Californians have a bad reputation in Texas. Seen as a bunch of liberal carpet baggers who can’t dance, being a Californian is a dirty secret when visiting the Lone Star State, especially in its capital city.
For whatever reason, California country dancers prefer to move in a line — a nearly criminal offense in ancesteral home of two-stepping. And with the influx of Californians during the pandemic and beyond, Texans’ dislike of the hippies (and their dancing) from the West Coast has exploded.
Signs in several historic venues around Austin tell folks they can return to to the Golden State if they want to line dance.
In a humorous reversal of historic name calling, being a Californian in Austin is a less-offensive, some-what pathetic version of being a called an Okie in Depression-era California.
Californians are driving up costs, supporting a booming economy (largely due to companies moving to the regulation-free state from California) and playing dress up like a Texan. While most in Austin don’t have livestock to tend, the newest residents truly are all hat and no cattle.
While the trend has tapered off, 2021 and early 2022 “were totally insane with Californians moving” to Austin, said life-long Austin resident and local real estate agent Katie Dochen. “People were even angry at cars with California license plates,” she joked.
“It seems to me like people move out of cities they are tired of to new places, and then get annoyed that the new place isn’t like the place they left, and then work to make the new city just like the one they left,” Dochen said.
South Congress, long the spot for local boutiques and Texas wares, has become like any other brand name-laden retail strip in Los Angeles, she said, but selling expensive boots instead of sneakers.
“In general, big cities are becoming the same thing: Instagram-worthy vignettes with reservations needed anywhere.”
But not everyone feels that way about the country’s 10th-largest metropolitan area.
Country music DJ and former Angeleno Don Sticksel, known as DJ Salty Cracker to his legion of fans, just moved to the city after nearly 30 years of visiting.
“I’ve been coming to Austin since the late 90s and it’s always been an amazing place,” he said in a recent interview. “Austin has grown like crazy in the past 25 years, but ‘The Live Music Capital of the World’ still lives up to its name every day of the week. Bands come and go but country music endures.”
After their lease came up for renewal in the City of Angels and they discussed what they really wanted in a home, he and “his lady jumped at the chance” to live in Austin.
“Now I can see Croy and the Boys, Paige Pleasance, Kathryn Legendre, Melissa Carper, Jesse Daniel, Western Fidelity and others regularly—plus the great musicians on drums, steel and guitar who play on everyone’s records — all within 15 minutes of my home.”
“I’m in my element and I love it.”
And while many transplants feel this way about their new hometown, the anti-California sentiment endures, which may be rooted in something more nefarious.
Serafia, rising Black country musician, who lived in Austin for several years, put it bluntly. The “go back to California” signage gives some Texans a way to express the same racism, xenophobia and wariness of outsiders that allowed Jim Crow laws to proliferate across the state for generations.
“Now they get to scratch that same itch in 2024,” she said. “That a major ‘we’re big, bad sovereign Texas’ thing.”
Johnny Marfa, a Los Angeles-based but Texas-raised honky tonk country artist, touches on another aspect of this mentality.
“If y’all don’t know Texas is just a big middle finger to the rest of the world by now, then I suppose you never will,” he jokingly wrote on a related social media post. “Even the shape of the state is sort of giving everyone the bird.”
“‘Don’t California my Texas’ stickers are on every other bumper,” said Marfa in a follow-up interview. “They don’t mind the money coming in but don’t want their politics changed.”
The rivalry never made much sense to Marfa, who sees more cultural similarities across the large states than differences. Deep Mexican influences, ranching history and overlapping styles of country music cross both states, he said — but California feels more like a place where outside influences are welcome, whereas in Texas, there is an orthodoxy that must be followed and passed down without variation.
On the same post where Marfa joked about the profane geography of Texas, another person noted that he never heard anyone say anything negative about Texas in California. In part, most Californians don’t give Texas much of a second thought — even though Texans have moved to California in significant numbers during the same period described in this story.
The Everything Is Bigger, Don’t Mess With, and other such Texas slogans betray an inferiority complex ingrained deeply in much of the state’s culture. Texas boasts wonderful food, music, art and a range of famous “citizens,” but no other state in the union seems to take residency so seriously.
Texans act akin to college students boasting about a football win rather than adult residents of a particular place, and even an expat like Marfa still carries that burden.
Regarding the peaceful California sentiment the Los Angeleno offered in the comment section, Marfa said, “That’s exactly what people from Texas would assume someone from Cali would say. Texans would respect Californians much more if they just were like, ‘Fuck you, Texas. We’ll line dance all over your oppressive legislation and voter suppression.’ A little attitude back goes a long way in a Texan’s eye.”