In “The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story,” the late journalist Richard Parker delivers a sweeping, richly detailed narrative that places El Paso at the center of American history — a place many of us who were raised here always believed it to be.
Many El Pasoans grew up with the stories of the city’s “firsts” — the 1598 Thanksgiving celebrated along the Rio Grande by Juan de Oñate and his expedition, long before Plymouth Rock; the election of Raymond Telles as the first Hispanic mayor of a major U.S. city in 1957; the 1966 national basketball title won by Don Haskins and Texas Western College, starting five Black players in a groundbreaking moment for college sports; and yes, even the first high school football game played at night in Texas, under the lights at El Paso High School’s Jones Stadium in 1928.
These stories aren’t just local trivia — they’re points of pride, woven into our identity.
But Parker’s achievement isn’t in celebrating those moments for El Pasoans alone. It’s that he connects them — chapter by chapter — to the broader story of a nation that has too often ignored the contributions of the Borderland.
“The Crossing,” which is the latest selection of the El Paso Matters Book Club, is not a regional history book. It is American history, reframed from its true point of origin.
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‘The Crossing’ by Richard Parker reframes El Paso as America’s true starting point
American history is often told from east to west – but ‘The Crossing’ argues that the true origin of the United States was in El Paso.
El Paso author Richard Parker dies days after release of his book, ‘The Crossing’
The former journalist’s book, “The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story,” published this month as was the El Paso Matters Book Club most recent selection.
The book opens in 1598, when Oñate — the ambitious and divisive figure — forded the Rio Grande and christened this place El Paso del Río del Norte. With the stage set for the region’s future, Parker reaches back further, to 38,000 B.C.E., describing how the Manso, Suma and Pueblo peoples lived along the riverbanks. When Oñate’s expedition arrived near what is now Bosque del Apache, “ … they had entered the earliest site of human life in North America,” Parker writes, grounding this place not only in colonial history but in deep Indigenous time.
Each subsequent chapter builds on this layered narrative. In “The Great Revolt,” we relive the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when Native peoples drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for 12 years. In “Mustangs,” Parker examines the transformative power of the horse — not just for agriculture and transportation, but for cultural blending. He explores how intermarriage, so common in the Southwest, defied British colonial norms.
“Color and creed were not obstacles,” he writes of El Paso’s early years, “to toiling together, fighting together for survival, or even joining in the holy sacrament of marriage.”
CELEBRATION OF LIFE
Richard Parker’s family will have a celebration of his life from 2 to 4 p.m. June 7 at Margin Notes Bookbar, 7460 Cimarron Market Ave., in El Paso.
Where other history books might treat the arrival of white settlers as a clear-cut turning point, Parker shows it as another layer in a long, complicated blend of identities. Chapter 5, “The Americans,” recounts the stories of men like Hugh Stephenson and James Wiley Magoffin — white newcomers who married into rich Mexican families, who “melded, not melted, their culture into the richly mixed prevailing one.”
The emphasis here is key: the Southwest didn’t dissolve into a monoculture. It became something else entirely — something uniquely American.
Parker’s scope is immense. He guides us through centuries of conflict — the U.S.-Mexico War, the Apache Wars, the rise and fall of the Confederacy in the region — all while making the case that El Paso was never peripheral to these events. It was a pivot point. “The Americans got their West,” he writes, “but El Paso was about to become one of the most fought-over cities in the world.”
He doesn’t shy away from the darker chapters. In “The Ninth Circle,” we confront the extermination policies against the Apache. In “The Klan,” we see how the Ku Klux Klan seized power over the El Paso school board in the 1920s, only to be repudiated by the city’s voters. And in “War and Hope,” he honors the sacrifices of E Company, a unit of Mexican American soldiers — many from Bowie High School — who landed on European soil in World War II as part of Operation Avalanche. These aren’t just footnotes — they’re milestones.
Parker is particularly masterful at drawing connections across time. One of the most poignant moments in the book comes in Chapter 20, when he writes about Juan Francisco Artiaga, a Central American asylum seeker eating a simple bowl of rice at a temporary migrant shelter inside an unnamed Catholic Church facility in 2018. Parker likens it to Oñate’s long-ago feast with Indigenous peoples — a “brief respite in a lengthy struggle.” The comparison isn’t romantic. It’s revealing. The story of El Paso has always been one of survival, of resilience, of shared humanity.
In the final chapters, Parker confronts the rise of white nationalist rhetoric. He recounts President Donald Trump’s February 2019 rally in El Paso and the chilling moment at a hotel bar afterward, where he told a bartender: “I think that guy, Trump, is going to get somebody killed.” Later that year, on Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman drove from Allen, Texas, to El Paso, targeting Latinos in an act of racial terror. The gunman has since pleaded guilty to federal charges and received 90 life sentences for the 23 lives taken that day.
State prosecutors confirmed last week that he will not face the death penalty and he will enter a guilty plea April 21 and be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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Some may accuse Parker of revisionism, of minimizing the white narrative in favor of something more diverse. That’s a misreading. What Parker offers is not erasure, but restoration — a deeply researched, passionately told account of how a binational, multiethnic city came to shape a country that has largely neglected or forgotten where it began.
Parker concludes not with despair, but with a call to remember who we are. “This isn’t just where America began,” he writes. “If we’re lucky, it can show America how to begin again.”
Since his death March 6, two days after “The Crossing” was released, many in El Paso have mourned Parker not only for his voice but for his vision. He gave us a gift — a book that validates what many of us have always felt deep down: that El Paso matters. That our stories matter. And that the future of America may depend on how closely it listens to its past.
The post ‘The Crossing’ puts El Paso at center of U.S. history appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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