The Crossing

Auteur

Richard Parker is an award-winning journalist and author who writes about the American Southwest for the New York Times and other publications. In 2020 his commentary in the New York Times on the El Paso massacre was honored by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In 2019 NBC News named him to “#NBCLatino20,” its list of the most influential Latinos in America. Parker’s first book, Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America, took a fresh look at the history of the Lone Star State to reconsider its present and future. Raised in El Paso, the son of an American father and a Mexican mother, he lives in Texas.

Résumé

A radical work of history that re-centers the American story around El Paso, Texas, gateway between north and south, center of indigenous power and resistance, locus of European colonization of North America, centuries-long hub of immigration, and underappreciated modern blueprint for a changing United States.

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.