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Texas is a state of strong feelings. Biases there aren’t held in abeyance. They are paraded with bravado. This is especially true in the matter of pickup trucks.

In Texas, my wife’s home state, you are a Chevrolet person, a Ford person or someone who has affection for Dodge.

“Foreign” pickups, such as the 2001 Toyota Tacoma PreRunner, get short shrift. This has nothing to do with quality. If it did, Toyota would win that contest, or finish in a tie with America’s best.

The Texas pickup syndrome involves manhood, even when it comes to women. Their granddaddies and daddies drove American trucks. Their brothers, husbands and boyfriends drive American. Heck, they drive American too.

It’s like wearing bluejeans, rooting for the Dallas Cowboys or stopping by Hooters on a Saturday night. Testosterone. In Texas, American trucks have it. Foreign trucks don’t.

I was thinking about this after a recent trip to Marshall, my wife’s hometown, and to Dallas, where other members of her family live. I was back in Northern Virginia, driving the compact Toyota Tacoma PreRunner Double Cab V-6, and thinking that maybe we should’ve bought this truck instead of the small Chevrolet S-10 we picked up earlier in the year.

The PreRunner has tighter build quality than our S-10, which is built well, but not perfectly. Every seam on the tested PreRunner was perfect. And though the PreRunner is offered as an inexpensive version of the Tacoma pickup, all of its interior materials, including the dashboard vinyl, are top-quality.

Of course, it helped that the tested PreRunner was equipped with an optional 190-horsepower V-6 engine, compared with the standard 120-horsepower four-cylinder engine we got with our S-10. The PreRunner also had four doors and seating for four adult bodies. My wife pointed out that we could’ve gotten a similar package had we chosen the Chevrolet S-10 LS Crew Cab. We also could’ve gotten four-wheel drive, which is offered in the PreRunner as well.

“I like my Chevy truck,” she said.

“Yeah, but don’t you think the PreRunner is better?” I asked.

Her body language — hunched shoulders, back turned — was dismissive. “Too pretty,” she said, referring to the PreRunner. “You mean, it has style,” I countered. “It looks better than most American trucks.”

The woman got nasty. “That’s your problem,” she said. “You want style. I want a truck.”

It was the Texas put-down. Translation: Real men don’t eat quiche, and they don’t worry about “pretty” or “style” when they’re buying pickup trucks either. Suddenly I realized why Ford and Chevrolet have held so tenaciously to their more-macho-than-thou truck advertising slogans — “Built Ford Tough” and Chevrolet’s “Like a Rock.” And it dawned on me that Nissan, with its new Frontier Crew Cab pickup, also is getting into the chest-beating advertising game.