Texas is unique, and has always been different from every other state. One way of measuring cultural connections is through the food people eat in any given area. Texas certainly has its fair share of traditional southern fare, but it's not our defining food style by any means. I'd argue that Tex Mex and our version of BBQ is more prevalent, or at least equally so.

Texas has always had deep connections to Mexico, and waves of immigration from Germany and Czechoslovakia. More recently, the state has seen large numbers of people immigrating from China, Vietnam, and other Asian countries. Texas is a magnet for immigrants from all over the world, and they are adding to the cultural landscape here in ways that continues to widen a divide between us and the rest of the South. I would not argue that there aren't some cultural traditions that we hold in common with the Southern states, but that simply Texas is too diverse culturally for that Southern influence to be the dominant one, making us very different from the South. Texas is really where different regional traditions meet and mix. We're not really "Southern," not truly "Southwestern," and not the Midwest, but depending on where you are in Texas, there are cultural similarities from those regions. Far East Texas is as different as night and day to far West Texas.

While Texas might once have had deeper ties to the rest of the southern United States, and still has cultural traditions from that region, we also have many other more recent cultural additions which have diluted the Southern traditions, or at least displaced them as a dominant one throughout the state. And that in a nutshell is why I don't think it is any longer accurate to include Texas as part of "The South." We have changed too much, and much of the South has not.