History, memory, and politics: “unforgetting” in the diaspora

Born in San Francisco, California, Roberto Lovato was raised in the shadow of silence surrounding family history and trauma, a commonly shared experience among those in the Salvadoran diaspora. In Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas (2020) Lovato shares his experience growing up surrounded by this omnipresent silence and the personal and political stakes of intergenerational forgetting. Lovato states “the machete dismembers our humanity from our stories.”[1] He uses the machete as a metaphor to describe the ways the social fabric of this community has been cut, wounded, and disintegrated by a long history of militarism, war, migration, and also silence.

This memoir shifts chapter-to-chapter across time and space as Lovato weaves his personal sense of fragmentation within familial stories and Salvadoran collective memory. Lovato makes readers come face-to-face with the history and lack of accountability of U.S. imperialism and hegemony. From the mass graves of bodies of Salvadoran migrants’ lives who died on their journey north to the mass graves found in El Salvador, Lovato emphasizes the necessity of unforgetting to understand the roots of this violence and reality. Most significantly, Lovato posits that by unforgetting, we can do the work of understanding ourselves and our families, to “unforget” allows us to transcend our historic traumas, while also moving from the self to the collective remembrance and action to seek justice in the present and future.

Silence, Lovato explains, has commonly been used by many Salvadorans as a means of survival, as an attempt to forget, if that were at all possible. Silence, however, is personal as well as institutional. It is imposed by the military who made it a danger for people to claim, and properly bury, the bodies of their murdered family members during the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). There are also silences in official historical accounts of the war, what Sociologist Leisy Abrego refers to as the denial of state terror.[2]

The Salvadoran government is infamously known for destroying records and archives that document human rights violations and known for their passage of amnesty laws that shield the perpetrators of these violences from punishment. Silence is embedded in the post-war phrase “ver, oir, y callar” written on walls in El Salvador as a reminder to those who may witness gang-affiliated activity. For Lovato though, the toughest silence was in his home, with his father whose “behaviors were rooted in the silences of his childhood in Ahuachapan.”[3]

As he shifts between collective history and personal and familial stories, Lovato places the readers in 1930s Ahuachapan, El Salvador from the eyes of his nine-year-old father, Ramon. In Ahuachapan, ejidos – collectively-owned indigenous lands – had been expropriated in the late nineteenth century to establish the coffee plantations that would bring El Salvador into the world economy. Coffee became a profitable export, profits that came at the expense of the exploitation of local landless indigenous communities. The coffee industry furthered the drastic disparities in wealth in the region.

When workers organized to challenge the coffee industry’s worsening exploitation, the Salvadoran state defended the interests of capital with military repression. What occurred inspired Roque Dalton’s well-known poem, that begins Todos nacimos medio muertos en 1932. We were all born half dead in 1932. Lovato's father, we learn in this memoir, is one of the last living witnesses of La Matanza of 1932, a massacre of an estimated 30,000 indigenous people in response to the uprising led by the revolutionary marxist Farabundo Martí.

The government violently suppressed the rebellion, targeting communities for being “indios'' and suspected communists. Recalling this experience, his eighty-eight-year-old father said, “I remember everything.”[4] His father explained that the only time he had discussed this memory is when he spoke with other kids about it, but “after that, I never spoke about this again, not since childhood.”[5] By breaking this silence, Lovato shares his journey of understanding himself, his anger in his adolescent years, and, most importantly, transforming his contentious relationship with his “Pops.”

While many are not familiar with the history of La Matanza, today El Salvador is known as one of the most dangerous countries in the world and a place of “terror.” These descriptions are largely attributed to the MS-13, or La Mara Salvatrucha 13, a gang that originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Lovato engages what he calls the dominant “gang-as-cause-of-every-problem” thesis and seeks to understand the socio-historical context, conditions, and silences that gave rise to the formation of these gangs that “turns kids into violent, even murderous gang members.”[6]

Lovato traces the many ways the U.S. has championed militarism in El Salvador and the ways this practice is intimately entangled in producing and furthering violence and mass displacement in this small county. During the civil war, the U.S. supported the Salvadoran military government, monetarily and militarily. Salvadoran military leaders graduated from the U.S. Army School of the Americans (SOA) trained in counter-insurgency tactics intended to fight their “enemy,” the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and their sympathizers.

These SOA-trained leaders committed the worst human rights violations and abuses that occurred in the war. In the post-war context, the focus in El Salvador has shifted to the violence of street gangs. Lovato suggests that understanding the rise and growth of transnational gangs requires critically analyzing the Salvadoran state’s response, particularly the importation of U.S. anti-gang policing strategies (including Mano Dura and its varying subsequent iterations that trained and further militarized security forces), as a central contributor to the escalation of violence. Lovato explains that this “ends up increasing, rather than diminishing, violence and gang influence.”[7]

Along with the impact of U.S. sponsored law-and-order policies in El Salvador, Sociologist Steven Osuna suggests that understanding the roots of the maras requires also taking into account the structural changes of the world capitalist system, and specifically the impact of the emergence of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, in producing worsening economic inequalities that have shaped the terrain for this violence.[8]

The contemporary struggles and violences faced by Salvadoran society and the Salvadoran diaspora are immense. In the introduction Lovato recalls his visits with Salvadoran children caged in immigrant prisons along the border who expressed “Quiero morirme.” The psychologists treating them shared with him that they work to create the “conditions for [the children] to reconstitute the fragments of themselves into stories they can share, to stir the memory and imagination of that part of themselves that’s still resilient and powerful,” to which Lovato adds, is “something we will need to survive and move forward in this fragmented world of perpetual crisis.”[9]

Salvadoran history unmasks the facade of American exceptionalism, innocence, and liberal “democracy.” As part of the Salvadoran and Central American diaspora, Lovato’s story, journalism, and activism transcends borders. As we struggle towards a more just world, even in the midst of revanchist regimes in the U.S. and El Salvador, Lovato reminds us, we must begin by unforgetting. We must unforget state-violence and our historical trauma but also the spirit of collective resistance, from the uprising in 1932 to the clandestine strategies of the guerrilla in the 80s to the use of code words by imprisoned women organizing a hunger strike in detention along the U.S.-Mexico border, there is much to learn from the Salvadoran struggle.

In a globalized and increasingly fascist world, unforgetting is essential to building movements from below that are internationalist, anti-imperialist, and revolutionary. Like his family and friends did for Lovato, we must continue to plant seeds of radical thought, even if we must do so quietly.

Notes

[1] Roberto Lovato, Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas (New York: HarperCollin, 2020), xxiii.

[2] Leisy Abrego, “On Silences: Salvadoran Refugees Then and Now,” Latino Studies 15, no.1 (2017): 73-85.

[3] Lovato, Unforgetting, 96.

[4] Lovato, Unforgetting, 268.

[5] Lovato, Unforgetting, 271.

[6] Lovato, Unforgetting, 19.

[7] Lovato, Unforgetting, 48.

[8] Steven Osuna, “Transnational Moral Panic: Neoliberalism and the Spectre of MS-13,” Race & Class 61, no. 4 (2020): 3-28.

[9] Lovato, Unforgetting, xxvi.

Alexis Meza was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley in a Salvadoran and Chicanx family. She is an Ethnic Studies educator and PhD student in the Department of History at UC San Diego. She organizes with autonomist collectives in the San Diego borderlands alongside the broader migrant justice movement.