This paper examines how Highland bagpipers in Texas construct individual and collective identities through participation in a diasporic heritage music practice. Drawing on qualitative survey data from pipers across the state and informed by scholarship on music and identity (Stokes 1994; Turino 2008; Frith 1996), it argues that piping functions not merely as musical performance but as a socially embedded process of elective cultural affiliation and self-fashioning. The analysis demonstrates that participants engage the Great Highland Bagpipe as a symbolically charged instrument through which belonging, authenticity, and personal transformation are negotiated, often independent of direct Scottish ancestry. While prior research has explored musical identity in diasporic and subcultural contexts, Highland piping in the American South remains underexamined. Findings show that pipers mobilize tradition, competition structures, and band participation to construct layered identities that are simultaneously heritage-oriented and locally situated. The study further reveals that musical self-concept and community participation operate in a recursive feedback loop, reinforcing commitment and social cohesion. These results contribute to ethnomusicological debates on elective ethnicity, participatory music-making, and the adaptive life of heritage traditions, suggesting that Highland piping in Texas represents a dynamic site where global symbols are recontextualized within regional cultural ecologies.