Forgotten Crossings at the Edge of Texas

Editor s Note Author Richard Parker died early last month days after publication of his book The Traveling My dad was a person that loved learning about the world around him and we saw that in his writing his daughter Olivia explained the Albuquerque Journal He was For years one of my favorite places to visit in El Paso was the bridging where the Spanish conquistador Don Juan Onate and several hundred Spanish mestizo and Indigenous settlers crossed the Rio Grande R o Bravo El Paso del Norte in 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 -foot frontier fence and the channeled river to the west and Paisano Drive the CanAm Highway railroad tracks and Interstate to the east It s hard to get to and maybe too close to the margin for the Confines Patrol s liking I guess For years I d take a meal at La Hacienda Mexican restaurant in the old house built in the s by Simeon Hart who operated El Paso s first mill so I could get a close up view of the navigating 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 perimeter fence and make haste toward Paisano Drive having made their own spanning 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 traversing 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 consistently 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 Moving across 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 where bulk 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 development 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 numerous cultures mixed and mingled The troubles started according to this telling at the end of the Mexican War in when the Rio Grande was declared the international boundary and Mexico ceded all declares 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 amenity in restaurants and residents 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 s 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 s 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 campaign that admitted farmworkers from Mexico the poll 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 and the Texas Western College Miners winning the NCAA basketball championship in 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 shoppers at an El Paso Wal-Mart by a -year-old racist from the Dallas area in 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 invariably hit the mark particularly when emerging 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 Ju rez with the Ju rez mountains in the background But The Bridging 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 Ju rez 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 revealed dead in his residence Two years ago a non-profit called Abara House stated 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 navigating is closed to people like you and me The best I can recommend is to Google 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 Bridging 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 meager 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