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Description
A radical work of history that recenters the American story two thousand miles west of Plymouth Rock, in El Paso, Texas—heart 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
"A grand tour of the Southwest, its people, culture, and history.” —S. C. Gwynne, author Empire of the Summer Moon
American history is almost always told from east to west. Yet a closer look at our past reveals a counternarrative, one that begins not in the East, but in the Southwest—at a Texan city located near the oldest archaeological evidence of human presence in the Americas: El Paso.
Situated in a naturally shallow crossing of the Rio Grande, El Paso was 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, in 1540, the European conquest of the North American interior began, and where the United States’ manifest destiny was later achieved. Here, East met West where the dominant transatlantic rail route, the Southern Pacific, was completed in 1881. Here, the West was “won”—the longest chapter of the Indian Wars was fought not on the Great Plains but in the Southwest, with a scorched-earth strategy that went on for decades. It’s the past and present hub of immigrant America—more immigrants have passed through El Paso than Ellis Island—and where crucial battles for civil rights were fought, with 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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Mariner Books |
| Publish Date | March 04, 2025 |
| Pages | 448 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780063161917 |
| Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.0 X 1.1 inches | 19.8 pounds |
About the Author
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.
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
"Explores El Paso through the lens of the origin story of America. . . . Ambitious. . . . In The Crossing, Parker takes a long chronological view, contending El Paso should be considered the source of the origin story of America. A multicultural America." — Albuquerque Journal
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