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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
Perhaps best known to the world at large either through the television program "Dallas" and President John F. Kennedy's assassination or through the "western image" of the Dallas Cowboys and the Fort Worth Stock Show, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is one of the most dynamic urban regions in the nation. Although lacking the glitzy image of Las Vegas or the attractions of New York and Chicago, it attracts great numbers of conventioneers and tourists to its own World Trade Center in Dallas, Six Flags over Texas in Arlington, and the new Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, located near the DFW International Airport, itself a central "hub" in the nation's transport system.
For decades, the political and economic leaders of Dallas and Fort Worth have worked hard (although only rarely in concert (1)) to sustain an entrepreneurial spirit and to attract new enterprises to the region. From the prairie landscape and its cotton fields have arisen skyscrapers for Fortune 500 companies and vast air-conditioned malls for suburban shoppers, as well as world-class museums, symphony halls, and universities. The growth of the "Metroplex" (a term coined in 1971 by a public relations firm) is a legacy to the leadership provided by corporate and political leaders (cf. Kemper 2002:96).
This growth has not been random, nor has this leadership been without a price. Throughout the twentieth century, urban planning efforts at city, county, and regional levels have dictated the ways in which Metroplex communities have been transformed (cf. Pratt 1992). At their best, real estate developers, bankers, and politicians have worked with urban planners to create new suburbs with excellent amenities for middle- and upper-class residents. They even have responded positively to conservationists' demands to create historical districts where a few of the remaining late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century homes might be saved from the wrecking ball. At their worst, they have collaborated in exclusionary and illegal practices that sustained ethnic- and class-based patterns of residential and educational segregation. Moreover, speculative excesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth real estate market in the late 1970s fueled the "bubble" that led to the nation's savings and loan crash and bailout in the 1980s.
Such a setting would seem to be ideal for social scientists interested in studying long-term urban and suburban development. Dallas-Fort Worth should provide an excellent laboratory for examining neighborhood succession and gentrification, city-ward migration and transnational immigration, and changing patterns of ethnicity, class, employment, and residence. Nonetheless, until recently the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex has been significantly under-studied by social scientists concerned with these vital issues. Aside from a few "classic" works produced by local scholars and journalists (including Achor's [1978] study of a Mexican-American barrio in west Dallas, Brown's [1977] analysis of contemporary Fort Worth and Knight's [1953] social history of Fort Worth, Thometz's [1963] description of the power structure of Dallas, Schutze's [1986] critique of racial politics in Dallas, and Seib's [1986] brief political history of Dallas) the bibliography of major social science works on the Metroplex is barely ten years old.
An increased presence of social scientists in the region's universities, together with a recognition of the impact of neoconservativism, entrepreneurship, and globalization on American society, have combined to increase greatly the number of publications focused on the Metroplex. A bounty of useful, field-based studies appeared in the 1990s: Boortz (1996) analyzed the commercial real estate market in Dallas; Cummings (1998) studied race relations and community institutions in east Fort Worth; Fairbanks (1998) examined planning and politics in Dallas; Governor and Brakefield (1998) described African-American culture and music in Dallas; Hill (1996) and Payne (1994) wrote useful histories of Dallas; Linden (1995) considered four decades of desegregation in Dallas schools; Um (1996) assessed the role of Korean immigrant women in the Dallas-area apparel industry; and Wilson (1998) reported on a unique African-American community in Dallas.
More recently, Adler (2004) published a monograph on Yucatecan immigrants in Dallas; Cu611ar (2003) compiled stories from the barrios of Mexican Fort Worth, Hanson (2003) issued a fascinating study of civic culture and urban change in Dallas; Horsfall (2002) edited a volume of her students' papers on the same Polytechnic Heights area of Fort Worth previously studied by Cummings in the 1990s; and Morgan (2004) published a study of the impact of the Voting Rights Act in Dallas.
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is focused on the two cities of Fort Worth and Dallas, separated by about 30 miles west-to-east. In recent decades, the primary direction of urban growth has been toward the north, thus raising the adjacent Denton and Collin counties to new prominence (see Map 1). This four-county metropolitan region currently has a population of more than 5,000,000 residents spread across 3,650 square miles in north central Texas. (2)
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An "International" History
The Dallas-Fort Worth area has been "international" in character since its beginnings. Dominated by Anglo populations since the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlers came to the region after Texas gained its independence from Mexico in 1836, the region was joined to the United States of America in 1845. The coming of the railroads to the region in the 1870s provided a boost to the region's cattle- and agriculture-based economy. Beginning in the 1950s, the network of federal Interstate highways furthered urban growth, as I-35E passed through downtown Dallas and I-35W through Fort Worth, while I-30 went through their urban cores and I-20 ran just to the south of Dallas-Fort Worth. The centrality of the Metroplex to the national and international transport system was heightened when the D-FW International Airport opened in 1974, since growing to be the fifth-busiest airport in the world (cf. Payne and Fitzpatrick 1999). NAFTA and other international economic arrangements have contributed significantly to the continuing globalization and urbanization of the Dallas-Fort Worth region. For example, Interstate 35 is a major route for goods flowing both to and from Mexico. In addition, Hispanic entrepreneurs in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have...
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