I have always appreciated Roberto Lovato's critical writings. I'm glad that he's published a book that is about his and his country's past. We all have much to learn from a history that rarely gets exposure in the popular press. Congratulations, Roberto, on this publication about which I just learned.
-Angela Valenzuela
In ‘Unforgetting,’ Roberto Lovato unearths the secrets of El Salvador’s past
He was 10 years old, on a family vacation to France in 1973, as he and his mother descended into the underground ossuary packed with the bones of more than 6 million Parisians. A tourist attraction open to the public for centuries, the catacombs can remind us of how much history forgets the dead.
“My mom set me up for life,” the San Francisco-born author, 57, says, “by preparing me to learn about death.”
Lovato, the son of Salvadoran immigrants who settled at 25th and Folsom streets in the 1950s, unearths the bones of his own history in his first nonfiction book, “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas.”
“Unforgetting” was released Tuesday, Sept. 1. Lovato is scheduled to talk about the book with author Myriam Gurba in a virtual event sponsored by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers on Tuesday, Sept. 8.
With the precision of a master seamstress — not unlike that of his paternal grandmother, Mamá Tey, who migrated from El Salvador with the money earned courtesy of her iron Singer sewing machine — Lovato braids a narrative that spans nine decades and weaves together El Salvador’s history of genocide, civil war, revolution and migration with his family’s own.
“It’s not easy,” Lovato says. “You first have to be willing to look at your own secrets, which, in the case of Salvadorans, means going deep into a rabbit hole that involves not just war in the 1980s, but genocide in the 1930s and a graph of consistent violence. … You’re talking about a really intense experience of war and genocide that causes pain not unlike what the Jews feel with the Holocaust.
“But unlike with the Jews in the United States, there’s nothing to commemorate the violence and the genocide perpetrated against Central Americans,” he adds, “because the ‘Nazi’ in the story is not just Salvadoran, but the United States.”
To understand the gang violence that persists in El Salvador today, Lovato directs us toward the history of U.S. involvement in the country. During the Salvadoran Civil War from 1979 to 1992, the U.S. government provided significant military funding and advice to the junta leaders, including training some of its death squads deployed to massacre dissidents. Around 75,000 Salvadorans perished during the war, most at the hands of the Salvadoran government.
And when the U.S. ramped up the deportation of undocumented immigrants after the war ended, members of MS-13, El Salvador’s notorious gang, which was founded in Los Angeles, flooded El Salvador.
The inspiration behind the memoir’s title is aletheia, the ancient Greek word that translates to “unclosedness,” or truth. Lovato wields this concept, not only in an attempt to undo the culture of silencio that loomed heavy in his household growing up — for decades, Lovato’s father, Ramón, refused to unveil his own traumatic past — but also to dispel the oversimplified, violent narrative associated with his parents’ homeland.
In the book, Lovato dives deep into the context for today’s gang violence, traversing firsthand through the mass graves of victims of gangs and civil war, and pulling from his own past as a rebellious Mission District youth to reveal the complexity beneath the monster that is MS-13.
Lovato was never a member of an organized gang, but the run-ins he and his Mission “homies” had with San Francisco police as youths earned him a degree in street psychology and an understanding of what makes gang members tick. In the ’90s, Lovato worked at the Central American Refugee Center in Los Angeles, where many of his clients were MS-13 members and their families.
“The rhetoric is one thing, and the reality is another,” Lovato says. “Most gang members in El Salvador are little kids. Most of them are not killers. They are salvageable with the right treatment. But unfortunately, the government — like some of our families — has the attitude of treating us like dogs. And the gangs, and I would have to share that because that was my reality, would say, ‘You treat me like a dog, I become a wolf.’”
But as much as pain is part of Lovato’s story, so are love and hope.
“I had one of the great love affairs in my life in the middle of war,” Lovato says, recalling his romance with a guerrillera, or freedom fighter, in El Salvador. A year before the war ended, Lovato linked with a politico-military organization in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which mounted attacks against police and military units that were supported by the U.S. Lovato and his partner even evaded death squads together.
“Amidst the terror, there’s always tenderness,” he said.
Lovato’s book is a brave examination of the oft-erased history of Salvadorans, including those like him who grew up in San Francisco. But it’s also a call for justice and change.
“I want people to know our story, in the hopes that people would better understand what it means to be from the Mission, what it means to be Salvadoran, and what it means to be from the United States,” Lovato says. “… Nations are a set of myths that are put out for people to not question the existing power structure. … I decided I would question and then I would fight the power structures. And I’ve never looked back. And the Mission taught me that.”
“Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas”
By Roberto Lovato
Harper
(352 pages; $26.99)
“The Real American Dirt: Roberto Lovato in conversation with Myriam Gurba”: 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 8. Free. Hosted on Zoom. To register, visit http://bit.ly/lovato-gurba
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