Richard Parker
The Crossing: El Paso, The Southwest, And America’s Forgotten Origin Story
From the publisher
American history is almost always told from East to West. Yet a closer look at the past reveals the country’s start began not in the East, but in the West—at a Texan city situated in a natural shallow crossing of the Rio Grande River: El Paso.
El Paso is the crossroads of Indigenous America, the nexus of a thousand-year-old Native American migration and trade route, linking MesoAmerican and Pueblo empires and beyond. It’s where the European conquest of North America began, and where the United States’ Manifest Destiny was later achieved. Here, East met West, where the consequential transatlantic route, the Southern Pacific, was completed in 1881. Here the West was “won”—the Indian Wars were not fought on the Great Plains, but in the Southwest, with a scorched-earth strategy that went on for decades. It’s where Immigrant America starts—more immigrants have passed through El Paso than Ellis Island—and where crucial battles for Civil Rights were fought—the city smashing through racial and ethnic discrimination before anywhere else in the nation.
The Crossing is a revelatory new history of El Paso that recasts the city as the unacknowledged cradle of American history, where cultures have encountered each other for centuries and forged a thriving multi-ethnic community far ahead of the rest of the nation. As award-winning, El Paso–native journalist Richard Parker charts, the city holds not only the framework of our American story, but also a model for a more diverse and flourishing country.
Reviews
“Richard Parker’s The Crossing is a grand tour of the Southwest, its people, culture, and history. The center of this sun-baked universe is El Paso, whose story Parker—who grew up there with roots in both Mexican and American cultures—is highly qualified to write.” — S. C. Gwynne, author Empire of the Summer Moon
“Sparked by the 2019 Walmart massacre in El Paso, Richard Parker was moved to write a deeply moving epic of that city’s story in deep time. Parker’s eloquent mestizo saga takes the reader through centuries of empires and errors, chronicling waves of genocidal violence, mass deportations, discrimination, and exclusion, all met with extraordinary resilience and resistance by the victims. This indispensable book is an act of great compassion, revealing that far from being a fluke, the horrific 2019 event was another episode in a long history of anti-Mexican estrangement and discord in the borderlands we’re still seeking to leave behind.” — John Phillip Santos, award-winning author of Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation
If you like this week’s discussion, you might also find these earlier discussions of the American West:
[Recorded and posted on February 27, 2025.]
