The Crossing

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 countrys start began not in the East, but in the Westat 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. Its 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 wonthe Indian Wars were not fought on the Great Plains, but in the Southwest, with a scorched-earth strategy that went on for decades. Its where Immigrant America startsmore immigrants have passed through El Paso than Ellis Islandand where crucial battles for Civil Rights were foughtthe 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 Pasonative 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.