UNFORGETTING

Journalist and activist Lovato delivers a memorable indictment of the civil war in Central America that drove a wave of migration to the U.S.—and spawned gang warfare in the new country.

In the 1980s, gangs of young Salvadorans who called themselves “maras”—a name that derives, improbably, from the Spanish title of a Charlton Heston movie—became infamous for fighting with machetes in the streets of Los Angeles. It was not macho posturing, writes the author, whose family fled the U.S.–backed authoritarian regime, but instead desperation: They had no access to the guns that other gangs carried. “These skinny kids came together out of immigrant loneliness and their love of Ronnie James Dio and Metallica,” Lovato writes. “Their hardcore violence is a relatively recent development. Even today, most gang members aren’t killers.” As the Salvadorans became better organized and better armed, they formed the infamous MS-13: “The mara violence that escalated following the LA riots of April 1992 reminded us that time is cyclical, and that violence moves in spirals as the innocent choose between becoming the violent or the violated—or both.” Before that, writes Lovato, the Salvadoran kids were longhaired metal heads who hung out at convenience stores. Lovato’s meaningful title draws from the Greek word for truth, its literal meaning not forgetting, which is essential, since so many Salvadorans are trying to forget the violence that destroyed their homeland and continues to rage today. Lovato traveled throughout both the U.S. and El Salvador to study this violence, some of which he dismisses as overblown if politically useful propaganda—though its government-spawned versions, such as the Chalatenango massacre of civilians by elite Salvadoran troops, have proven very real. Lovato identifies a logical chain: Against the machete-bearing kids, the LA police became militarized, bringing the war back home and establishing a pattern that persists today.

A provocative, revealing work of journalism that explains gang behavior but does not idealize it.