Award-winning journalist, former Journal Washington DC correspondent Richard Parker dies

Former Albuquerque Journal Washington Bureau Correspondent and author, Richard Parker, has died. He was 61.

He is survived by his daughters Olivia Parker and Isabel Parker and sister Janet Parker Collins.

“My dad was a person that loved learning about the world around him, and we saw that in his writing,” Olivia Parker said.

NBC News said in 2019 he was one of the most influential Latinos in America.

Richard Parker was found in his home Thursday after police responded to a welfare check request, El Paso Matters reported. El Paso Matters founder and CEO Bob Moore told the Journal Richard Parker told him days before he had a heart condition and “as he put it, ‘I’m not going to make it past April.’”

Richard Parker, who was born in Albuquerque before moving to El Paso, was the Journal’s Washington bureau correspondent in the 1980s and continued to contribute columns until 1995.

“He did a really good job of showing how the New Mexico delegation in Washington figured into the big picture,” said Kent Walz, a former Journal editor-in-chief and Associated Press bureau chief.

Richard Parker covered a myriad of subjects ranging from nuclear weapons to border issues. .

“He did a terrific job, I thought, both describing the national situation in Washington and relating it to New Mexico,” former Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said in a phone interview. “It seemed to me, he always gave a real priority to making a fair representation of whatever you said.

“I think it’s a loss for our state that he’s not going to be around to continue observing what goes on and presenting that to the public.”

Richard Parker, who was raised in El Paso by an American father and Mexican mother, also wrote “Lone Star Nation: How Texas will Transform America” and several pieces about the American Southwest for the New York Times and other publications.

In 2020, Richard Parker’s commentary in the New York Times on the El Paso mass shooting at a Walmart, was honored by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

“He was one of the last of the breeds of old school journalists who really took it seriously and was kind of no BS, but also really loved his work,” said Michael Coleman, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s spokesperson and former Albuquerque Journal Washington, D.C., bureau chief.

Richard Parker recently came out with a new book, ”The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story,” which “is revelatory new history of El Paso that recasts the city as the unacknowledged cradle of American history, where cultures have encountered each other for centuries and forged a thriving multi-ethnic community far ahead of the rest of the nation,” according to HarperCollins.

“It’s heartbreaking that Richard Parker passed away the very week his book was published,” HarperCollins spokesperson Sharyn Rosenblum said in an email. “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.”

The book was recently reviewed in the Sunday Journal.

Writer’s Digest asked Richard Parker in a recent interview what he hoped readers would get out of the book.

“I suppose there are really three things,” he said. “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.”

Coleman said he is glad Richard Parker's latest book came out before he died.

“That will give his family and friends some comfort,” Coleman said.

A celebration of life is being planned for June 6 in El Paso, Collins said.