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

Para mi madre, Maria Elena Alvarenga Lovato, mi verdadero corazn de meln y mi padre, Ramn Alfredo Lovato, Sr., el que supo vivir, a pesar de la oscuridad. With love and gratitude for teaching me to dive downward into darkness, on extended wings.

Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.... Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences. Unity is always brutally established.

Ernest Renan, What Is A Nation?

Now everyone is a gang member, or a terrorist, or a narcotrafficker.... Maybe next they will go back to just being Communists.

Ada Luz Santos de Escobar, former Judge of the First Court of Execution of Measures of Minor Infraction of San Salvador

los guanacos hijos de la gran puta,

los que apenitas pudieron regresar,

los que tuvieron un poco ms de suerte,

los eternos indocumentados,

los hacelotodo, los vendelotodo, los comelotodo,

los primeros en sacar el cuchillo,

los tristes ms tristes del mundo,

mis compatriotas,

mis hermanos.

Roque Dalton, from Poema de Amor

los guanacos hijos de la gran puta,

the ones who could just barely go back,

the ones who had a little bit more luck,

the eternally undocumented ones,

the I-can-do-it-all, the I-can-sell-it-all, the I-can-eat-it-all,

the first ones to take out the knife,

the saddest most saddest of the world,

my compatriots,

my brethren.

Translated by Roberto Lovato and Javier Zamora

• PopRamn Alfredo Lovato Sr., Robertos father
• rsula and FelipeRobertos friends who invite him to visit Karnes prison
• Elena and DavidSalvadoran mom and her son whose plight sparks Robertos journey
• Giovanni Mirandamechanic whom Roberto befriends in San Salvador
• Alex Snchezformer MS-13 gang member who helps guide Robertos journey into LA and El Salvadors gang underworld
• Ral Mijangoformer guerrilla commander who organized the controversial gang truce of 2012
• Santiagotop gang leader whom Roberto searches for and eventually meets with
• IsaiasRobertos driver in El Salvador
• Saul Quijadaforensic scientist at the Instituto de Medicina Legal, El Salvadors body counters
• Mara Elena RodrguezRobertos cousin and main family contact in El Salvador
• Reynaldo Patrizindigenous leader and guide to the history of the western coffee region
• Jos Raymundo Caldern Mornscholar specializing in the history of Ahuachapn, the homeland of Robertos father

• Clotilde Alavarenga (Mam Cloti)Roberto's maternal grandmother
• PopRamn Alfredo Lovato Sr., Robertos father
• MomMara Elena Alvarenga Lovato, Robertos mother
• Mam TeyRobertos paternal grandmother
• Omar (Om) Alvarenga, Ramn Alfredo Lovato Jr. (Mem), Ana Irma Herrera (Mima)Robertos siblings

• PopRamn Alfredo Lovato Sr., Robertos father
• Mam Tey (Maria Esther Arauz Lovato)Ramns mother, Robertos grandmother
• Mam Fina (Delfina Lovato)Ramns maternal grandmother, Robertos great-grandmother
• Don Miguel RodrguezRamns father, Robertos grandfather
• Mam Juanita (Juana Rodriguez Arreola)Ramns paternal grandmother
• Alfonso Lunaolder friend of Ramn and radical university student
• Maximiliano Hernndez MartnezEl General, dictator of El Salvador
• Farabundo Martrevolutionary leader

The machete of memory can cut swiftly or slowly.

Its August 4, 2019. Pop and I are watching news of the latest shooting rampage. A white supremacist slaughtered twenty people in El Paso yesterday. Most of the victims were people who looked like us, people whose last names end in z. This shooting and the one in Dayton days before have the country aghast. The El Paso shooters declared motivepreventing the Hispanic invasion of Texashas friends talking or posting on social media about the possibility we may have to take up arms to defend ourselves. No stranger to guns, Pop has other concerns.

Those fucking gangs are ruining El Salvador, he says suddenly, as if out of sync with the more urgent news in the Spanish-speaking United States. A few minutes earlier, the newscast that reported on the El Paso massacre also reported on the relentless killing in the tiny country of titanic sorrows that bore him.

Pop has never met a member of MS-13, the most notorious of these gangs. Over the course of several decades, Ive met dozens, and even befriended members of a gang that the president of the United States compares to Al-Qaeda and calls animals who, he says, have literally taken over towns and cities of the United States.

I nod, as if silently agreeing with Pops gangs-as-cause-of-every-problem thesis. The snake in my gut lets me know theres no room to deal with the shooting and Giuliani and Barr and Pop all at once.

Yeah. Youre right, Pop.

The news from El Paso and my friends terrified social media responses tighten my shoulders and neck, my body reminding me of those times someone has tried to hurt or kill me. It brings back a memory of sitting at Pops dining room table last April. I was helping him pay some overdue bills, while he watched Animal Planet. During a commercial break, Pop stood suddenly and hobbled back to his bedroom. The soft steady skss-skss-skss of his fluffy gray orthopedic slipper rubbing against the faded linoleum sounded faster than his usual pace.

A minute later, another, faster-paced skss-skss-skss signaled he was navigating his way through the kitchen toward the living room. As he neared the table, he stopped and stood next to me.

I looked up and smiled at him. He had a strangely familiar look on his tense, unshaven face. His eyes like daggers, looking at me with a wrath I hadnt seen since my adolescent years, when our anger was at its mutual worst.

I raised my eyes in disbelief when I saw his hand wrapped tight around the dusty, varnished black handle of a machete. Without warning Pop swung his machete toward me, screaming, You drogadicto son of a bitch! Stop trying to steal my money!

I glanced at the ninety-six-year-old hands clutching the machetes handle. The flags of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador on the old souvenir were about to come down on my head. I jumped to Pops side and grabbed the machete before he could finish the act.

Pop stood dazed, and frustrated, and alone. I rushed out of the dining room to hide the machete downstairs in a safe corner of the garage. He rarely went into the garage, since he stopped driving two years ago at age ninety-four. From down below, I heard my cousin Anas hurried footsteps rushing from her room through the kitchen and into the dining room. I remained downstairs a few minutes to let my cousin chill Pop out.

In the cool silence of the garage, a couple of five-by-three-foot cardboard boxes sit side by side in the shadows beneath the stairs. The boxes bear musty old clothes, cheap new blouses, radios, calculators, TVs and other ancient electronics, and outdated toys, remnants of my familys contraband empire, once a source of incomeand serious family conflict and inner conflict of my own.

Minutes later, the mellifluous guitars and layered three-part harmonies of Golondrina Viajera, a bittersweet bolero by Trio Los Condes followed by the soulful, dreamy sounds of Jose Feliciano singing La Barca, another nostalgic Pop favorite, signaled Pops latest storm had subsided. It was safe to come back upstairs.