Editor’s Note: Author Richard Parker died early last month, after this review was published in print and days after publication of his book The Crossing. “My dad was a person that loved learning about the world around him, and we saw that in his writing,” his daughter Olivia told the Albuquerque Journal. He was 61.
The El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019, the largest massacre of Mexican Americans in the history of the United States, has prompted award-winning journalist Richard Parker to take a second look at what was his family’s hometown during his youth. After graduating from a high school in El Paso’s Westside, he couldn’t wait to get out of this border city. At the time he considered it a vast, gritty desert wasteland in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t alone in this perspective.
