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Texas is not the South although there are a lot of cultural similarities. Dallas and Houston are huge sprawling metro areas with people from all over the country and all over the world. Houston i/m/o has a truley international aspect to it. In adddition to the Hispanic influence, there are a lot of Asians there and Dallas as well. Austin has more in common with Berkeley than it does with any other SEC college town with the exception of maybe Athens. Fort Worth feels very "Western" and after FW, civilization basically ends.

Of course then there is Marshall and East Texas generally. If you were blindfolded and listening to the folks talk, you would swear you were in rural Alabama or Mississippi (and for a simple reason, that is where the folks who settled those areas came from), and you probably couldn't tell much of a cultural difference also.

Houston and Dallas are comparable to Atlanta, geographically southern, but not culturally because of the diversity of population origins. Atlanta has a large population of Northerners, Asians (Koreans, especially), and Hispanics that make it more "cosmopolitan" than most other cities in the South.

Folks can pretend otherwise all they want, but yes, large swaths of Texas are culturally Southern: look at religion, politics, food, values, history, etc.