Author Roberto Lovato and award-winning broadcast journalist Juan González discuss Lovato’s book, Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS).
Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (Harper Collins), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” that the paper also hailed as a “groundbreaking memoir” that is “powerful.” Newsweek listed Lovato’s memoir as a “must read” 2020 book and the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of 2020. Lovato is also an educator, journalist and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, California. As a Co-Founder of #DignidadLiteraria, he helped build a movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off of bookshelves in the United States and out of the national dialogue. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France and the United States, among other countries.
Juan Gonzalez is an award-winning journalist with a career that has spanned nearly 40 years. He was a staff columnist for New York’s Daily News from 1987 to 2016 and has been a co-host for more than two decades of Democracy Now, a daily morning news show that airs on more than 1,300 community and public radio and television stations across the US and Latin America.
His investigative reports on urban policy, race relations, the labor movement and Latin America have garnered numerous accolades, including two George Polk Awards for commentary. Gonzalez has authored five books, including Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities; News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media; and Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse.
One of the original founders of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), Gonzalez served as the group’s president from 2002-2004 and was named to its Hall of Fame in 2008. Before he entered journalism, Gonzalez was a well-known 1960s activist, as a key figure of the Columbia University student revolt of 1968, and later as a leader of the militant Puerto Rican group the Young Lords, and of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights.
Event Recap
The Latinx Project was thrilled to have Roberto Lovato join us to discuss and share excerpts from his new book, Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. Unforgetting focuses on the larger issues that have plagued El Salvador such as civil war, gang violence, and migration, as well as Lovato’s own, more personal relationship to these concerns. He was joined in conversation by renowned author and journalist Juan Gonzalez, who engaged with him on the book’s central themes and implications for the contemporary moment of crisis in Central America. Their conversation highlighted the changing Latinx demographics in the US, as well as the need to combat the erasure of Central American stories, understand migration as the result of US-sponsored neoliberalism, violence, and climate change; and confront the deep histories of Central American issues. Lovato concluded with a call to militancy in approaching the telling of these stories, hoping to combat the exclusion of Central Americans in journalism and publishing.
He also left attendees with a list of Central American scholars, writers, and activists that are currently transforming these discussions: Leisy Abrego, Suyapa Portillo, Eduardo Contreras, Carlos Cordoba, Esteban Ozuna, Esmeralda Bermudez, Javier Samora, William Archilla, Esther Hernandez, and the contributors of The Wandering Song.