A senator from Texas was at the center of the government shutdown. Then Time magazine dedicated its cover to why the state is America's future. As happens with some frequency, Texas has been in the spotlight lately. And it doesn't seem to mind.

Senator Ted Cruz, who has been in Congress only since January, was the face of the Republicans who brought the government to a standstill in early October. While he was reviled across much of the country, many in Texas cheered him on, saying they had sent him to Washington to shake things up.

"I was proud he was a Texan," Bruce Labay, who owns an oil field services business, told The Times recently. "I wish they would have held firm, and we'd still be shut down."

Many other Texas lawmakers were lining up with Mr. Cruz during the shutdown. Representative Pete Sessions summed up the fight: "We're not French. We don't surrender." Meanwhile, the Texas lieutenant governor said that President Obama should be impeached.

The Times columnist Gail Collins envisioned a 2016 presidential race that included both Mr. Cruz and Rick Perry, the Texas governor.

"In Texas, there's so much craziness, it's hard for a normal crazy to get attention," she wrote. "Imagine an election year with both Perry and Cruz on television every night. To get any airtime, the Texas guys in the House of Representatives would have to call for impeachment while bungee jumping. While waving 'Secede!' signs. While carrying unconcealed weapons."

But while many people elsewhere in the states criticize Texas as too conservative and obstructionist, it has another side that draws Americans to it. That Texas is the land of job growth, low cost of living and lower taxes.

Texas has three of the country's fastest-growing cities - Houston, Austin and San Antonio - and has weathered the recession better than most states. That is why a Time magazine article suggested that more people will move to Texas and that other states will follow its lead, with a cheaper cost of living and fewer government regulations, but also with more economic inequality and a fraying safety net for the poor.

Mr. Perry, who has served in the governor's office since George W. Bush left it to become president (another reminder of the state's outsize influence), has been making trips around the country, The Times reported, to try to persuade employers to move to his state, calling this "the Texas century."

Perhaps one part of "the Texas century" will be the rise of the kolache, a pastry that Czech immigrants brought to central Texas in the mid-1800s. It has been making inroads beyond the Texas borders, and as The Times recently reported, some entrepreneurs predict it will be the next-generation doughnut.

But Lisa Fain, an author in New York who wrote "The Homesick Texan Cookbook," told The Times, "the pastry now making its way around America is what Texans have done with kolaches, not what Czechs brought to Texas." The kolache was traditionally filled with sweetened cheese or fruit, but it has taken on an assortment of new flavors: jalapeno cheese, chicken enchilada, Nutella and banana.

Like the Mexican dishes that crossed the border, kolaches now have a Texas flair. "What we're seeing might be the emergence of another cuisine, like Tex-Mex," Ms. Fain said. "This is Czech-Mex."

EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

(China Daily 11/03/2013 page9)