Richard Parker’s 'The Crossing' explores El Paso through the lens of the origin story of America

Think of the opening of the prologue and the conclusion of the final chapter as the twin points in the arc of Richard Parker’s ambitious new book “The Crossing: El Paso, The Southwest and America’s Forgotten Origin Story.”

Both of those points focus on the Aug. 3, 2019, massacre of 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso. Parker argues it was an attack on a unique feature of El Paso: this big, bustling city was a blend of Europeans, Americans, Native Americans, mestizos and African Americans, all living side by side, intermarrying — a multicultural society that dated back centuries.

Not to mention Mexican nationals who cross into El Paso to shop and to work.

In “The Crossing,” Parker takes a long chronological view, contending El Paso should be considered the source of the origin story of America. A multicultural America.

That story, he writes, begins with the first known humans on the North American continent who were living in the caves of present-day Oro Grande, New Mexico, just outside of what are today’s city limits of El Paso, Parker writes.

These peoples predate the Paleo-Indians, whose forebears traveled over the Bering Strait ice bridge more than 14,000 years ago. Taking the place of the Paleo-Indians were the Archaic people, he writes, hunter-gatherers who “were among the earliest and most prominent ancestors” of the Pueblo.

Parker fast-forwards to the late 16th century and the expedition of Juan de Oñate that was commissioned by Spain’s King Philip II to find gold, along with Oñate’s promised shortcut to China.

Oñate, his soldiers and colonists instead encountered withering desert winds in northern Mexico. Native people they surprisingly encountered redirected them to salvation — a river.

They were now at present-day San Elizario, Texas, 20 miles south of modern El Paso. The Spanish named the waterway El Rio del Norte, the River of the North. It would later be called the Rio Grande.

Oñate referred to the Natives as the tattooed Manso and the red-painted Suma.

Franciscans traveling with Oñate organized a feast of thanksgiving.

After the Franciscans said mass then, Parker writes, “… everyone feasted on duck, geese and fish.”

The first known performance of a play in the Americas followed. He writes, “… it depicted the conversion of unwitting, yet willing, Native people to Christianity, a lighthearted foreshadowing of a cataclysm yet to come.”

Parker contends that the meal, on Easter Sunday in 1598, was the first Thanksgiving in America, predating the Pilgrims’ autumnal Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag people at Plymouth Rock by 23 years.

Even Oñate’s expedition, like present-day El Paso, counted many nationalities. Parker writes the group included 400 cavalry and infantry composed of Spanish, Europeans of various nations, mestizo and Tlaxcalan warriors. The Tlaxcalan people had helped the Spanish defeat the Aztec.

Parker devotes part of a chapter to Oñate’s downfall — he discovered neither gold nor a shortcut to China. And he was convicted of illegally executing Native people, executing his own soldiers and adultery.

The same chapter details the legendary Po’Pay, the Pueblo man who led his people’s revolt — aided by the Apache and Diné — against the Spanish in 1680. Surviving refugees of the devastating ended up in El Paso.

“It was,” Parker writes, “the only time in the history of the Western Hemisphere that a European colonial power had been ejected by the Native people. From Canada to Peru, many Native peoples had tried to do this, but only the Pueblo succeeded.”

Meanwhile, El Paso was already growing into a settlement that was a gathering place for people of many Native backgrounds — Apache, Jumano, Suma and others, he writes.

By the early 19th century, Parker writes, El Paso had assumed the role of a crossroads, notably as an important way station on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro between Mexico City and northern New Mexico.

The book has an abundance of historical figures, famous and obscure, woven into vignettes of different periods. For example, several vignettes illuminate the various personalities and conflicts in the wake of the Mexican War.

Parker backgrounds some of the new faces in El Paso in the 1850s. They included James Wiley Magoffin, “a trader-spy-traitor,” and tall newcomer Sarah Bowman, who bought a hotel and restaurant and ran a brothel out of them.

With the Mexican American War over, Americans were now fighting former Mexican nationals, many of whom were newly minted U.S. citizens under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, though not granted full constitutional rights.

Under American rule, Parker writes, the army fought “a grinding war of occupation” and El Paso became a more violent place. Still, the city was what he called “America’s new frontier.” In the next sentence, Parker declares the arrival of European Jewish, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants would be an important turning point. A turning point in what is unclear.

The book tells of the conflicts in the El Paso region before and during the American Civil War. Americans fought different Apache bands, and then during the war battled Confederate troops from Texas that invaded pro-Union New Mexico, pushing north up the Rio Grande.

The rebels wanted New Mexico as a steppingstone to California’s gold mines. They made it as far as Glorieta, just east of Santa Fe, where they were stopped.

Given the references to numerous historical figures, the book would have benefitted by having a list identifying them.

The author is a contract writer for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and other publications; he is a former Albuquerque Journal staff writer. Parker’s first book was “Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America.”

Born in Albuquerque and raised in El Paso, Parker resides in Texas.