"Gripping and beautiful. With the artistry of a poet and the
intensity of a revolutionary, Lovato untangles the tightly knit skein
of love and terror that connects El Salvador and the United States."
—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes and Nickel and
Dimed
An urgent,
no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare,
intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the
United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates
family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines
about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the
most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our
time—and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the
United States have been silenced and forgotten.
The child of
Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San
Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming
in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating
violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually
traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in
wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the
U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the
most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent
history.
Roberto returned
from war-torn El Salvador to find the United States on the verge of
unprecedented crises of its own. There, he channeled his own pain
into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how trauma
affects individual lives and societies, and began the difficult
journey of confronting the roots of his own trauma. As a child,
Roberto endured a tumultuous relationship with his father Ramón.
Raised in extreme poverty in the countryside of El Salvador during
one of the most violent periods of its history, Ramón learned to
survive by straddling intersecting underworlds of family secrets,
traumatic silences, and dealing in black-market goods and guns. The
repression of the violence in his life took its toll, however. Ramón
was plagued with silences and fits of anger that had a profound
impact on his youngest son, and which Roberto attributes as a source
of constant reckoning with the violence and rebellion in his own
life.
In Unforgetting,
Roberto interweaves his father’s complicated history and his own
with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart
of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the United States.
In doing so he makes the political personal, revealing the cyclical
ways violence operates in our homes and our societies, as well as the
ways hope and tenderness can rise up out of the darkness if we are
courageous enough to unforget.