Unforgetting

July 27, 2020
Salvadoran-American journalist Lovato recounts in this anguished memoir his 2015 trip to El Salvador to investigate the country’s horrific gang wars. Along the way, he visits mass graves, and speaks with a gang chieftain enamored of the Hunger Games novels and a police official who hints at extrajudicial executions of gang suspects. In Lovato’s telling, the carnage is an American tragedy: El Salvador’s current gangs were founded in California by refugees from the country’s civil war in the 1980s, in which thousands of civilians were killed by the U.S.-backed military and right-wing death squads battling FMLN insurgents. It’s also a personal story as he revisits his work with the FMLN and a love affair with a traveling companion. He weaves in the troubled saga of his father, who as a boy in 1932 witnessed La Matanza, a massacre of thousands of Salvadoran peasants and Indigenous people by an earlier generation of death squads. Mixing fraught reminiscence with vivid reportage—his driver, a Salvadoran Army veteran, recalls a mission to recover the corpses of comrades: “When we started picking them up, we yanked the meat right off them, like when you have a fried fish and the skin and meat fall right off”—Lovato delivers an intimate, gripping portrait of El Salvador’s agony.

August 1, 2020
Journalist and activist Lovato delivers a memorable indictment of the civil war in Central America that drove a wave of migration to the U.S.--and spawned gang warfare in the new country. In the 1980s, gangs of young Salvadorans who called themselves "maras"--a name that derives, improbably, from the Spanish title of a Charlton Heston movie--became infamous for fighting with machetes in the streets of Los Angeles. It was not macho posturing, writes the author, whose family fled the U.S.-backed authoritarian regime, but instead desperation: They had no access to the guns that other gangs carried. "These skinny kids came together out of immigrant loneliness and their love of Ronnie James Dio and Metallica," Lovato writes. "Their hardcore violence is a relatively recent development. Even today, most gang members aren't killers." As the Salvadorans became better organized and better armed, they formed the infamous MS-13: "The mara violence that escalated following the LA riots of April 1992 reminded us that time is cyclical, and that violence moves in spirals as the innocent choose between becoming the violent or the violated--or both." Before that, writes Lovato, the Salvadoran kids were longhaired metal heads who hung out at convenience stores. Lovato's meaningful title draws from the Greek word for truth, its literal meaning not forgetting, which is essential, since so many Salvadorans are trying to forget the violence that destroyed their homeland and continues to rage today. Lovato traveled throughout both the U.S. and El Salvador to study this violence, some of which he dismisses as overblown if politically useful propaganda--though its government-spawned versions, such as the Chalatenango massacre of civilians by elite Salvadoran troops, have proven very real. Lovato identifies a logical chain: Against the machete-bearing kids, the LA police became militarized, bringing the war back home and establishing a pattern that persists today. A provocative, revealing work of journalism that explains gang behavior but does not idealize it.

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Starred review from August 1, 2020
In a memoir that is at once profoundly personal and historically significant, accomplished journalist and scholar Lovato digs deep into his own troubled past to embark on the superhuman task of "unforgetting" the tortured history entwining his family, El Salvador, and the United States of Am�rica. In short, powerful chapters narrated in a fervent first-person voice, Lovato deftly guides the narrative from the 1930s when his father was a child during the brutal U.S.-backed Mart�nez dictatorship to the 1950s on to 2000, a period during which his family migrated to California during El Salvador's Civil War and the L.A. riots, and the present, when his father is an elderly man with dementia and Lovato is a professor supporting gang rehabilitation and a new Central American Studies degree program, while gang members are declared terrorists and Central American refugee children are jailed in Texas. Lovato braids together multiple points of view as he relates gripping true stories populated by heroic, doomed, resilient, and unforgettable characters who shine in their humanity, hope, and endurance. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

January 8, 2021

In this challenging and rewarding book, journalist and activist Lovato passionately weaves his own highly personal account with those of the people of El Salvador along with Salvadorans in the United States. As portrayed here, they share a unified narrative that Lovato and many others have lived in the decades leading up to the present day. His book takes readers on an exploration of his recollections, including his memories of his father's experiences in a violent 1930s anti-dictatorship uprising. While Lovato explores his and Salvadoran's remembrances, he incorporates history of both El Salvador and the communities in the United States to which people migrated. He also argues against atrocities and multiple wrongs visited on Salvadorans. 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. But, overall, he takes readers into the minds of those who lived through and often propagated violence affecting the lives of so many other Salvadorans, including himself. VERDICT Lovato's revealing story enables us to look within minds and hearts that have been molded by immigrants' experiences in their home country and their adopted one. A worthwhile account that brings a personal face to a complex, nuanced issue.--Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato

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