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Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas
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About This Book
A timely and no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerilla warfare, immigration, and intergenerational trauma, Robert Lovato's memoir and cultural critique reflects on his multifaceted life and examines many of the self-serving myths underlying modern American culture.The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s California. Joining a gang in his teens, he witnessed a friend take a bullet to the face in a coke deal gone bad and survived his own shooting. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against its corrupt, fraudulent military government. As a child. Roberto endured beatings and humiliations driven by his father Ramón's anger—a rage rooted in his own childhood in El Salvador. Raised in extreme poverty in the countryside during the time of La Matanza—in which tens of thousands of indigenous peoples were killed in the span of a few months—young Ramón also spent time in a brothel and as the leader of a small band of thieves on the streets of San Salvador. Roberto looks back to the pain of his father's youth and examines both how he survived a life straddling intersecting underworlds of family secrets, traumatic silence, and criminal black-market goods and guns, and how these forces impacted his father's life and subsequently Roberto's own. Returning from El Salvador, Roberto channeled his own pain into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how intergenerational trauma affects individual lives and societies. In Becoming Américan, he makes the political personal, interweaving his story and that of his father with wider social issues, including gang life—notably that of MS-13—and the immigration crisis, to reveal the profound ties between El Salvador and the United States that have fueled the rise of both of these issues.
Reviews
"[A] memorable indictment of the civil war in Central America that drove a wave of migration to the U.S."
"But it's also a call for justice and change."
"The book is not particularly easy to read, in part because of the sometimes-violent content, but also because Lovato's work moves dizzyingly back and forth in time and place."
"First among them is a machete."
"This mix of memoir and history is an essential chronicle, solidly researched and carefully sourced, and enriched with some poetry and plenty of hard-won wisdom."
"It is a complex puzzle indeed, and Lovato is among the first Salvadoran-American writers to assemble it, shuttling back and forth in time, between countries and languages, to retrieve the pieces for a kaleidoscopic montage that is at once a family saga, a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the vicissitudes of history, community and, most of all for him, identity ..."
"Salvadoran-American journalist Lovato recounts in this anguished memoir his 2015 trip to El Salvador to investigate the country's horrific gang wars ..."
"Admitting the reality of the horrors one has seen cannot make them go away, but airing them might, at least, create the space necessary for a departure from history to become possible."
"He neither judges nor romanticizes the gang members he meets, speaking honestly to their struggles while never absolving them of their often violent behavior ..."
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