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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
"Lovato lives many lives — street tough, evangelical Christian, activist, guerrilla movement supporter — all of them Salvadoran ..."
"a memoir that situates his family's story within the broader history of what he dubs 'the tiny country of titanic sorrows,' Lovato describes a personal awakening to El Salvador's century-old cycle of violence, the process that prompted his turn to journalism as a means of grappling with the scale of the nation's trauma ..."
"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."
"A provocative, revealing work of journalism that explains gang behavior but does not idealize it."
"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 ..."
"Lovato delivers an intimate, gripping portrait of El Salvador's agony."
"In a time of national reckoning, such truths must be faced if we are to be serious about who we are and what we have done."
"The insights Lovato gleans about his own country's history ultimately allow him 'to understand my family in a more complicated way, one that accommodated both its lightness and its darkness,' he writes."
"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."
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