this is the side effect of millions of Americans tuning in to a TV set version of a particular city for over a decade—they form a parasocial relationship with a place that doesn’t exist any more than your favorite celebrity’s public-facing persona.
As a writer, though, it can be interesting to parse the relationship between stereotypes and truth, the difference between myth and history, the gap between the tourists’ view and the locals’, and how a place is marketed versus how you experience it. It’s curious to see a city that has such a frankly ugly history—the sort that Critical Race Theory opponents would prefer you ignore—become a symbol for a nation. At least, that is, a symbol of the parts of the U.S. we can’t put under New York City’s even more prodigious semiotic umbrella.
Maybe it’s just that Texas lends itself to having things projected onto it, as I have with my own personal history with Dallas. Not to put myself in bad company but is seems like everyone from Trump to Elon Musk wants to use the Lone Star State as a giant scrim for their turn as the main character of our national narrative.
Indeed, the state continues to double down on its identity as the conservatives’ vision of California’s antithesis, intentionally suppressing and abusing its BIPOC, queer, trans and female communities to make a point. That’s not helping the rest of the country see or discuss Texas in a more nuanced way, unfortunately, or divorce it from the old John Wayne stereotypes of guns, toxic masculinity, and un-mess-with-ability.
This isn’t an essay with any firm conclusions, either about Dallas or myself or how to wrap up this issue of Passersby. This is an open-ended journey, both through Dallas on my way to Colorado and down the rabbit hole of Texas-focused media I consumed along the way, and continue to. I’m not sure we should come to a complete judgment about something as complex and ever-changing as place, even if that feels like a cop-out from a craft standpoint.
I’ll say this—I’ve had a taste of Dallas’ first-date-best behavior that can be both expensive and charming. I ate Frito chili pie and drank champagne during a Cowboys game at Jerryworld and scarfed crawfish beignets at Boulevardier. I’ve also taken the city’s buses and hit the pavement with temperatures pushing a hundred, kicked back in suburban strip mall pool halls, and slurped cold Lone Star beers with locals at an dervish of an Ume concert. I’ve seen a few sides to the city, and I hope I’ll have the chance to see a few more.
Despite the passing familiarity of a repeat visitor, Dallas is as mysterious to me as ever. But the same I could say for the country I’ve lived in all my life. The same I could say of myself. I know I’ll be back in the Big D one day. I still have some bands I want to see there, some burritos to slam at El Ranchito, and I’ve never been to Possum Kingdom Lake. I want to order the biggest coronarita at the Katy Trail Ice House after a sweaty run, and I want to check out the new Ten Bells when the kitties are settled in.
I’m not sure who I’ll be and what else I’ve seen by the time I’m there again. Like the Old 97’s said, “We're just shadows, just ask Plato, it was all a dream.” But I have to disagree with them on the next line to “St. Ignatius,” when Rhett Miller sings “I've had it with Dallas, let's burn down the Palace, I'll bring the kerosene.” Hold the pyrotechnics—this place doesn’t need any more violence. Instead, let’s see what stories are left in this strange, sprawling place.