Author and newspaper correspondent Richard Parker died last week at age 61, the Albuquerque Journal reported. He had had a terminal heart condition and was found during a wellness check.
 |
|
| Richard Parker at Literarity Book Shop in El Paso. | |
Only a week ago, on Tuesday, Mariner Books published his book The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America's Forgotten Origin Story, "a radical work of history that re-centers 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."
"It's heartbreaking that Richard Parker passed away the very week his book was published," his publicist Sharyn Rosenblum said. "He was passionate about the Southwest, illuminating its past and the role the region played in shaping America. I know he was grateful to have The Crossing out in the world."
Born in Albuquerque to an American father and a Mexican mother, Parker grew up in El Paso. He was the Albuquerque Journal's Washington bureau correspondent in the 1980s and continued to contribute columns until 1995. He wrote for the New York Times and other newspapers and journals, and he taught journalism. His Lone Star Nation: How Texas will Transform America was published in 2014.
In an interview with Writer's Digest published last week, Parker said, "Everything [we] 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."