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The West South Central Region
West South Central is one of the nine divisions defined by the United States Census Bureau, not one of its four regions. It sits inside the South and holds four states: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. The name is federal statistical vocabulary that nobody uses in conversation, where the four get called the Gulf South, the Southwest, or simply Texas and its neighbors. The Bureau of Economic Analysis disagrees outright and files Oklahoma and Texas in a Southwest region with Arizona and New Mexico.
The four West South Central states
| State | Capital | Largest city | Statehood |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arkansas | Little Rock | Little Rock | 1836 |
| Louisiana | Baton Rouge | New Orleans | 1812 |
| Oklahoma | Oklahoma City | Oklahoma City | 1907 |
| Texas | Austin | Houston | 1845 |
The other twelve Southern states fall into the South Atlantic and East South Central divisions. All four states here run on Central time except the far western Texas counties around El Paso, which keep Mountain time.
Population, land and economic weight
The 2020 Census counted 40,774,139 people here, the fifth largest of the nine divisions, on 425,066 square miles of land, the fourth largest. Both figures are dominated by one state. Texas alone holds 29,145,505 of those people, 71 percent of the division, and 261,232 square miles, 61 percent of its land. Arkansas, with 3,011,524, is the smallest of the four. The division carries 61 electoral votes, of which Texas holds 40, and Texas was the only state in the country to gain two House seats in the reapportionment after the 2020 Census. Texas also runs the second largest state economy after California.
The physical geography
Rainfall falls off from east to west more sharply here than almost anywhere in the country. Southern Louisiana takes roughly 60 inches a year; El Paso, at the far corner of Texas, takes under ten. The Gulf Coastal Plain floors the southern and eastern half of the division, and the Mississippi Alluvial Plain runs up eastern Arkansas and Louisiana. The Ouachita Mountains and the Ozark Plateau, straddling Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, are the only substantial highlands between the Appalachians and the Rockies.
In Texas the Balcones Escarpment cuts the state cleanly between the wet, wooded east and the dry, open west, and the Llano Estacado of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles is a flat, elevated tableland that became the core of the Dust Bowl. The rivers do the boundary work: the Red River forms most of the Texas and Oklahoma border, the Rio Grande the whole Texas and Mexico border, and the Arkansas River crosses Oklahoma and Arkansas to reach the Mississippi, whose final stretch and delta lie in Louisiana. Tornado Alley runs up through Oklahoma and north Texas, and Gulf hurricanes strike the Texas and Louisiana coasts.
How the four states were assembled
Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma all entered the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Texas did not. It broke from Mexico in 1836, spent nine years as an independent republic and was annexed in 1845. Louisiana became a state in 1812, the first carved from the Purchase, and it remains the only state with parishes instead of counties and a civil law code descended from French and Spanish law rather than English common law.
Oklahoma was Indian Territory, the destination of the removals of the 1830s along the Trail of Tears, and it stayed outside the state system longest. Land runs from 1889 opened it to settlers, the term Sooner describing those who slipped across the line early, and it was admitted in 1907 as the 46th state. It still holds the headquarters of dozens of tribal nations, and the Supreme Court held in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) that the Muscogee reservation was never formally disestablished.
What the region is known for
The Permian Basin of west Texas and the Gulf refineries make this the center of American oil and petrochemicals, running in a near continuous industrial corridor from Corpus Christi to New Orleans. The Port of South Louisiana moves more tonnage than any other port in the country, most of it grain coming down the Mississippi from the Midwest. Arkansas grows about half the nation's rice and holds the headquarters of Walmart, Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt in its northwest corner. Houston is the fourth largest city in the country, and Texas has 254 counties, more than any other state.
The music map is just as distinct: jazz out of New Orleans, Cajun and zydeco across south Louisiana, western swing and Texas country from Fort Worth and Austin, and red dirt in Oklahoma. Bill Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, and Lyndon Johnson near Stonewall, Texas.
Where the boundaries are argued
The argument is about whether these four states belong together at all. Arkansas and Louisiana are Southern by any test anyone applies. Texas and Oklahoma are the problem: both are census South, both are Southwest to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Oklahoma is regularly called Midwestern by its northern neighbors because it shares the Plains geology and the wheat economy of Kansas. West Texas has more in common with New Mexico than with Louisiana, while east Texas is Deep South pine country. The division is best understood as a statistical container, not a place with a shared identity.