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” (xxiii). He uses the machete as a metaphor to describe the ways the social fabric of this community has been cut, wounded, and
