Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas

An LA Times Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Editors' Pick • A Newsweek 25
Best Fall Books • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"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.

Roberto Lovato is a journalist and a member of The Writers Grotto. He is one of the country’s leading writers and thinkers on Central American gangs, refugees, violence and other issues. Lovato is also a co-founder of #DignidadLiteraria, the national movement formed to combat the invisibility and silencing of Latinx stories and books in the U.S. publishing industry. He is also recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center and a former fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center. His essays and reporting have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, La Opinion, and other national and international publications. He lives in San Francisco.