I was very fortunate to have this book accompany me during my special journey to El Salvador recently. Roberto Lovato’s memoir, which is driven by a search for himself as well as for the story of his father’s traumatic childhood story, are deeply relatable themes he develops masterfully from the start of his book all the way to the end.
By “unforgetting” or excavating the “half-dead,” “half-alive” memories of Salvadoran-American and U.S. history, Lovato introduces readers to new terms by which to assess this deeply buried past, which continues to inform present conditions between these nations’ governments, communities, and individuals alike. This sense of a “half-dead” existence for Salvadoran-Americans in particular was first placed on the page by Salvadoran-American poet Roque Dalton, in a poem commemorating the 1932 massacre of indigenous communities and peasant workers in El Salvador’s coffee towns; “La Matanza” (The Slaughter) of 1932 reportedly saw between 10,000 – 30,000 Salvadoran lives forcibly taken by ruling families and military General Maximiliano Martínez in a four-day span from January 22nd through January 25th of that year.
Unforgetting (Harper Collins) also treats the cyclical nature of violence upon “forgotten people” very thoughtfully, making the case that nothing which is supposed to be forgotten can simply vanish from the sight or the psyche of those of us remaining. This is because any conscious being, whether “half-dead” or “half-alive” who we encounter reflects us, most of all when we decide how to treat them. By extension, our collective treatment of–or policies towards–“survivors of history” itself is a matter of whether our governments and the norms they create are still half-dead or finally half-alive in their humanity and accountability.
The current trends a la the rhetoric of pundits like Tucker Carlson, which are neither new nor old but static, towards so many survivors of U.S. foreign policy and intervention in Latin America, as well as towards Latin American migrants to the U.S., suggests our approach is still half-dead. As such, Lovato’s memoir contributes greatly to the countless efforts to apprehend the callous regularity of U.S. empire, from San Salvador to the streets of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, and everywhere else it continues to dislodge and dismember families for private profit and power.
J.T.
