In the first part of a week-long series, southern correspondent Matthew Teague and photographer David Levene discover change is coming to the Lone Star State

The south will have its say in the 2016 election primaries on Super Tuesday, but the six southern states going to the polls will not speak with one voice

The sign in the window boasted “the best goat meat in town”, but Grace Ndam’s eyes narrowed when asked about her restaurant.

The new south: Irving, Texas – in pictures Read more

“May I see some identification?” she asked. “Can you prove you are from the Guardian?”

She cast an eye out the window. On her block there were other food places: Japanese, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Congolese. Across the street there were Thai and Mexican. “I need to know you are not from one of my competitors,” Ndam said.

The third most diverse zip code in the United States is on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay. The second is in New York City’s Queens. But the most diverse – the neighborhood with the most even balance of ethnicities and cultures – is here in Irving, Texas, a Dallas suburb. Which means that, however improbable, the African Village restaurant hasn’t cornered the market on Cameroonian goat. There’s competition.

Ndam’s face softened once she saw identification and heard an explanation – photographer David Levene and I were starting a journey through six increasingly important southern states: Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia. Together these states are maneuvering for better political and cultural position by shifting their elections to the front of the presidential primary calendar. So on 1 March, they will vote in the first ever southern “Super Tuesday”. It’s a move that could powerfully influence both Republican and Democratic races, and will bring southern thought to the fore of the election process.

The new south, day one: Irving, Texas.

The inevitable question – what is southern thought? – is too simple to match the reality of a territory so vast and complex. But much of the globe still perceives the American south through old conventions – as a land draped in seersucker and Spanish moss – so we set out to take a new view of the region in a 2,000-mile journey across the crucial states.

Grace Ndam understood right away. “I was afraid of Texas,” she said. She had grown up in the village of Batibo, Cameroon, then moved to the US for an education and a position in the medical field. She lived in Boston, at first. “There were neighborhoods there, in the 1980s and 90s, where I was not welcome to live,” she said. “My realtor told me: ‘You can move here but people will not be happy.’”

Then she travelled to Dallas for job training. It was a revelation. “I had so many ideas about Texas,” she said. “But when I got here I realized I could live anywhere I wanted. People welcomed me.”

So she stayed.

Texas will be the biggest prize on Super Tuesday, as the second-most populous state in the country. The state’s junior senator, Ted Cruz, is a leading Republican contender. “Texas is America on steroids,” he said recently. “Give me a horse and a gun and an open plain and I can conquer the world. That is Texas.”

Ndam didn’t seem to fit that trope, on her arrival. Her skin was richly black, her accent heavy and foreign. But she liked Texas, and Texans liked her.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grace Ndam, owner of the African Village restaurant, holds a photograph showing all the local people that mobilized here in support of Barack Obama during past elections. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Instead of a horse and a gun, she used a goat and rice: she opened the restaurant so she could both work and care for her then teenage son, Azeyeh, who has special needs. It worked: she conquered her open plain. She feels as Texan as anyone else, today. Even with a Cameroonian accent. Even with a portrait of Barack Obama smiling down beatifically from a place of honor on her dining room wall.

For two decades Texas has been the reddest of red Republican supporting states. Four of the current and former 2016 Republican candidates – Cruz, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina – grew up here. And as in many other places, Texas’s congressional seats took a hard right turn in 2014. But encircling the state’s most important cities, there’s a new blossom of blue: formerly conservative suburbs are shifting left, as their ethnic and ideological makeup changes.

Irving, Texas, is not a topographically beautiful place. It’s low-slung, built for cars, overseen by a network of traffic lights. It features a labyrinth of strip malls, each differentiated only by its particular shade of light brown: beige, taupe, tan.

If you close your eyes, though, it erupts into life.

There’s the smell of incense drifting from Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, an enormous Hindu temple where Indian computer experts go to worship. During our visit, an old woman with a walking frame sat alone at the front of the temple, and an attendant pulled back a massive curtain to reveal an elaborate altar filled with many-colored idols and Hindu scenery.

There’s the music of Congolese drums wafting from the African food store, where immigrants pick out groceries that remind them of home.

There’s the dagger-like application of spice at the Thai lunch spot, where Nemo the server always, always wants to talk about English soccer.

At the African Village restaurant, Ndam keeps a sort of shrine to Obama in the dining room. There’s the portrait, high on the wall, and enormous photos that commemorate past elections when African Village served as a sort of pro-Obama hub, where supporters organized themselves. The photos look like the new Irving, showing brown people, white people, Christians and Muslims.



This year, Ndam said, the Democratic support exists, but it’s less organized. People seem less confident about their votes; polls show Clinton with a healthy 28-point lead over Bernie Sanders, but, Ndam said: “There doesn’t seem to be a place to go, or anything to do right now.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Somboon Rattanawerapong, 47, a Buddhist monk from Thailand who lives in Arlington. Two women who meet him confide in him that the elder of them has just today been diagnosed with cancer of the colon. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The leftward, diversifying trajectory is happening in other places across Texas. Key suburbs around San Antonio, Houston and Austin are shifting, as more immigrants and people from elsewhere in the US move to the area.

After spending some time in those places, it becomes easier to remember that before it was the biggest Republican state, Texas was the biggest Democratic state. During decades when even California reliably voted conservative, Texas went progressive. Lyndon B Johnson, a Democrat, won re-election here in 1964. But the night he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he told his press secretary: “I think we just delivered the south to the Republican party for a long time to come.” And they did – but a half century has passed since then.

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In downtown Dallas, on the site of John F Kennedy’s assassination, Somboon Rattanawerapong and two other Buddhist monks took pictures of tourists, of Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper position, of each other. As Rattanawerapong crossed a street, a woman walking with her elderly mother came alongside him and blurted out that her mother’s doctors had just found a tumor in her colon.

Rattanawerapong, 47, placed a hand on the older woman’s shoulder and leaned so close to her their foreheads almost touched. “After a hard week, the weekend comes,” he said. The two women nodded and walked away, making small noises of puzzlement.

Rattanawerapong said he and his fellow monks serve the Lao community from their monastery, Watbuddhamahamunee, in Arlington, a suburb which neighbors Irving and is also home to that ultimate symbol of everything all-American, the Dallas Cowboys football team. “We love Texas,” he said. “We are very welcome here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rattanawerapong displays his cellphone case, which has a Texas eagle design on it. He says it is because he is known as King Eagle of Texas. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

In the deep pocket of his orange robes, a familiar rectangle showed through the sheer fabric: his iPhone.

“Ahh,” he said, as he fished it out. The phone’s case displayed a bold red-white-and-blue bald eagle decal. “It is because I am King Eagle of Texas,” he said, and nodded to indicate his explanation was complete.

He and his fellow monks then took turns standing on an X in the road where Oswald’s final shot fatally wounded Kennedy. They posed for pictures, strolled on the grassy knoll, and chatted with tourists about their home state.

Because after all, they are, like the elderly Hindu woman and the Cameroonian restaurateur, Texans.