Editor’s Note: Author Richard Parker died early last month, days after publication of his book The Crossing. “My dad was a person that loved learning about the world around him, and we saw that in his writing,” his daughter Olivia told the Albuquerque Journal. He was 61. 

For years, one of my favorite places to visit in El Paso was the crossing where the Spanish conquistador Don Juan Onate and several hundred Spanish, mestizo, and Indigenous settlers crossed the Rio Grande/Río Bravo—El Paso del Norte—in 1598 on their expedition from Mexico to northern New Mexico.

The spot has all kinds of significance. The first Europeans entered present-day Texas here. It’s where the expansion of the Spanish empire to California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas began. The El Camino Real trail to Santa Fe and Taos runs through here.

Part of the site’s appeal is how it has been ignored and willfully hidden. The four-acre site is a little sliver of forgotten territory squeezed between the 15-foot border fence and the channeled river to the west and Paisano Drive, the CanAm Highway, railroad tracks, and Interstate 10 to the east. It’s hard to get to and maybe too close to the border for the Border Patrol’s liking, I guess. 

For years, I’d take a meal at La Hacienda Mexican restaurant in the old house built in the 1850s by Simeon Hart, who operated El Paso’s first mill, so I could get a close up view of the crossing. Even when the restaurant was open, the area felt deserted. On one afternoon visit, I watched three teenage males emerge from the brush by the border fence and make haste toward Paisano Drive, having made their own crossing.

Just beyond the restaurant’s parking lot is a paved semi-circular plaza consisting of four markers along with a fountain that no longer flows, a mere stone’s throw from the fence and the miserable channel that passes for the Rio Grande. The markers commemorate the place as the major east-west link for telegraph lines and railroads in the United States and James Magoffin and Simeon Hart, portrayed as civic leaders and agents of the Confederacy during the Civil War who helped thwart Union soldiers from taking El Paso.

Since the closing of La Hacienda, access to the crossing has been blocked by a chain-link fence. 

Behind La Hacienda is the pocket-sized Doniphan Park with a small playscape and half court, plus the original Fort Bliss, a two-story adobe that was long forgotten since the military installation relocated east of Mount Franklin long ago.

I was always puzzled why the site was willfully forgotten, as if it was a history city and state leaders didn’t want you to know about. 

The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story is the title of Richard Parker’s new rich cultural and political history of El Paso. By virtue of the book being about El Paso, it’s an adventure into the Other Texas. El Paso has never really belonged to the Lone Star State. It’s in a different time zone. The landscape is sprawling desert pocked with dry mountain ranges, far from forests, lakes, and anything green. It’s dry and dusty, the antithesis of Texas alongside and east of Interstate 35, where most of the population lives. El Paso is the American West, geographically closer to Los Angeles than to Orange, Texas.

Parker writes about the tribes and traders who lived and traveled through the region before the Europeans arrived, and he makes the case that agriculture was practiced in the Lower Valley of El Paso before just about anywhere else on the continent. Even after the arrival of Juan Onate, Parker writes, the different folks who passed through El Paso generally got along—excepting the fierce Apache people—until the arrival of Anglos, the United States, and Texas. 

As part of New Spain, then Mexico, El Paso prospered as a trading center and commercial hub where many cultures mixed and mingled. The troubles started, according to this telling, at the end of the Mexican War in 1848 when the Rio Grande was declared the international boundary and Mexico ceded all claims to Texas and the Southwest. 

The new immigrants arriving in El Paso came mostly from the east, not the south, and included all kinds of outlaws, hustlers, and rapscallions, leading to a half-century of bloodshed (Cormac McCarthy’s sweet spot) and El Paso’s reputation as the Gunfighter Capital of the World. This mythic Marty Robbins-and-Felina-at-Rosa’s-Cantina version of El Paso has substance: Plaques on downtown streets identify where John Wesley Hardin was killed and where four men were shot dead in five seconds. 

Parker profiles a very different Pancho Villa from the one portrayed in legend, and he cites Villa’s numerous ties to the city. 

Mexican Americans suffered discrimination from “Juan Crow” segregation laws in Texas, often forced to attend separate schools and routinely refused service in restaurants and public facilities, even lynched because of the color of their skin. Efforts to delouse Mexican immigrants who commuted to and worked in El Paso with poison gas in the 1930s were successfully stopped, although the method caught the eye of German Nazi scientists, who employed a similar method in their concentration camps.

Parker also writes of tolerance and progress, such as when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to make inroads in El Paso in the 1920s and was rebuffed; of Company E and the Texas Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division and other uncredited Mexican-American heroes of World War Two; the Bracero program that admitted farmworkers from Mexico; the election of Raymond Telles as the first Hispanic mayor of a major city in the United States when he was picked to lead El Paso in 1957; and the Texas Western College Miners winning the NCAA basketball championship in 1966 with its starting lineup of all-African-American players beating the all-White University of Kentucky Wildcats. 

He writes of the military, immigration, the drug war—elements that define life in the borderlands—and of the Guggenheim-owned ASARCO copper smelter smokestack, the tallest in the world when it was built, and its history as a spewing font of noxious lead, arsenic, and cadmium.

The negative Anglo/U.S./Texas influence culminates in the murder of 23 shoppers at an El Paso Wal-Mart by a 21-year-old racist from the Dallas area in 2019. Parker makes clear the killings were the end product of the hate-spewing, Mexico-bashing U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

Parker’s manuscript could have used a more thorough edit. He sometimes tries to connect the dots between dates and events to make a point but doesn’t always hit the mark, particularly when breaking down the dynamics between Indigenous tribes in the region and delving into details of the Mexican Revolution. 

A photograph caption reads: “A view of contemporary El Paso’s East Side, with the Franklin Mountains, rising to seven thousand feet above sea level, in the background.” But the actual image, taken from the top of the Doubletree Hotel downtown, is of El Paso’s Westside, along with Juárez, with the Juárez mountains in the background.

But The Crossing brims with El Paso pride, citing elements that give El Paso its character, teasing out the small stuff that make it unique and unlike the rest of Texas, to the point that Parker suggests El Paso secede from Texas and join New Mexico because they’re more aligned culturally, socially, and politically, as well as geographically. 

El Paso (Shutterstock)

Parker tells his own story, too, growing up on El Paso’s Westside, i.e. the more prosperous side. His Arkansas-born Anglo father managed a maquiladora across the river in Juárez. His Hispanic mother came from Monterrey. Parker has been a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, an opinion writer for The Atlantic and the New York Times, and an instructor at the University of Texas and Texas State University. His previous book Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America suggested Texas portends where the United States is headed.

Halfway through the book, I started wondering how Parker was going to frame his storytelling for Texas media at book events, whether he’d pull punches or be as blunt as he is in print. Then, days after publication, Parker was found dead in his residence. 

Two years ago, a non-profit called Abara House announced plans to restore Hart’s Mill/La Hacienda restaurant and repurpose the site as a multi-use borderlands center. A master plan has been designed, but to realize the project funds have to be raised. 

For now, the crossing is closed to people like you and me. The best I can recommend is to Google 1720 Paisano, and when you get there, drive real slow and peer through the chain-links and the brush, and you might catch a glimpse of the four historic markers and forlorn fountain in the grassy clearing. 

With Parker’s passing, The Crossing becomes a coda for his relationship to the borderlands, a place he portrays as a model of different cultures working together, tolerance, and understanding—a few things, he contends, the rest of Texas could learn from.

The post Forgotten Crossings at the Edge of Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: Author Richard Parker died early last month, after this review was published in print and days after publication of his book The Crossing. “My dad was a person that loved learning about the world around him, and we saw that in his writing,” his daughter Olivia told the Albuquerque Journal. He was 61. 

The El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019, the largest massacre of Mexican Americans in the history of the United States, has prompted award-winning journalist Richard Parker to take a second look at what was his family’s hometown during his youth. After graduating from a high school in El Paso’s Westside, he couldn’t wait to get out of this border city. At the time he considered it a vast, gritty desert wasteland in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t alone in this perspective.

For too long, the story of El Paso told by Hollywood filmmakers, news reporters, and cowboy historians has been that of a Wild West frontier town full of outlaws. The stories that sell have to do with violence, drugs, and the alleged invasion of the “brown hordes,” which ultimately require Anglo lawmen to tame the chaos. These self-perpetuating tropes still predominate in mass media. 

You could say the story of a young Anglo vigilante from the Dallas area, who drove to El Paso six years ago to shoot down “Mexicans” and stop the supposed “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” is the modern-day adaptation of the Wild West story. In this rerun, the El Paso shooter is the updated version of John Wesley Hardin. The killer, who wrote a four-page manifesto, certainly had a faulty understanding of the history of Mexican Americans, whose Native and Hispanic ancestors were in the Southwest long before the U.S.-Mexico border existed.

In The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story (Mariner, March 2025), Parker searches for a more accurate story of El Paso that doesn’t repeat the distortions of previous histories. As Parker researched his book, he reports being stunned to learn what other borderlands scholars have before him: that the history of El Paso is not marginal to that of the United States but rather represents this country’s unacknowledged origins. He writes that the “first Thanksgiving” took place in the El Paso area more than 20 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. 

Parker correctly finds fault with the way Anglo gunslingers and fraudsters have been romanticized by fiction writers and historians, such as Leon Metz and C.L. Sonnichsen. “Because many of these characters were not Native Americans or Mexicans, but white Americans from back east, these dangerous people were glamorized in the pulp novels of their day and well into the history books that followed,” Parker notes. “The romanticizing of this period has hidden its cruelties.”

The Crossing is not an academic history. It reads like a winding journalistic essay in which the author is up-front about his own politics. The book’s back cover promises “a radical work of history that recenters the American story on 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.”

What’s on the menu sounds pretty good. We absolutely need a radical new history of El Paso. The last comprehensive overview of the border city’s historical developments was El Paso: A Borderlands History, published in 1990by University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) historian W. H. Timmons, and it was by no means cutting-edge.

Unfortunately, The Crossing doesn’t deliver what its promotional materials promise—as what might have been the equivalent of a well-prepared meal is more like undercooked fast food. 

To begin with, Parker gets a lot of details wrong. In addition to spelling mistakes, including the first name of legendary Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, the author commits attribution and factual errors. When Parker quotes Adolph Hitler praising the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, he incorrectly cites the source as Mein Kampf. Parker got this quote from my own book—Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1893-1923—in which I note that Hitler wrote these lines in his second book, published after his death.

More significantly, some of The Crossing’s historical dates are wrong, including a few that are way off. The fossilized human footprints discovered at White Sands National Park are 21,000 to 23,000 years old, according to carbon dating, not 55,000 years old, as the author claims. According to Parker, Mexican revolutionaries attacked Ciudad Juárez beginning on April 7, 1911, and by May 8 the federal troops were out of ammunition and water. Anyone who’s seriously studied the Mexican Revolution should know that the insurrectionaries didn’t begin shooting at the Federales in Juárez until May 8 and that the Mexican government forces surrendered two days later. Parker doesn’t cite his sources for this section, but Wikipedia and Britannica make the same mistake about the dates of the Battle of Juárez. [Editor’s Note: These mistakes appeared in both the uncorrected and final proofs of the book provided by the publisher.]

Pointing out such inaccuracies might seem like excessive academic fact-checking. But these errors add up. They give a sense that the author has not fully mastered his material. Parker depended almost entirely on history books, newspaper articles, essays, and online materials written in English, according to his footnotes and bibliography, which include no Native, Spanish colonial, or Mexican sources. Archival research of primary documents, written during the time the historical events took place, is almost nonexistent.

By depending on previous English-language historical literature, Parker ends up reinforcing some of the same old narratives about El Paso he was trying to avoid. He points out that once-glamorized Anglo gunslingers were by no means the good guys, but he nevertheless spills too much ink fleshing out their biographical details, at the expense of more worthy Native and Mexican-American historical protagonists. Parker delves extensively into the Native prehistory of El Paso, but Indigenous people, in his book, practically disappear in the modern period.

The Crossing fails to correct the historical record in other ways as well. In the past, white settler historiography portrayed the territory north of the Rio Grande as empty land to justify the dispossession of brown people. By omitting certain facts, Parker unwittingly promotes this same terra nullius argument in his book. He fails to mention there was an Apache peace camp (establecimiento de paz) in the late 19th century where about 1,000 Mescalero Apaches (Natagendé) resided, located where the modern city of El Paso was born, in today’s Barrio Duranguito. It was in the same area as the historic river ford where Juan de Oñate crossed into what is now the United States two decades before Plymouth Rock. 

Parker also ignores the extent of the Mexican presence in El Paso north of the river before the U.S. military invasion in 1846. This is partly forgivable, since the first thing the Anglo military invaders did when they occupied El Paso del Norte was destroy some of the local archives, including Mexican land deeds and other property records. This destruction of memory continues to negatively affect the writings of historians today. 

El Paso (Shutterstock)

Parker’s book does have some strengths: One informative section focuses on Raymond Telles, elected mayor of El Paso in 1957 as the first Mexican-American mayor of a major U.S. city. Telles worked behind the scenes to desegregate public places in the Anglo parts of town. El Paso was the first city in Texas to desegregate many of its public institutions in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including Texas Western College (today’s UTEP), without the violent backlash seen elsewhere in the state. 

The last chapter of The Crossing, drawn partly from an opinion piece Parker wrote for the New York Times after the El Paso Walmart shooting, is the book’s most impassioned section. But even here the author goes astray. Parker misidentifies prominent local labor activist Guillermo Glenn, a survivor of the shooting, as “an artist” and describes then-presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke as a “local hero” and the “public face” of the people of El Paso. Had the author dug further, he would have found that many El Pasoans beg to differ with his overly flattering characterization of the famous politician. When O’Rourke sat on El Paso’s city council, he was the face of a harmful gentrification plan that would have demolished major sections of historic immigrant neighborhoods in South El Paso to build a sports arena and other private developments spearheaded by his father-in-law. The proposed demolition, never executed, included the site of the 18th-century Apache settlement and the ford Oñate crossed.

The Crossing doesn’t dig deep enough to substantially correct the fallacies and erasures of previous El Paso histories. Instead, it creates new ones of its own.

The post El Paso’s Still-Untold Story appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. inflation declined last month as the cost of gas fell, a sign that price growth was cooling even as President Donald Trump ramped up his tariff threats.

Consumer prices rose just 2.4% in March from a year earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday, down from 2.8% in February. That is the lowest inflation figure since September.

Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 2.8% compared with a year ago, down from 3.1% in February. That is the smallest increase in core prices in nearly four years. Economists closely watch core prices because they are considered a better guide to where inflation is headed.

The report shows that inflation is mostly cooling, for now. Yet President Donald Trump’s huge tariffs on China and 10% universal duty are likely to push up prices in the coming months, economists say. The higher import taxes will likely weigh on growth as well.

On a monthly basis, prices actually fell 0.1% in March, the first monthly drop in nearly five years. The cost of used cars, car insurance, and hotel rooms all fell. Core prices rose just 0.1% in March from February.

The cost of groceries, however, jumped 0.5% last month, the report showed, as egg prices leapt 5.9% to a new record average price of $6.23 a dozen.

Trump had imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly 60 nations last week, which sent financial markets into a tailspin and caused sharp drops in business and consumer sentiment. Yet on Wednesday he paused those duties for 90 days. He kept a steep 125% tariff on all imports from China and 25% duties on steel, aluminum, imported cars, and many goods from China and Mexico.

The remaining tariffs are still likely to lift inflation this year, economists say, even with the 90-day pause.

Even with the pause, many companies are still uncertain where trade policy will go next. Trump has also said that duties on pharmaceutical imports will be imposed.

Consumers will likely see some prices rise because of the existing duties, including the massive tariffs on China. The United States imports more than $60 billion of iPhones and other mobile phones every year from China, as well as massive amounts of clothes, shoes and toys.

Many U.S. companies will likely shift production out of China, a process that had already started during Trump’s first term when he slapped duties on some of its exports. Still, China remains the Unite States’ third-largest trading partner.

Shifting supply chains out of China will also likely take time and come with its own costs, which could raise prices for U.S. consumers in the coming months.

Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank was likely to keep its key interest rate unchanged at about 4.3% as it waited to see how Trump’s policies impacted the economy. Trump called for the Fed to cut rates on Friday.

“There’s a lot of waiting and seeing going on, including by us,” Powell said. “And that just seems like the right thing to do in this period of uncertainty.”

By MATT OTT, Associated Press Business Writer

Slightly more Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, but the labor market remains broadly healthy despite an ongoing trade war.

Jobless claim filings inched up by 4,000 to 223,000 for the week ending April 5, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s less than the 225,000 new applications analysts forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have mostly ping-ponged between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.

Even though President Donald Trump put a 90-day pause on most of his widespread tariff hikes Wednesday, concerns remain about a global economic slowdown that could upend what has been an incredibly resilient labor market.

Like his pledge to institute tariffs, Trump’s promise to drastically downsize the federal government workforce is fully in motion.

It’s not clear when the job cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency — or “DOGE,” spearheaded by Elon Musk — will surface in the weekly layoffs data,

Federal agencies that have either announced layoffs or are planning cuts include the Department of Health and Human Services, IRS, Small Business Administration, Veterans Affairs and Department of Education.

Despite showing some signs of weakening during the past year, the labor market remains healthy with plentiful jobs and relatively few layoffs.

Last week, the government reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 228,000 jobs in March and while the unemployment rate inched up to 4.2%, that’s a healthy figure by historical standards.

Some high-profile companies have announced job cuts already this year, including Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines and Facebook parent company Meta.

The four-week average of applications, which aims to smooth out some of the week-to-week swings, was unchanged at 223,000.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of March 29 fell by 43,000 to 1.85 million.