One block south of the square in Kingsville, Texas, there is a small shop over which a faded yellow plastic sign hangs that reads, simply, “Kingsville Shoe Repair.” Inside, a man named Felipe Mejia makes incredible, handmade custom cowboy boots for people all over the state. His counters are stacked with photo albums containing pictures of his finished works — boots with elaborate threaded scrollwork and punched-out leather designs of ranch brands, prickly pears, broncos, guitars, angels, hawks, roses, barbed wire, lightning bolts, skulls, crosses, hearts, longhorns, and volumes of initials. His boots are short, tall, pointy-toed, square-toed, round-toed, high-heeled, flat-heeled, medium-heeled, and made from all types of leather in a rainbow of colors, all stacked in giant fragrant rolls in an unruly heap behind the counter.
On a weekend late last August, my husband and I went in. It was his second visit to the shop and my first, and he and Mr. Mejia were striking up a deal on the pair of custom boots my husband has long dreamed of — boots that will accommodate his “duck feet,” which are broad in the front and almost dainty in the heel, and will also somehow solidify my husband’s identity as a non-native, but enthusiastic, Texan. They conversed easily and quickly in Spanish despite my husband’s bashful request for patience as he “practiced,” and I flipped through albums trying not to appear strained as I concentrated on understanding.
We’re new in town, but we won’t be staying long. My husband is a Navy flight student, which means a nomadic existence for us where we settle briefly in towns like Kingsville, which are suitably remote to handle constant jet traffic and offer big tracts of flat airport-ready land at decent prices. The Navy base and the local Texas A&M branch provide the regular economic blood transfusions that keep Kingsville’s thready pulse from succumbing to the fate of many small, farming-based towns I’ve sped through on moves and road trips. The world-famous King Ranch is nearby, and trains clatter through the center of town with clock-like regularity, but in the scant ten months we’ve lived here, I’ve seen more going-out-of-business sales than I ever have before. My regular jogging route now passes more abandoned storefronts and empty houses than occupied ones. Having grown up in Austin, where explosive growth and the booming pulse of a major university are the norm, witnessing a town’s death rattle has been unnerving. Can this be the same state?
The boot shop is also old and falling in on itself. A yellowed notice on the wall announces the October 1985 tax rate change, and much of the ceiling is patched with crumbling cardboard to catch the leaks. Mr. Mejia has been working out of this shop for 25 years, and making boots since he was 9 years old. He’s easily in his late sixties now, if not older. Flipping through volumes of lovingly made boots, it’s easy for me to see that this man is an artist and a craftsman, an original, and when he’s gone, there will likely be no one to replace him. His work is part of a long list of things that are unique to this part of the state — and new to me — and are saturated with South Texas’s history of economic struggle, immigration, and its ties to the crop cycles and sometimes violent whims of nature. I feel like I’m discovering a whole new Texas right as it’s fading off the map.
My husband decided on chocolate-brown leather, calfskin for its softness instead of the wrinkled, weathered look of bull skin. He chose Naval aviator wings as his personalized logo, a symbol that represents the sum total of everything he’s been working towards in the last two years and the realization of a lifelong dream, and has found the perfect color of leather and stitching for it. Mr. Mejia traced and measured both of his feet onto a long white sheet of paper, six different measurements per foot, and scribbled notes to himself in Spanish in the margins. He’s even adding a special tuck in the leather of one heel to accommodate the massive callous my husband has from years of ill-fitting footwear.
Well satisfied, they both turn to me with the question I’ve been dreading: what type of boots would I like?
I’m stuck here. For all the reasons of beautiful craftsmanship and one-of-a-kindness, I’d love a pair. Plus, we’ve agreed that moving around so much brings with it the pleasant responsibility of finding one nice thing per posting that really reflects that place, something to invest in as a way of keeping track of each place and honoring the time we spent there. Boots definitely fit that definition.
My problem is this: being from Austin, I’ve never quite felt comfortable in flexing my Texan-ness among other Texans. Out of state is another story — in Florida I caught my accent thickening when I was totally clueless and needed help with something, the implicit message being, “Cut me some slack — I’m not from around here.” Out of sheer homesickness, I even bought a shirt online that says, “Fuck Y’all, I’m from Texas,” and wore it when my husband and I explored dive bars.
But every time I come back home, the message is clearer: Austin is different from most of Texas; urban Texas is a whole different world from rural Texas. With every anti-Bush bumper sticker, every cross-dressing hobo, and every vegan diner I pass in Austin, I realize that what used to look like plain, old home to me is in fact consciously, and even aggressively, weird compared to much of the rest of the state. So for me to don something as iconically Texan as cowboy boots is cause for more than a moment’s cognitive dissonance — am I allowed to do this? Does this look pitifully wrong on me? Which Texas is mine?
So why do these questions matter when I’m considering whether or not to get a pair of custom cowboy boots? Because they’re expensive, and I know someone will work hard on them. Because this man, who will not be around forever, will spend four months on them, leaving his personal mark on them, for me, and I’d like to think that if he’s going to do that, I could do him the courtesy of designing a pair that has some meaning of home for me.
After using an undue amount of Google’s bandwidth as a means of searching my soul, I decided on brown calfskin boots with a red horse logo with yellow hibiscus blossoms on the horse’s flank and shoulder. Red represents my grandmother, an outspoken iconoclast whose fashion sense, and indeed her whole outlook on life, was as aggressively weird as Austin, but long before aggressively weird was cool. She died earlier this year, leaving behind a pair of fire engine red cowboy boots that she claimed were the most comfortable footwear she ever owned. The horse represents travel for me, and the roots of the American nomadic tradition, long before we all piled into SUVs and moving vans. And finally, the yellow blossoms on the horse are for the unreasonable profusion of plant life and the closeness of nature in South Texas, which has been a revelation for a city kid like me. Plants down here are hardy, gaudy, armed, and completely alien to me, which, come to think of it, describes much of the rest of Texas to an Austinite.
In the end, I can’t say that the process of designing my boots has reconciled the alternate realities of Austin and Kingsville for me, or that it’s made it any clearer what it is to be a Texan. I still find it bizarre and unnerving to think that in a few months I’ll be leaving this state entirely, again, and for much longer than I have before, and I’m only now realizing how much I never really knew it to begin with. Ironically, though, the boots fit like few things have ever fit me before — it’s like my doppelganger handily broke them in before passing them on to me. Surely that’s the magic of coutoure footwear, but I’d like to think that home is like that too, that even if it proves to be more complicated than you originally thought, and even if parts change or disappear in your absence, it will still always fit.
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