To pushback, I'm Aaron Mate.

The award-winning journalist Roberto Lovato is the author of a new book.

It's called Unforgetting, a memoir of family, migration, gangs, and revolution in the Americas. Hi, my name is Robert Lovato,

journalist and author of Unforgetting, a reported memoir excavating the real American dirt

and these headlines about MS-13, Caged Central American Children, and the humanitarian crisis

of immigration, headlines in which the voices of Central Americans in the United States

have been silenced and forgotten.

Unforgetting is also about an underworld journey.

My journey across the cities, forests, and deserts

of the 2,500 mile chain of forgotten, dead,

and devalued life that begins in El Salvador,

where I visit mass graves, morgues, and hideouts,

where gangs and governments have killed, dismembered,

and disappeared their victims for decades.

Along the way, I encounter gang leaders, desquad operatives, and guerrillas, who reveal their

sometimes startling truths.

Unforgetting also chronicles my inward journey to find the stories of revolutionary hope, poetic

imagination, and the tenderness that survives the terror. Unforgetting also leads me to

Los Angeles, the birthplace of the gangs that would later be exploited for political gain.

Eventually, I returned to my birthplace, San Francisco's Mission District, to the stories of my immigrant family,

including those of my father Ramon,

who bore the astonishing secret that would alter my life.

...