Forgotten Crossings at the Edge of Texas

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. 

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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.

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