 Hi everyone, welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America, Code Pink's weekly YouTube broadcast of hot news out of Latin America and the Caribbean. This week I am proud to be in conversation with activist academic journalist and my friend Roberto Lovato, whose memoir Unforgetting, a memoir of family, migration, gangs and revolution in the Americas was released on September 1. Welcome Roberto, I'm so pleased to be in conversation with you today. Great to see you through this medium Terry. So when I first approached you about doing this conversation. I asked we talked about how we want to focus the conversation today and there's so many angles and so many themes that you present in this book and I just want to show the audience this is this is the new book. And you've done many, you've done quite a few interviews prior to the to today, and you said I want to talk about me as a US citizen, which of course you are you were born in San Francisco to Salvadoran parents and reading the book from that perspective as a US citizen was really in a way it was liberating for me to some of the things that you cover. The things that really hit me with this is when you talk about getting your papers and we'll back up for the audience as to how you got to Salvador and needed a new Sedgilla, etc. You wanted your papers in Salvador to say Roberto versus Robert, which was on your US passport and for me when I read that all this stereotypes and history of immigration to the US just started kind of pouring into my mind as to how when you come here, you're basically in subtle ways and an overt ways told to just forget where you came from forget the history of your country or culture your language, whatever violence you you fled whatever economic educational back of opportunities you fled you're here now, and we become this kind of mix, I wouldn't even call it a culture when when, especially reading your book and you when you when you talk about the richness of the Salvadoran culture. So that to me was a real like strong theme about just forgetting in general. But in the case of your book, you are also talking about the violence that that so many people forget on all levels emotional violence, family violence, state violence military violence violence, and leading to the into getting in order to survive. And that seems a lot of what you in this book is a very personal journey and a very personal unraveling for you but getting tapping into the some of the violence that occurred for your family or father specifically. Yeah, I you hit on nail on head I wrote the book. You never I don't think you I don't write with one singular purpose I write with different motives. One of my major motive for writing unforgettable was to simply get my story down on paper that I've witnessed over the last, especially 30 years of my life with the between El Salvador and the United States. It's obviously a personal story and you know tells a story of a family of family secrets. But it's also about the secrets of nations, nations like El Salvador, nations like the United States, and the way that these secrets can often have violent effects. So if you look at, for example, in the beginning of the book I have a quote by a great theorist of nations, Ernest Renan, and he basically says that forgetting is at the core, and at the beginning of nations. It's a fundamental part of it or the way I like to say is if you look under the hood of any nation you're going to find the bones and bodies of indigenous people and others slaughtered to create these ideas and so. You know, nations are very nations like progress are very genocidal concepts that have material effects and so the material effects trickle downward through the family. And what I call my SHI blank theory of state and family violence and so my mission in the book is to link my experience of family to my experience of the states of El Salvador and the United States and the violence between them. So it's an underworld journey of anything you know I go into the underworld journey of my family history my father's history which is very intense in terms of the kinds of violence that my family lived through in the 1930s in El Salvador during the age of when the Salvadoran government killed. Something on the order of 10 to 30,000 people we don't know in a matter of weeks and one of the most singularly violent episodes in world history as far as the numbers of people killed per day per month per week in a concentrated space, according to scholars at Oxford that I've interviewed. So the book also is is is a way to look at the present violence of say the government and the gangs in El Salvador that are perpetrating extreme violence themselves right and, and I do mean government because often time in the gang equation we leave out the government part and the counterinsurgency policing that was brought on by characters like those in my book like a guy named Attorney General William Barr of the Bush administration. Who's who's who's back, who's back with us and talking about gangs again he talked about gangs and he and he deployed massive FBI resources to begin the quote unquote gang war that we now know in the United States in the 1990s after the He's now back and after prop 187 here in California. Yeah, yeah, we were there. Yeah. So let's talk about, let's talk a little bit about the history of these gangs because this is something that he is really lost now in the US media and and therefore in the US narrative that these these gangs, particularly MS 13 were created in the United States. In Los Angeles, by young people who had no families who had come here either on their own or lost family here, Salvador and specifically Central Americans in general, and already there was a Mexican gang in existence. But this you talk in your book about where the term Mara comes from and how it really was about friendship, friends gathering families friendship gathering and how that whole term has been bastardized at this point and and and is and refers to a real significant form of violence but let's talk about the founding, the creation of the of the Mars in LA just so our audience has a really clear understanding that it is not the story we currently here. Yeah. And as I document in the book. The get the word models. I didn't even know what it meant I grew up with it. I was in the 70s in El Salvador I was, I was visiting El Salvador my family there. And you know people would call themselves La Mada, which was basically friend group of friends, hanging out on a corner playing soccer or playing or or or or different games hide and seek and it was La Mada. And so I watched as that word suddenly was adopted by young men in Los Angeles in Los Angeles Pico Union area where I work at an organization called caress and what was then called the Central American refugee center in the early 90s. And we were serving the Salvadoran and Guatemalan communities, providing legal services, etc. And we were our clients had these kids who had these tattoos with MS Mada, and we started kind of encountering these gang members who were coming together primarily at that time. Before that, like in the 80s, they were, they came together to listen to hard rock music like Metallica, Ronnie James deal and other kind of music that they liked and to protect. But they eventually found themselves having to protect themselves from larger better structured gangs, like what, like the bloods, the crypts, and the Mexican mafia. And so they had to start buying, you know, getting more formal and hardened to protect themselves in this environment. And to name themselves they call themselves Mada they took the word friend and applied it to them because they were friends who were listened to to rock music. Eventually, though that word has come to mean the heart of darkness evil quote unquote to everybody from the Obama administration who spent a lot of money researching and trying to help create this image of the evil quote unquote gang member, and now the Trump administration, the Pentagon, the US Southern Command, a number of scholars that I've been tracking over the years who have kind of made an industry out of the creation of enemies, you know that justify militarism in Latin America, and drug war in Latin America and drug war and police militarism here and now you have them fused in this thing I call, and that others like Stuart Schrader called counterinsurgency policing. Um, you know, as you know in the book I track, and I show the way that the models were used as a justification for this counterinsurgency policing that was brought by Salvadoran US Pentagon trainers who were training desk was in El Salvador came after the 90s after 92 came to LAPD and other police departments in the US to train the local police departments encounter insurgency gang policing. So it's complex this gang equation it's but it often excludes the police part of the equation and I put it back in. And so it's a really important variable and again, it's a very violent variable in this whole physical enforcement of a whole legal paradigm a whole and a whole national paradigm of who and what I would say the United States is, you know when we first talked about, Oh, having this conversation I had thrown out I'd like to talk about how those of us in the states are now seeing us foreign policy coming home, and if influencing domestic policy. Now say having read your book twice now that it really is about US domestic policy being exported that violent expansion of the of the US. And as you said earlier the genocide of of a hot and entire race of people is something that's that is part of US history that is rarely talked about, certainly not to the extent of the violence and heinous act that it was. That's used, you know, and then you go in to talk about this in 1930, 1932 El Salvador but it had already happened here in the States. And so to me it's almost like we're, we're seeing I think I really had it backward when for myself thinking about US foreign policy coming home and talking to you and reading your book it really is more of an exporting of US violence, which you and the later book, you know say is necessary for all empires to expand and I really hit me very hard to frame it that way. And I believe it's more accurate. Yeah, it's a it's a complicated. Culture of violence that is part of the core functioning of states right one of the things that defines a state is the control of violence. Right. According to political scientists and those that are into that. I think that. Yeah, it is an exporting but I prefer to talk about circuits. Because if you look at El Salvador right you have us trainers from the Pentagon going and training the outlook battalion that wiped out 1000 people in 19 December 1981. Half of those people were children under 12 half of those children under 12 were under six. I've seen the bones of those kids. I've spoken to people that have witnessed similar massacres. I was there when some of those massacres were happening in the later part of the war. And so, you know I come back from El Salvador to Los Angeles and I see the LAPD starting to get like you remember Adam 12. I don't know if you're. Yes. They're uniform really thin. Right. And I start button down shirts really thin and suddenly the police uniforms are getting puffier to the point of the Robocop uniforms that we have now. Right pretty soon they're going to be so puffed up beyond Robocop they're going to be like those inflated. Those inflated you know in the Macy's parade what do you call them. Yeah the inflated giant balloons right militarized because that's what they are the inflation is a is a as a reflection of of militarism in of US policing and so when those Pentagon trainers came from El Salvador for training the outlook battalion and the death squads. They came to the United States to start training the police. And that's when you start seeing this counter insurgency policing of what was known for example of the as the crash anti gang units. Right. And they targeted the gangs they started making the gangs more violent by pitting them against each other falsely arresting them, killing some shooting them in the back. You know doing all these things to divide conquer and kill the gangs so that they became more more violent. And my book is a is a is a personal telling of the wind of having witnessed all these different circuits because then remember those police and LAPD went to train El Salvador in some cases. In the post war era of the gangs in El Salvador so you have the US gang structures being born with the help of, of William Barr, and then you have William Barr sending US style policing to fight US style gangs. And then, you know it's astonishing the way that these circuits work. It's the same. I mean, I think you it's the same sort of circuit with with the arms trafficking from the US into Mexico. Yeah, and then back and forth. Yeah, and it's, it's very insidious and the fascinating thing with the gangs in El Salvador is that they originated here, many of the members US born and and then all deported to El Salvador. And so there's that exportation again and then how it all, like you said, I think circuit is a really brilliant description of it. You just mentioned, you know, in, in talking about all this violence that you've seen, you know, you've seen the bones of victims from 1932 to present day. And you also, you've seen them in the burial sites but you've also seen them, you know, in forensic labs. And one of the things you mentioned is in your book is how important these forensic anthropologists are. And as far as discovering the gravesites as far as defining, you know, determining how people died, but also in that process, allowing families and friends to recognize the death of a family or friend, and to start or I guess I will say to stop forgetting to start on forgetting, which allows for healing and moving forward. Thank you for bringing that up because with all the violence of El Salvador's history because it has been one of the most consistently violent places on earth since its founding in 1821. And with all the violence, what tends to get lost in the, in it is, is the tenderness like I like to say the, my journey is one to, to excavate the terror tenderness that survives the terror. And there's a lot of beauty in my book. I try to put a lot of beauty in my book I did the best that I could to put the beautiful and the sublime that I've encountered because I already saw what was coming like a lot of us in 2015. The journey of this book, and of writing it, that where the world was going and I anticipated that we were going to have to. I was, I wanted to contribute by bringing out whatever Jedi knowledge of transcendent knowledge I had about sustainable struggle. I've been in it for those that know me since the 1980s, early 90s up to the present, whether it was joining the FMLN guerrillas, whether it was as a journalist, whether it was co founding different organizations that have like presented the work, and that have done work of solidarity and others. There's always an undercurrent in my work of beauty and the sublime there's a, I like to say the strategic value to the sublime and the beautiful right now that we need to understand. That's why in the content and in the form that I wrote. I try to make it as beautiful as possible. And the beauty is contained in two of the dominant metaphors. The beauty is sewing my grandmother was a seamstress and my grandmother would take disparate pieces of a cloth to create these beautiful dresses for the prostitutes of the shanty town that she lived in in San Salvador during a great depression that made Steinbeck's dress look like a wine festival. You know, and so my grandmother in her mathematical and creative beauty would just size up somebody literally and create a dress for them that gave them some of the dignity back after La Matanza for example had erased indigenous identity as a public thing. In the same way and they were you know it's my grandmother was giving that person a piece of the dream that they had in by the same token right the dream of having dignity of being an indigenous princess in the case of one prostitute my my grandmother live next door to by the same token the forensic specialists sewed together that story so together the bones of a deceased this apparecido person to tell the story of what actually happened what were the final days of that person like to then give to the family. As I as I narrate the story the bones and therefore the beginning of some closure and the beginning of some unforgettable that I think individuals and families and nations have to undertake right now if we're to fight the the enormous crises we face we have to we have to have a political vision that it doesn't just look forward but that also looks backward in a clear way. And that's I think what the foundation for solidarity and and revolutionary politics of the future are So I'm thinking about a number of things simultaneously now what is coming right, you know, understanding the understanding the past and coming to terms with it is so important on on all levels moving forward and yes on a global scale more important now than ever. Particularly for young people, we older people really need to do the unforgetting to help them create a better planet for themselves and I I see that in so much of your personal story with your father because you as a young man really struggled without your, without your father, or because of your father's forgetting quote unquote, because of your father's forgetting that did not allow you as a young man, his son to really understand yourself, your family, your bicultural heritage, it was made for a very confusing frustrating and at one point violent youth. And I'd like you to talk about that because I think it's so important what you just said is for us as nations to come together and to forget, understand where we came from in order to go forward as peoples, and not just simply nation states and I think that is the experience of your personal life is really analogous to that. And that's kind of one of my points in my book is to show the connection between the person on the political. They really always are connected. My first rage against authority was against my father. You know, and like psychologists like R.D. Lang, you know, from the 60s, who wrote a book called the politics of the family and the politics, another book called the policy of the experience. You know, tells us that the first entry point for the state in our lives are in fact our parents to their subconscious, the way of the state propaganda education and other things insinuate themselves in the family. Families unconsciously sometimes adopt beliefs and words and beliefs that are kind of messages from the state. You can see Donald Trump doing it, but you could also see Barack Obama doing it. They're just different forms of the same thing. And so I was aware of this and I wanted to kind of show in my own example, the way that I was, I led this kind of crazy life and doing things that I didn't know why I did them, whether it was becoming, you know, a violent kid and, you know, engaging in criminal activity, or joining the FMLN. I didn't know why I did. I just knew that I wanted to do that. And then I go in, I discover a secret that I can't share with the, with the audience, Terry, because I'd be given away the whole book. People get angry with the story. So there's a big atom bomb of a secret that my dad has that I discover and that discovery of that secret. I hope and I try to show is the thing that connected my gut, literally my intestines, the tightness and trauma that I contain in my gut to, you know, it's umbilical connection to state violence. Right? Yeah, tightness in my gut was connected to the state violence of history that I didn't even know I was caring. But then I find out I did the excavation. So then that explained to me why I was such an angry kid, why I did crazy things. And it's been so liberating for me to write this book because I now have an arc explaining, you know, myself to myself, but also explaining my father. And it allows me to be more tender and loving towards my father who I had a lot of anger towards, because I understand more deeply what it was to live in the Great Depression. That made John Steinbeck's Great Depression look like a wine tasting, right? So, um, yeah, the healing is real in the writing. It's, you know, it's a fascinating read and it is, you know, it is a multi-level analogy. And the thing that really came through for me, you mentioned that you were, you know, careful to be sure you talked about beauty. And I think in the unforgetting, we re-encounter our humanity. That the forgetting is kind of pushing, you know, to heal emotional scars, physical scars, so that we can survive. And everybody has different levels of forgetting for very different reasons. And the whole nation-state forgetting is causing, you know, so much of the violence today, as you mentioned earlier. But that aspect of humanity that you keep bringing back into the book, the women you talk to who I think one young student in LA who talks to you about the garden she was sequestered in and climbing the trees and having this beautiful vision. The vista of the countryside, the fruit she was able to eat, and you just, you know, those are very human sentiments and experiences among all the physical violence. And I think that those moments that you bring out are so important. And I love the sewing analogy, the creation out of, you know, pieces, which is what so much of society is. Particularly, I would argue, for immigrants, like your parents and my grandparents coming to this country, these pieces that they bring with them, and what do you do next? You know, and your grandmother made beauty, made beautiful dresses out of remnants. And I just love that whole telling of her and her ability to create out of just remnants. And as you mentioned, that's the bones, the bones of these from these mass graves are remnants of physical remnants of human beings, but also remnants of people's lives, their greater lives, not their individual lives, but their families and society as well. Thank you. Thank you. That's what I was trying to do and I hope to elicit that in the reader. There's a third layer that's kind of unspoken. I kind of hint at it at the end. That's what, so what a forensic scientist did do, or what my grandmother did in terms of piecing things together. I try to do with words and you can see it at the end of the book where I'm at a table at Labouin coffee shop here in San Francisco in the Mission District. The table is a is my favorite table when I go there, people that know me here in the city. No, I'm in that corner, when we're not in COVID-19, working on my computer on top of a table that is a converted sewing machine that still has underneath the table. It still has the gears and they and the and the and the treadle of the singer sewing machine, the iron horse. And I'm typing there. I'm almost revisiting my grandmother being on my grandmother's lap as she was kind of creating the conditions for our livelihood in San Francisco, coming from the desperate and just devastating history of El Salvador coming here and showing those those close together to make us sustainable. I'm trying to do the same thing with our words by taking the fragments of my life and the experiences I have, one of which which I think is especially important to your audience is the experience of solidarity. Solidarity. I was part of, you know, the solidarity movement here in the United States, I was with care and with the committee of refugiados, and I actually made a point to try to draw out the beauty of solidarity and because there is a beauty and kind of connecting with something so far from us. And yet, doing and committing a piece of our lives like with people like my old friend Don White of committee and Saudi with the people of El Salvador like like this man gave up a large piece of his life before he died to the people of El Salvador. And I'll never forget him and others or people that I met in El Salvador who are, you know, guerrillas and guerrillas from Mexico from Spain from across the world I mean the way that, you know, the way that the way that say Hemingway or Orwell see saw solidarity with and of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. I saw the solidarity in El Salvador in the same way as a heroic act. And so I try to do at least a little bit of justice to that beauty, the beauty of that is his heroic act of, of joining a people struggle across borders, which I think is fundamental and seriously lacking right now here in the United States in our concepts of politics even on the, even on the left. Especially on the left, I would argue lost. Yeah. Yeah. And if it doesn't matter what race you are whether you're white, black, Latinx or whatever you call yourself. There's a, there's many people whose concept of politics is limited to the borders of the United States. And that's already. That's already basically an embrace of empire at a certain level, when, you know, when, when you fail to see the global context that the United States is in, and the connections, whether it's through immigrants through trade, through militarism through police models. If we fit, we're not going to get anywhere being boarded off in a multicultural movement. I, I could care less to Beyonce is somebody's ally, quite frankly, Beyonce is class wise, a billionaire. I don't know any billionaires who are our class ally. I think, you know, even though she, she has these black panther things that the super bolder, you know, I mean she also has, you know, Thai sweatshop labor women sewing, speaking of sewing, an empowerment outfits for for sale in the US for big money. So, anyway, I don't want to get distracted by Beyonce and all, but my point is, the concepts of politics are, I think are dangerously boarded off and I'm, I'm sharing the experience in my book of solidarity and of revolution, in order for people to as an active political imagination, so that people kind of start thinking about politics in the way we did in America Latina. Well, I have to say, you mentioned solidarity and my activism interest in Latin America really began when I was in sixth grade my sixth grade teacher introduced me to Mesoamerica and pre Colombian cultures and at that time I was growing up in the Catholic Church under liberation theology which you touch on in your book to as well as evangelical religions, and all these years in and out of Latin America and some just touching on work and and and then at other points in my life, you know, it being 100% of my time and work as more now. I have to say and I say this was great sincerity of all the solidarity movements groups of people communities of people that have made the biggest impression on me are the Salvadorans specifically those with a history in the fmln, as far as understanding and as far as understanding organizing and being able to come together and not be, I guess, petty about identity and things like that that there's the ability for Salvadorans to organize is impressive. It's rapid it's solid and people just come together and make things happen and I have consistently seen that over the years. And you see it with other organizations as well and other groups of people but with the Salvadoran community, it is consistent and has been consistent for the last 3040 years. It's very impressive and it was really something admirable. I tried to get at a little bit of that political culture that you and I both partook of and I mean I don't put it in the book but my theory about Salvadorans and politics and why, for example, one of every three people had adopted organized politics at the height of the war. And I saw in the article in 1989 about how there was a poll that said one of every three people was organized against the Salvadoran state and had adopted radicalized politics. So with some things like the density of El Salvador, very tightly small population, you also have like La Matanza creating sadly a more homogenous culture so that you don't have the organizing issues that you have in a place like Guatemala, we have to organize across different, a broader space of geography and a broader expanse of languages, for example. Right, you have all these different Maya Quiche, Maya Canjoval, different identities, thankfully, thank goodness, I wish El Salvador had more indigenous identity than it does but it's been forced to go underground. And so for different reasons, yeah, I bring that into the book to show the spirit of the matter that made Salvadoran organized one of the most thrilling experiences for many of us to the point where the CIA, for example, said that Salvadoran opposition and people's movement was one of the most effective people's movement in the Americas in the 20th century. And so I try to, in between the lines I'm doing my best to show whatever Jedi knowledge of revolutionary kind of organizing and spirit I could amass. But I do it through the telling the story of actual people who were revolutionaries and what they taught people like me. So I am thinking about several things simultaneously that you mentioned, you know, the Salvadoran culture being more homogenous since 1932 and that being part of the ability to organize, unlike a lot of the cultural diversity in Guatemala. And when I was reading your book, you know, you have so many synonyms you use for forgetting and one of the things that was that I've heard over and over again in Guatemala, specifically since, you know, the Maya people were given genocide status by the UN and how they were able to, after the attempt to completely exterminate them in the 80s, they talk about memory, which I think is, you know, their historical memory and not, they had to get to a place as a people, the Maya people where they could start talking about what happened to them their women specifically get the men talking about what happened to the women in their in their culture before they had to do this memory before they could actually admit the genocide and then petition for that status from the UN and I just think that's just one more heinous example of, of what people suffer. But what has to be done, first that unbearing that excavating unbearing that unforgetting that has to be done in order to heal and move forward on, you know, Absolutely. I wish I wish I had the time to do another book on Guatemala. You know, I think we have writers like Hector Tovar and writers in Guatemala who are far better equipped than I am to tell that story as there are Salvador and other writers actually I want to make that point to is that I mean, mine is just one story. And one of my motives for writing this was to demonstrate in fact that Salvadorans and Central Americans in the United States have the ability to tell compare as compelling and powerful a Salvadoran and Central American story has non Salvadoran and non Central American writers in the US have won prizes for I'm not criticizing any of those writers, but the fact is you can look into your bookshelf. You don't have any books about Central Americans, non fiction. This is the first non fiction book by a US Central American about Central Americans, published by a major big five publisher Harper Collins. So we've been here for, since the 19th century, and in large numbers since, you know, the 1950s. And so there are reasons that we haven't been afforded the space to tell our own stories including for example, the fact that 1% of books in the space are Latino Latinx books by Latinx authors 1%. So, and we're within the margins, because you've got to remember the big groups in the Latino Latinx space are Mexican, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Dominican and Cuban right I mean those are in the sense. Those are the ones that are recognizing in the case of Mexicans. It's a colossal community that has no literary publication record in the US reflective of its numbers. And that's not the Mexican and Chicano spot. That's the publishing industry fall because most Mexicans are on this side of the Appalachians rather than on the other side in New York. See, I think, you know, listening to you say this, I think that's all part of, you know, of the US nation state quote unquote forgetting. You know, the good part of the Western United States was part of Mexico and Spain at one point in time. And so you, you know, and there's that whole violent history as to how those Texas in particular how you know became, you know, part of the United States and they just you to not have more stories like yours. Or, or, or migrants who just who not even born here don't you know to hear those stories as to what the heritage is why people come I think it's intentional I have to say it's part of the it's part of the US nation state forgetting so to speak. I don't think you can erase a community of 60 million people in film in Sunday news shows in the political narrative of the United States, and in literature and other cultural and media systems with such just totality without it being having a degree of intentionality. And I think it's a it's an intentionality of a country that doesn't feel it can move beyond a black white narrative of itself. Many scholars of race and identity in the United States. So we had what known as the black white binary the conception that the United States is primarily just black and white and so, you know, you see this and, and, and, and those of us of who are neither black know why, although Latino is black right after Latinos are a large population and they're either. So, you know, those of us outside of that equation, kind of see this conception that's very obsolete and actually dangerous when you look, for example with the numbers of people identified it under this category of Latino whatever, getting COVID-19 the children among children the largest group that's getting COVID-19 or chill or Latino children. Of, you know, you know, death by police we're not hearing about the killings of young men here in San Francisco in Fresno in LA and out throughout the Southwest and on the East Coast, we're not hearing about that. We're coming upon Latinos to bring that up. And we are but we have to push even harder because the system doesn't seem to want to seem to say there's already enough room. And God bless the black community for for for for leading the way to abolishing police and and and bring in our awareness of the prison system and what's happening to black bodies. But, you know, we're going to advocate for our own dead and our own youth too. Otherwise, they're going to be continued slaughtering our youth with impunity and with invisibility and forgetting and forgetting. And then we just and then we have more young people suffering. You know, a childhood as as you did with the lack of understanding with the lack of knowledge with the lack of connecting any sort of continuum about your, your family or culture and yourself as an individual. That's exciting to me right now because I'm already getting responses from people who like yourself have already read the book. I got these notes from these young Salvadorans and Central Americans, and they're on fire for this because if only because they've never seen themselves in on the written page in the English language to read about themselves, they have to go read stories like Roke d'Alto and Claribel Alegria and Latin American writing, but they have no stories, except in in smaller presses and hard to get to spaces like an anthology that I was a part of called The Wandering Song, which is great, but you have this out of print, because it's so doubtful. So there's not a lot about us. So when these kids are seeing a major publisher with publishing a book that's about us. And coming out of the United States written by born here about us here. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a it's a seminal moment. And that's not even saying if the writing's any good. I mean, I don't know. I'll let the critics be the judges. I'll let the reader. All I'll say is that I put in total to make it as sublime and sublime and beautiful as I could, because I recognize not just for those Salvadoran and Central American kids but for those of us on the left those of us in solidarity. I use my book as an example of what I call the strategic value of the sublime and the beautiful at a time of epic crisis right now. Like I said, we're not going to face what we're facing right now in the world. You know, whether it's Trump, economic decline, you know, of neoliberalism that's continuation of neoliberalism, the militarization of our inner cities. COVID-19 and then if we deal with that, then we're going to have to go toe to toe with climate change. So we're not going to Democrat liberal or progressive our way out of this. We're going to have to develop something of another order. And I think that that that other order has to include the spiritual power given to us by the sublime and the beautiful that makes for sustainability of struggle. It's a fantastic story and I really, I'm so, I'm so happy that you wrote this. And I think that the message for all of us is really that you share is really, really profound. I mean, your story as the analogy for all of us to move forward is just is so is so important and so profound. And I know, Roberto, I promised you 2030 minutes today and we've been talking for almost an hour and I'm so thankful for that. Is there anything I want to show the audience your book again. Can you sit. Yeah. And read it and buy it read it and read it more than once, and then share it. Is there anything that that we should add to our conversation this morning before I let you go. You know, I, I would just add a big thank you to you and coat pink Terry for your work I've known you all for many years and you've been with it. And you know, you, you, you, the way you erase the, the border between femininity feminism and politics and and global politics at that has been a gift to us all. I want to commend you for that and thank you and especially with the work with America Latina that Medea and others have held. I also want to say that I just hope people understand my book is at its core a very hopeful book. It just takes a very underworld stark dark journey that I took so that you didn't have to to tell the story, but I do it with the intent to bring out the tenderness that survives the terror the stuff that we're going to need for a sustainable struggle. And I guess a lot of folks are struggling right now to, to find their way in struggle and in just living. And I would ask people to read my book as a, as my blueprint for how to survive an apocalyptic age. And so, you know, there's, there's, there's goodness and there's beauty and there's, there's, there's success to be had, despite it all and I just encourage people to keep their heads up as we face whatever challenges are before us. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time I'm thankful for your work and for your friendship. And, and thank you for this lengthy conversation I know you gave me so much more time than, than we had initially talked about. So I want to tell our audience that a conversation can also be heard Thursday on code pink radio broadcasting on WPFW DC WBAI New York City simulcasting on both stations, 8am Pacific 11am Eastern and then re broadcasting again 730pm Eastern. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. I'm going to reread your book now with yet more insight and I'm so thankful for the, the, the political analogy that it offers and it's so hopeful for young people and it's marching orders for us older people. And I think that you know one of the things I'll just say real enclosing because you mentioned the underworld and, and it makes me think of the responsibility of us older people which, which indigenous cultures so understand that older people are to leave the world better for the upcoming generations and you talked about going under into the underworld into the dark space but also you tell an indigenous story about that and how the, the bones of the people in the soil are the fertilizer for the life above, so to speak. Yeah, and I think that's that's a wonderful story and I think that's what we all need to be now the fertilizer for the future. Thank you. Thank you so much Roberto. Always wonderful to see you and speak with you. My pleasure, Terry. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye.