The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and Americas Forgotten Origin Story [Hardcover]

ANew YorkerBest Book of the Year * A Southwest Book of the Year “Top Pick”

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

A revelatory work of Southwest history that recenters the American origin story two-thousand miles west of Plymouth Rock, in El Paso, Texas—heart of Indigenous power and resistance, locus of Spanish 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, authorEmpire of the Summer Moon

American history is almost always told from east to west. Yet a closer look at our past reveals an untold history, 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, including the decades-long Apache Wars, was fought not on the Great Plains but in the Southwest. 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 history were fls*