Colombian-born producer Villa dies during 48
Jan 22
Wednesday, Mar 16th 2011, 4:00 AM
Ricardo Leon Pena Villa, a Colombian-born poet, romantic and journalist, has died. He was 48.
Villa died Friday during Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan from several health complications after carrying difficulty respirating pronounced his wife, Clara Peña Lopera. He was surrounded by his mother and a tighten organisation of friends and poets in his final hours.
Villa was innate in Medellin, Colombia, in Apr 1962. He always aspired to be partial of a informative stage in New York City and changed to a reduce East Side in 1990. He done visit trips to Jackson Heights, Queens, to bond with a internal Colombian community, where he common his communication and ideas.
As a writer, Villa had 7 books published, many of them collections of poems and brief stories. His final book, “Gardel Vive en Guarne,” was his initial novel and was published final year.
He won 4 National Hispanic Media Awards while stating on a humanities and enlightenment stage for a Spanish-language newspaper, El Diario-La Prensa, from 2000 to 2001.
He was also a editor of a communication biography and co-director of an online humanities and enlightenment magazine, redyaccion.com.
As an activist, Villa was concerned in a squatter transformation in New York City from 1992 until he died.
He participated in several protests opposite a city – that wanted Villa and other squatters on a reduce East Side to empty a buildings they called home.
Villa was also a fixed domestic activist. He flew to Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2002 to criticism a U.S. military regulating a island for training exercises.
He also orderly a assent impetus in Colombia in 1998 and helped set adult a Colombian Film Festival.
Lopera, his wife, pronounced she will not usually remember Villa for his “beautiful words” though for who he was.
“I’ll always remember him as a really amatory man, a really inexhaustible male with a large grin on his face,” she said.
Villa’s physique will be cremated and a rite celebrating his life will be hold on his birthday, Apr 8, during Natives Restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens.