THE CROSSING

How American history began in the West.

If you want to look at the starting place of American history, writes native son Parker, forget Plymouth Rock or Jamestown. It’s El Paso you want. “The first white man we ever saw,” wrote an Indigenous historian of the Rio Grande Valley, “was a black man.” He means Esteban or Estevanico, a Moroccan sold into slavery to a Spanish conquistador who, shipwrecked on the Texas Gulf Coast, made it on foot to what is now El Paso. Indeed, well before English colonists landed on the Atlantic seaboard, Spanish settlers were founding towns and missions up the spine of the Sierra Madre to the place where the once-mighty Rio Grande could be forded. Just so, writes Parker, Native peoples were in the El Paso area thousands of years before they were presumed to be crossing the Bering Strait, and when the Spanish arrived, they formed a third culture in which people met each other more or less on their own terms. Not so the newly arriving Americans, many of them from slaveholding states, who categorized and subjugated and despised, dividing peoples and countries. “The very idea that an imaginary line in the desert would somehow divide the fates of the two nations was an absolute folly,” writes Parker, but folly has ruled. Folly and murder: Parker’s framing device is the 2019 mass shooting by a white supremacist outsider who killed a veritable melting pot of El Pasoans, only one of them a Mexican citizen, along with “Anglos, Mexican Americans, a German, and others” representative of El Paso’s cosmopolitan past and present. With so much history to cover, the book is a touch too long, but its point is well taken: That mix of people and cultures is the very nature of the Southwest, and it’s the American future as well.

Overstuffed, but well written and full of eye-opening stories of a place worth knowing more about.