The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story

Summary

“‘American history did not begin in the Northeast. It began in the Southwest,’ Parker asserts, in this sweeping history.” —The New Yorker, Best Books of the Week

A revelatory 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 multi-ethnic 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.