Answer:
Texas is a southern state. It was settled primarily by southerners in an expansion of the southern culture. In its antebellum period, the state had a slave population of 30 percent, and voters in the state overwhelmingly voted to secede from the Union during the Civil War. In 1936, during the Texas centennial celebrations, a public relations campaign was waged by state politicians to distance Texas from the rest of the south in an effort to attract tourists and out of state business during the Great Depression, a period in which the greater South was portrayed as impoverished and backward. Prior to that public relations campaign, Texas was always seen as a southern state. Although rebranding the state of Texas as a western entity may have been good business, it did not change the underlying reality that Texas was, and is, a southern state.