Houston’s Melting Pot: How Diversity Unites The Bayou City

HOUSTON, TX — Houston has surpassed New York City and Los Angeles as the nation’s most diverse metro area — a highly prized distinction among cities trying to lure jobs and workers to fill them to their communities. While other cities charge boards and commissions with developing plans to promote and implement a culture of diversity on their own, diversity just simply happened in Houston when no one was really looking.

Houston wears its diversity as a badge of honor. It’s estimated that more than 140 different languages are spoken in the metropolitan area, with Spanish and Vietnamese among the most prominent dialects.

Houston is a far cry from the “Urban Cowboy” stereotype of the the average Houstonian as a two-stepping, bull riding, cowboy boot wearing white male in a pearl snap shirt, with the outline of a snuff can ring on the back pocket of a broken in pair of jeans.

But the reality of Houston’s diversity is hardly lost on Mayor Sylvester Turner, the Bayou City’s most enthusiastic cheerleader, who has spent the entirety of his first mayoral term trumpeting Houston’s uniqueness and diversity in speeches, news conferences and to outsiders who can’t believe it’s actually the truth.

“It’s a great city. As we say, it’s the most diverse city in the United States,” Turner said during his recent state of the city address. “We are a very welcoming city, and we embrace Houstonians for who they are and where they come from.”

According to thecitywithnolimits.com, which used data from the Kinder Institute and Rice University, Houston is more diverse than the U.S., and actually is a city that has no ethnic majority, enjoying a racial diversity that’s 37 percent anglo, 37 percent Hispanic, 17 percent black, and 8 percent Asian.

As with any community, Houston has had its share of a dark and culturally unacceptable norms, such as the strength of the Ku Klux Klan, which was openly accepted in many circles from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s.

The Ku Klux Klan surfaced again in 1984 and marched in protest of Houston’s gay community, hoping to trigger fears but actually achieved the opposite. And this year, marchers from the Black Lives Matter Movement clashed with White Lives Matter supporters, indicating that even though diverse, Houston still has a way to go in cultural assimilation.

While there is indeed diversity in Houston, many in the black community feel that unity is missing

And many in Houston’s black community feel that there is still a long way to go, to achieve real unity, and that is the goal.

Aswad Walker wears many hats in Houston’s black community.

He’s a pastor for the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, and also serves as a contributing writer for the Defender Network, and was previously an adjunct professor of African-American studies at the University of Houston.

Walker has devoted his career to empowering Houston’s black community and appreciates the diversity that other cultures contribute to Houston.

However, Walker said there’s still work to do in Houston.

“I remember Mayor Turner bragging about the diversity of the city, but he also said as diverse as we are, we are still a very segregated city,” Walker told Patch.

And much of that was for a time, self-segregation, with many communities sticking close to areas where their families had always been.

Despite the self-segregation, the signs all indicate that Houston is indeed welcoming.

This is most evident in the observances throughout the city that celebrate the various cultures, as well as multi-ethnic balance found in various offices within the city and county.

Walker, whose church is downtown, sees a lot of that in the arts community where so many different cultures intermingle.

“That’s one area where you see people of different hues and backgrounds, getting together and working together and celebrating...with one another,” he said.

In fact, Houston and Texas as a whole, has always been a great multicultural community, with the base population of white, black and Hispanic now mingled with Indo-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, Asian-Americans and many others.

The regional diversity becomes even more apparent when the areas of Harris, Galveston, Brazoria, Waller and Montgomery Counties come into play.

“People come from all over the world, different ethnicities, people practice different faiths…,” Turner said. “There are 142 plus languages in our city. One in four Houstonians in foreign born.”

While the statistics tend to point to the differences, community leaders and residents realize cultural diversity can act as a bridge.

FORT BEND COUNTY:

Fort Bend County, the cities of Sugar Land, Missouri City, Stafford, Richmond and Rosenberg all grew along ethnic lines where traditional German and Mexican families settled even before Texas became a Republic in 1836.

For many years, these were agricultural communities where cattle, sugar and cotton were king.
In the 1970s, immigrants from Vietnam, Pakistan, India and South Africa began to establish a presence in many of these communities, particularly Sugar Land and Missouri City.

Sugar Land Mayor Joe Zimmerman says bringing different cultures together allows all to learn from one another.

“Sugar Land has a Caucasian population between 44-46 percent, and an Asian population of 34-36 percent. We have Asian-Americans, Indo-Americans and Pakistani-Americans,” he said. “This is a homogenous group with a lot of different beliefs and a lot of different interests. It really does work here.”

Zimmerman, who served on the city council for four years before being elected mayor in November 2016, is actively involved in all the various cultural communities, not because of his office, but because it’s his home, he said.

It was a commitment he made before he was mayor and he sticks by it.

“I wasn’t just going to be the mayor of the white guys,”Zimmerman told Patch. “I was going to be the mayor of all the people.”

Terri Wang, who was born in the United States to Taiwanese parents, moved to Sugar Land in the 1990s to be close to her husband’s family, and while it was those ties that brought her to Texas, it’s the diversity of the community in Sugar Land that she appreciates.

For seven years, Wang has served on her city’s Multicultural Advisory Team, which works with city leaders on cultural events and understanding, and provides opportunities for city leaders to learn about the cultures through presentations, question-and-answer sessions and cuisine.

“The city makes an effort to include, and to be sensitive to other cultures,” Wang said.

While programs can be an effective tool, sometimes immersion and just being part of the community is all that’s needed.

It was a different time in the late 1950s, and early 1960s, and Juan Delgado, who grew up in Rosenberg, Texas, just a few miles from Sugar Land, recalls that era as one of learning between the predominantly German culture, the Mexican culture, and the small minority of African-Americans in the city.

“One of the things that brought us all together was sports,” said Delgado, who played basketball at Lamar Consolidated High School. “We never really had any segregation problems there.”

In the 1950s, Richmond and Rosenberg were farming communities, and Delgado and his peers were accustomed to not only working together in school, but in the fields with their families, picking cotton and corn and harvesting rice.

Delgado said growing up at that time — in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement — was an experience that opened him, and others, up to learning about other cultures.

PASADENA:

However, some areas have had a harder time adjusting to cultural differences in their communities.

In recent years, the City of Pasadena has experienced racial tension, particularly in the growing Hispanic community, which sued the city.

The lawsuit was filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund three years after the city changed the structure of of the city council, which was done to diminish Hispanic voters.

The change in 2013 was narrowly approved by voters, was pushed through by then-Mayor Johnny Isbell, who expressed concerns of “an invasion of Hispanics” should the push to revamp the voting districts in 2013 fail.

It was testimony of Isbell’s comments that resulted in a ruling against the city and forcing a return to the pre-2013 council districts.

Former Pasadena City Councilman Ornaldo Ybarra, who grew up in Pasadena, said he’d never experienced racism in Pasadena — until he became a city council member.

Francisco Perez-Mendoza, who came to Pasadena six years ago from El Paso, said tensions have been high in recent months, part of which he attributed to lines drawn in the November 2016 presidential election, and part to old attitudes.

“Honestly, it’s sad to me,” he said. “My parents came over here in the 1950s to become Americans, and they did. I still have faith, though. The process works. We saw that in the lawsuit, that this is still a great country, even if some attitudes are outdated.”

Image: Pixabay

Send news tips to bryan.kirk@patch.com