Pretty much all of us learn about American history in school. But, Richard Parker, author and journalist who wrote about the southwest, argues we’re not learning about a big part of it.
Richard Parker’s new book is called "The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest and America’s Forgotten Origin Story."
In it, he writes, “Simply put, the origin story of America, usually told as starting in the East, at Plymouth Rock, and extending to the West is wrong, erasing places and people between the coasts. The first known humans on the North American continent didn’t cross the frozen seas of the Bering Strait fifteen thousand years ago; they were already here, living in the caves of present-day Oro Grande, New Mexico, just outside the city limits of El Paso.”
Parker was scheduled to be part of the Tucson Festival of Books earlier this spring. He sadly passed away shortly before that.
Parker joined The Show before his death to discuss how El Paso fits into the story of the U.S.
Full conversation
RICHARD PARKER: Well, El Paso and the entire Southwest, the territory that was seized from Mexico on the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848 has actually been foundational in the history of the United States. Many of the firsts did not happen on the East Coast, as our history class has taught us. It actually began in El Paso.
Now, we did wind up adopting the political systems that came from the East Coast, either through force or annexation or or free will. But long before the pilgrims landed, for instance, at Plymouth Rock, the first European Thanksgiving in the New World was actually celebrated on the banks of the Rio Grande in what is now El Paso.
MARK BRODIE: So why is it then, that that is not what most of us are taught?
PARKER: It’s an excellent question. I’ve pondered it many times, and I think that particularly when it comes to our education — and I see this as a product of public schools and private universities — there’s a great deal of politics that’s involved in the curriculum of public education. And certainly that applies to history, probably more so than almost everything else.
Because there are mythologies that spring up, and these mythologies become entrenched, and they tend to influence our academic work to sort of frame a narrative — maybe not tell the whole narrative, but to frame it …. And so that’s why, for instance, American history has not generally delved into the very long history of the indigenous people of the Americas, including the United States.
And that certainly is the same thing that happened with the arrival of the people of the Spanish Empire and their indigenous allies in the American Southwest. They’ve just been shunted it out of the that framework because it doesn’t align with the mythology.
BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting you talked about the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. And one of the things you write that I found so interesting in your book is that more immigrants have passed through El Paso than Ellis Island — which to the point about education, certainly not what most of us anyway are taught, but also really, really fascinating.
PARKER: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, El Paso has been a crossing, quite literally, for thousands of people headed north and south, even before European contact. This area, which is basically a passageway between mountains and a crossing of a fairly shallow river most of the time, was a north-to-south corridor.
So there’s a natural geography here that lends itself to passage north and south, as well as what happened later, east to west. And that was the attraction.
BRODIE: Let me ask you about that concept of going north to south. Because as you reference in the book, so much of our history is thought of as east to west. And we talk about the pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock and eventually moving west and manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine and all that stuff.
But as you write, the history of the country is in many ways much more a story of going north and south than it is east and west.
PARKER: It is true. The Spanish arrived actually in Florida and settled Saint Augustine a just a bit prior. So Saint Augustine is the oldest city in the United States, followed by Santa Fe and El Paso. That said, that that colony really didn’t flourish. It was just hanging on by the barest thread for a very long time until it was sold to Great Britain.
But what we see is really what my, friend Carrie Gibson, the historian, has described as American history really starting to emanate out of the Caribbean basin under the Spanish Empire, moving gradually north. It met with very limited success in the South, but it met with great success in the Southwest. And we just don’t record that stuff in our traditional history because the dominant framework says, “Oh no, it’s earth-to-west, manifest destiny, etc.”
BRODIE: What does it change in your mind about maybe the history of this country and its future, perhaps, to think of El Paso as maybe a central location and to think of the history of this country moving north and south as opposed to a place like New York City or D.C. or Philadelphia and history moving from east to west. Like, how does that change your thinking about where we’ve been, where we are and where we may be going?
PARKER: Well, I think we have certainly become a more Western nation. And by that, I mean the geographic center of the population out West … The territory taken from Mexico following the 1848 war is more populous now than the northeast states. And that’s sort of shocking to me. I lived on the Atlantic seaboard for much of my career, and I just was baffled by that figure.
So I think that we’re in a period which the West, generally speaking, with the Southwest specifically, should probably begin to assert its place in history as foundation. Without the people who came here under extraordinarily difficult circumstances in the 1500s and the 1600s, we would not be the country we are. It’s just that simple.
BRODIE: How did researching and writing this book maybe make you think about your hometown? El Paso is your hometown, as you write. How did the process of putting this book together maybe make you think differently or see your hometown a little differently?
PARKER: I’ll be blunt with you: It made me feel incredibly stupid because I didn’t know any of these … And I was just sort of dumbfounded a lot of the time. Because even growing up here, nobody teaches that. So everything in this book was new to me.
