Richard Parker: On Considering the Bigger Picture in Nonfiction Writing

Richard Parker is an award-winning journalist and author who writes about the American Southwest for The New York Times and other publications. In 2020 his commentary in The New York Times on the El Paso massacre was honored by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In 2019 NBC News named him to “#NBCLatino20,” its list of the most influential Latinos in America. Parker’s first book, Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America, took a fresh look at the history of the Lone Star State to reconsider its present and future. Raised in El Paso, the son of an American father and a Mexican mother, he lives in Texas. Visit him at RichardParkersWest.com, and follow him on Bluesky and Instagram.

In this interview, Richard discusses everything he learned in the process of researching and writing his new historical nonfiction book, The Crossing, the collaborative process of publishing a book like this, and more.

Name: Richard Parker
Literary agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas Creative Management
Book title: The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America's Forgotten Origin Story
Publisher: Mariner Books (HarperCollins Publishers) Nonfiction, History
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction, History
Previous titles: Lone Star Nation (Pegasus Books, 2014); Disunion (Contributing Author only, The New York Times and Oxford University Press, 2016)
Elevator pitch for the book: The Crossing is a radical work of history that recenters the American story around 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. American history is almost always told from East to West and yet a closer look at the past reveals the country’s start began not in the East, but in the West—at a Texas city situated on a natural, shallow crossing of the Rio Grande River: El Paso.

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On the scorching afternoon of August 3, 2019, a young man from just north of Dallas got out of his car. Unlike the hundreds of shoppers crowding Walmart for back-to-school sales, Patrick Crucius, age just 19, wasn’t here to buy anything. He was here to take it. He raised an AK-47 style rifle across the parking lot and toward the front door, lifting it once to kill an elderly woman as she walked out. To his left, a knot of school-age girls sold candy to raise funds for their soccer team; they bolted and ran, their black ponytails flying behind them.

After an editor at The New York Times stirred me from a much-needed nap—I had just arrived in my hometown from Los Angeles to visit my mother—I raced toward the scene in the car, following the radio reports and the circling helicopters to the scene to a middle school converted to a gathering point for nervous families. In the end, 23 people would lay dead with nearly an equal number wounded in the largest act of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing nearly a quarter century earlier.

I pieced together the scene as the dead, wounded, and missing were identified to the hysterical, grieving, shocked, nervous, and relieved families inside. A pastor showed me pictures of a baby who survived but whose parents did not; cradled by his mother, she turned her body to shield the child and was instantly killed by Crucius. In that moment, I didn’t just witness the aftermath of another mass killing, but the raging violence of a nation convulsed by a rising majority that was not, strictly speaking, white, the intersection with the cruelty of the Trump administration toward immigrants and the belief that this city, now bigger than Boston, was somehow a dusty desert outpost of no consequence.

As a result, I bore witness to new facts: My hometown, for which I had held little regard, was the very root of American history—the first humans in the Western hemisphere, complex native cultures, European contact, a passage of settlers who long predated Jamestown or Plymouth; ensuing violence between Europeans, Americans, and Native Americans on a globally historic scale over survival, land, Manifest Destiny, and revolution. It was all followed by 100 years of sacrifice for the country, firsts in the struggle for equal and civil rights, and the rise of peaceful society astride three nations and all or parts of five states that is a model of integration and diversity unmarred by the original American sin of chattel slavery.

These were all things that I didn’t know and that hardly anyone from even El Paso understood. I came to believe that this story wasn’t just history, but narrative history, replete with characters, drama, suspense, and tragedy. I think this story doesn’t just tell us as Americans from where we really came—most Americans now live west of the Mississippi River—but where we can go if we vanquish our demons and fears, of others and the unknown.

It took about four and a half years. I kept Peter Hubbard apprised as I researched and wrote, certainly, and he provided some excellent guidance that helped me avert some blind alleys and underscored what was important in a sprawling story that stretches over some 14 millennia

I was pleased at how gifted people it takes to publish a work like this. I know that at least a half-dozen people pushed this manuscript over the finish line, and I got the chance to thank them in the acknowledgments. Sort of like raising a kid, it takes a village to publish a big book like this.

For me they came more in the research and reporting of the book. I was pleased at how certain nuggets of fact became “aha” moments.

For example, the first evidence of human beings in the Americas was found two decades ago by just two sites: near El Paso and in Peru, carbon dated to 14,000 years ago, nearly three times older than that of the people who came from Asia across the Bering Strait ice bridge. Or that the population of El Paso (the city) now exceeds that of Boston or Detroit and just barely trails Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Or that the population of the Southwest now rivals the Northeast. Or that the binational metropolitan area contains nearly 4 million people—far bigger than metro Denver and about the same as Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Or that the first Thanksgiving was not held at Plymouth, Massachusetts, by the Pilgrims, but on the banks of the Rio Grande by a huge expedition along with native people. The list is long. But to be fair, I didn’t know these facts either, till I started down the trail of this book.

I suppose there are really three things. Everything they are taught about American history is so incomplete as to be factually wrong. Despite the legend and the lore, we are not a people simply rooted on the colonial East Coast; instead, we are a nation of westerners with all the good, bad, dangerous, and tragic that entails.

But as importantly, as a nation of westerners we can fashion an alternate national future in which people of a range of races, ethnicities, countries, languages, and religions can indeed live side by side. El Paso had its share of oppression, sure, but it is probably one of the few large American cities that never endured a race riot.

Think about what the nonfiction story is about in a larger sense, from individual emotion to global precedence and all that’s in between, and then weave that through your narrative to see if it binds the story together and tells an even bigger one. There is that and the importance of a great agent. My agent, Jane Von Mehren, was tireless and I benefited from her skills as a former book editor. There simply are no shortcuts around these two, no matter the rise of self-publishing and now AI. Just like the team at Mariner, it takes a village.

Lastly, I do get asked for advice by students who want to write and say they plan a major or graduate degree in journalism. I have two degrees, been a journalist in one sense or another, all of the last 40 years or so. I have been privileged to teach journalism at the university level twice and benefited vastly from journalism fellowships.

But the number of journalism classes I took. Zero. Instead of learning process, learn subjects you care about. Think critically.