UNFORGETTING

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 ownshooting. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against its corrupt, fraudulent military governmen

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 n 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 Unforgetting 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.

Roberto Lovato is a writer and journalist working out of the San Francisco Writers Grotto. He recently completed a 3 year commitment as a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Berkeley's Center for Latino Policy Researche.

Roberto is also the recipient of a crisis reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center. Roberto is a frequent contributor to The
Nation magazine and his work has appeared in numerous publications including the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the Boston Globe, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, Salon Magazine, La Opinion, and other national and international media outlets.

He has also appeared as either a source or commentator in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Economist and Le Monde Diplomatique. He has also appeared on the network news shows of MSNBC, Univision, the BBC, CNN, CNN en Españo l, NPR, Radio, Bilingue,Democracy Now and Al Jazeera. He holds both an MBA and an MFA.