The Crossing takes place during a period of transition for the North American Southwest—it begins sometime in the 1930s and ends on July 16, 1945, the date of the Trinity nuclear test that signaled the beginning of the global nuclear age. For most of the people living along the borderlands of Texas and New Mexico, however, the wider world had little impact on their daily lives. Far more important were their relationships with the natural world, with Indigenous tribes that still occupied parts of the land, and with Mexicans with whom they regularly traded.

Tensions between America and Mexico were significant during this time, due to America’s sporadic role in the Mexican Revolution, which comprised a series of armed conflicts in the 1910s-20s. Often, the United States government would step in to support whoever held power. As a young man, protagonist Billy Parham would be little aware of this, but it’s an undercurrent in many of his exchanges with Mexican citizens throughout the novel, and several of the characters he meets are veterans of those wars with lingering feelings of resentment. It’s also an integral element of the society of the Northern states of Mexico during this era: The spirit of revolution influences Billy and Boyd’s fast achievement of folk hero status when they stand up to the powerful Hearst ranch.