 Welcome everyone. Thank you for being here today in the San Francisco Public Library. I'm Michelle Jeffers, the Chief of Community Programs and Partnerships. Before we begin, as you can see, our authors are already here on the stage today. But before we begin, let me take care of a little bit of business. First, I want to acknowledge that we live and work here on the land, the unceded land of the Ramatosh Ohlone people. We acknowledge that they are the rightful owners and stewards of this land, and we thank them for allowing us to have our library in this space. Again, I'm Michelle Jeffers with the library. I'm also on the board of Litquake. So I'm delighted to be here to welcome you to this very special Litquake Library Alta Journal Friends of the Library co-branded event. I'm pressed to see all of you on this windy, windy Saturday. So thank you so much for making your way up here and finding us on the sixth floor. Today is the last day of Litquake, so thank you for making it to this event. If you're still feeling inspired and party happy, I hope you join us at the Lit Crawl tonight through the mission. I also want to just acknowledge that Jane Ganahl, one of the founders of Litquake is here in the back of the room. So proud to be working with Jane, such an amazing person who developed this amazing festival. Now I want to welcome Alta Journals Managing Editor, Blazariga to the stage to talk about our authors. Thanks for coming. This is a real family event, literally, right, between the library and Litquake and Friends of the Library and Alta. We're just delighted to be here. And my family. As excited as I am. What's that? And my family. Yeah, that's what I said. It's a family event. I don't understand anything. Anyway, so my job today is to introduce Roberto and Vanessa. Roberto Lovato is an educator, journalist and writer based at the Writers Grotto here in San Francisco. As a co-founder of Dignidad Lataria, he helped build a movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off bookshelves in the United States and out of the national dialogue. He's a recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center. He has reported on numerous issues, violence, terrorism, the drug war and the refugee crisis from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France, the United States, among other countries. Vanessa is an award-winning best-selling author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, A River of Stars, was named to the Washington Post and NPR's best books of 2018 lists and has been called A Marvel by O, the Oprah Magazine, and Delightful by the Economist, her short story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities was a New York Times editor's choice. It received an Asian Pacific American Award in Literature and was also a finalist for a California Book Award and a New American Voices Award. Her new novel, Forbidden City, is available now. And in my role as managing editor at ALTA, I've had the honor of editing both Roberto and Vanessa on articles at ALTA. Most recently, Roberto's essay about psychedelics and life in the mission, it's called Gentrification of Consciousness and Vanessa's incredible short story, Oreo Arroyo. It's about what happens when some young teenage boys crash a party where a stripper has been hired, you know? What could go wrong? I know who that's about. And for those of you who may not be familiar with ALTA Journal, I invite you to please stop by our table, we're a prize-winning arts and culture quarterly devoted to California in the West. We have copies for sale, including a limited number of the issues featuring Vanessa and Roberto's writing. And if you sign up today, special offer, you get five issues for the price of four. And I also encourage you please to stop by the Friends of the Library table and support Roberto and Vanessa, their books are for sale and I'm told if we're good, they may even sign some. And of course, since we're at the library, you can also check out their books or go to your local brands and check them out too. So thank you for your time and support of Litquake and without further ado, over to Vanessa. Okay. Thank you so much for that introduction, Blaze. And thanks to all of you for coming here today. It feels really special to be here in conversation with Roberto. I think his amazing book, Unforgetting, came out in the middle of the pandemic. So this is the first live in-person conversation, right? In conversation, pretty much. Yeah. I was in conversation with myself somewhere else. Exactly, exactly. So, and I don't think we could have asked for a better, warmer crowd. So. Oh yeah, just gratitude to Melissa and Alejandro and Anise and the people that organized and Litquake for co-sponsoring and Blaze and Alta, you know, just generous. And especially I want to thank my family who's here in the front row today and my closest lifetime friends who I will take my vengeance on when I read a little while and a little while. Well, Roberto had it a bit before to talk about this conversation. And I think one of the things that's so special about having this conversation here and today and with those of us gathered is it's a very San Francisco story, although there's a lot of reporting in El Salvador as well. But on the cover is Hunt's Donuts, right? Hunt's Donuts? Hunt's Donuts. You name check the Randall Museum, Cafe Bo'em, Folsom Street. So yeah, could you talk about what it's like to be doing, you know, Local Boy Makes Good, let's say. Well, I don't, you'd have to ask my family if I have Mounted any good, but. But before anything, I want to thank you, Vanessa, because as soon as I called you to ask you, you were just without hesitation. You've always been a friend, a comrade in word indeed. So thank you so much. And a thoughtful one to boot. Well, we'll get into the conversation, but he's the best co-conspirator one could ask for us. Yeah, well, the foundation for us, my family here is with these two people who I wanted to be with me today. My dad, we just lost him a few months ago. So I wanted to make sure we raise him up. So my story begins and ends with my mother, Mariana Lovato and my dad, Tramundo Lovato, and my grandmother, Mamate, who we'll talk about as well. And it's a, you know, I want to celebrate them. I feel moved because I miss my dad and my mom, but I want to celebrate them today. So yeah, it's a, my cover also has Horseman Junior High School and my family and I are so, so mission, so hardcore mission. This man here, who has known me since he was literally cleaning up my shit as a baby, my brother Omar, went to school with this guy you might know of, Carlos Santana. And so that's how mission we are. We grew up on 25th and Folsom and El Salvador, people from El Salvador. My brother Ramon and I are the only ones that were born here, but everybody else born over there, like my other family that's here in the front, you know, and we, you know, Salvadoranos don't really have a story. We're an un-stoyed people, by and large. It tells you a lot about publishing in the United States when this is the first book in the English language written by a US born Salvadoranos, of which there are millions, to be published by one of the big five published, the first non-fiction book. And so we have a big problem in fiction when 60 million Latinx, Latino peoples are represented by less than 1% of the books in the United States. So I felt a need to tell the story of our people because what's the dominant story of Salvadoranos? What is it? Civil War. Civil War, that's, you're from the 80s, man. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Now, the gangs, there you go. Gloria, my friend, is up to date, has tattoos and everything on her. You can talk to her about gang life later. So yeah, gangs. And that's like not all there is to us. There's a lot more. And I wanted to make sure that that was part of the historical record in San Francisco, in the United States, and throughout the hemisphere. Yeah, I mean, not only when you were teaching at Cal State Northridge and having your students scan stories to see what was being portrayed about Central Americans and Salvadorans, and then the audit you did for Columbia Journalism Review. So maybe you could speak a bit about just, like over the decades, that lack of representation and what it ultimately means for how that leads to things like people getting dehumanized or, yeah. In a racist, white supremacist society like the one unfortunate that we still inhabit, people are put in boxes. And these boxes are gendered, are racialized, are classed, in particular ways, so as to take the humanity from people. In the case of Salvadoran, we have an especially and a very particular kind of dehumanization where, like I did some research for the Columbia Journalism Review, which is one of the preeminent media organizations in the country. And I looked at the reporting on, remember when Donald Trump was following Barack Obama in caging and separating Central American children by the tens of thousands? I know you want to forget Obama did it, but he did. So like when Trump followed it, that was the biggest story of 2018. So as a journalist, I went and I analyzed the coverage with some volunteers. And we looked at, OK, as a journalist, I want to know who your sources are. What's the sourcing here? On MSNBC, on CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, you name it, when they're talking about the caging and separation of children in the Trump era, how many Salvadoran scholars, like my friend Lacy Abrego, who heads up the Chicano Studies and Central American Studies at UCLA, how many Central American scholars? Zero. How many Central American lawyers, like those at Cares and here in San Francisco? Zero. How many Central American lawyers? Zero. Community leaders, zero. The only images, I mean, basically, the number is best stated in Salvador, ni mierda. No había ni un centro americano en la historia de los centro americanos, not a single Central American in the telling of Central American stories in the United States. The United States publishing industry and followed the median, preferring white women to be the tellers of Salvadoran stories, for example. So I decided, I'm going to do something about that. If you get to know me, that's kind of how I am. I kind of say, I'm going to do something about that. And I try my best to do something about it. So that's why I produce this, in order to rescue our silence, rescue ourselves from the silence imposed upon us. And I want it to be an example for other Central Americans that we would go out and tell our own stories. And what makes Unforgetting so unforgettable is it's both a memoir, but also deeply reported. There's three different storylines, 1930s El Salvador, your time growing up in the mission, your return in 2015. So do you want to read from this section? All right, here's where I get my one of the things about writing a book. I really encourage you to write a book. You know, I know some of you are, but you get to take revenge on those who've wronged you throughout life. I'm going to name names now, because that's what I do as a journalist and as a public advocate. Now I'm going to name names here in San Francisco of people without whom their book, not just the book, but without whom I would be possible. My family lived at 2911A Folsom between 25th and 26th, down the street from the Army Street Projects, three 10-story dirty, graffitied white towers full of friends, music, and music, parties, and pain. At one time, up to 12 of us, parents, brothers, sister, cousins, tenants, and friends of the family, lived in our four-bedroom apartment, which included a converted kitchen at a closet as bedrooms, where me and Omar and Ramon would sleep. Besides the smell of cigarettes and Jovan musk oil, Revlon Charlie, and other cheap cologne and perfume, the dominant smell at the party in our apartment was that of salsa. Mom's special mix of spices, pepitoria, dried pumpkin seeds, ajonjolí, chile pasilla, sticks of canela, bay leaves, and others, passed down by her ancestors over hundreds of years. Set on a hot fire, then ground and blended into a sauce and mixed with grilled tomatoes, red onion, carrot, and bell peppers, the salsa glazed, the 30-pound bird that mom and my grandmother, Mamate, were using to make the turkey sandwich, the light known as panes con chumpeh. Salsa was a smell and taste of family joy. The Mexican and Salvadoran maids' mom worked with at the St. Francis Hotel and the Cuban, Mexican, and Salvadoran janitors' pop worked with at United Airlines, all crowded alongside cousins and other family members, eating panes con chumpeh and washing them down with alcohol. Pop's music helped the guests metamorphose into party animals, dancing to mambos by Perez Prado, salsaing to Afro-Cuban sounds from Sonora Matanzera and Celia Cruz, or singing together the classic Mexican rancheras by Vicente Fernandez and my favorite, lucha vía. I'm gonna skip briefly. Pop was always styling at the parties. His wavy curly black hair, big forehead, big nose, and thin mustache that we thought made him look like Javier Solis, the Mexican singer whose love songs and rancheras he and mom loved. I thought he looked more like the bubbly, debonair British actor, David Niven. After they danced, mom and pop played la bala, a traditional Salvadoran cumbia in which the singer acts, asks the dancers to do fun things like lift one leg or rub their bellies or give the person you're dancing with a kiss. Omar, my mom's son, the oldest one of us kids, started dancing. My sister from dad, Iana Irma, Mima, who was on Zane joined in as did Ramon Jr. Mem, who at 17, rode way deep in the salsa and soul dance world. Everybody danced, including me. Let me move over to my grandmother now. And so Mamate's portrait was placed in the center of the big wall in our living room alongside that of Mama Clotty, my grandmother on mom's side. We had a picture of mom's dad too, but not of pop's father, Don Miguel, or Don Miguel's family in El Salvador. I didn't know anything about them and wondered why I didn't. I wondered what Don Miguel and his family looked like, what they acted like. And if I looked and acted like them, I felt cheated. They, this wanting to have a better sense of family history made me value and love Mamate all the more. During the party, Mama Tate played cards in the kitchen on a velvety white table cover used expressly for that purpose. I went and sat on her lap as she lauded over the game with her sweeter but sharper version of pop's humor and charm. I started strumming the thick, gorgeous labs of skin and fat that hung from her arms like I was beating eggs as I had since I could remember. I often did this while she showed on her electric singer with the pedal she let me push. So she said, looks like you're having fun there, Mejito. Got yourself your own little guitar with my arms, huh? Yes, abuelita, I answered. Happy to be at the table with her. I love playing your arms. Oh, well, she said, I'll tell you what we're gonna do. Oh boy, I thought to myself, her tone usually meant, I was gonna get some Salvadoran milk chocolates, money, or another killer grandmotherly treat. She grabbed me from her lap and stood up next to the table. I stood smiling, wondering what she was going to say. Okay, me muchachito, she said, while raising her eyes and smiling. So why don't you put your hands through your zipper, grab your little balls, and beat them like you're making a tol, hot indigenous drink made of corn and a pour or something with them. But leave my fucking arms alone. I love you, but you're not going to be playing my arms or pieces anymore, got it? Thank you. Yeah, you can see where the toughness runs in the family. And the tenderness. Yes, and the tenderness. And definitely I will, in a little bit, we'll talk more about Mamate and G and all the strong women in your book. But I'm thinking maybe we could, this novel is also very, novel, this book is also very much about your relationship with your father and the sort of complications and then the realization that how intergenerational trauma and silences, how that not only shaped your family, but policy on gangs and the sort of Salvador national identity. And I was hoping you could speak to that. Yeah, one of the places I start the book, because I started three times at three different time periods, one of them is an immigration prison in 2014. I would go to these prisons that the ice would put way out in the farthest reaches of South Texas, like where my friend Laurie is from, even south of there, where the US government didn't want you to know, we didn't want journalists to go or lawyers to get to go to these places where I met children who they had these little scars on their neck because they try to hang themselves or their mothers who had scars on their wrist, thank you, because they tried to slash their wrist after being separated from their children and this didn't happen under Donald Trump. I'll just say that. So I went down there and I opened, and this kid, I'm like avoiding El Salvador because El Salvador is a strong drink to take. Got some heavy things in its history and its present, just like the United States is now. So like, but in a different way. And so, you know, I'm like, I don't really want to deal with Salvador and things. And then this kid spills the beans of his story of what happened to him, how he saw his uncle's face shot and he could see through his teeth and he could see his brain and try to be so big, but this is the stories that I would hear over and over again and I was avoiding. And this six-year-old child just like burst open my heart and forced me to say like, I'm going to do something about this. So I decided to go down and tell the story of what I've known and lived. And I thought I was going to tell the story as a journalist, going down to meet gangs in secret hideouts, being with Desquad people. And that's also all in there as well. All in there. And then I realized, shit, I need to put myself in there because I know things about being Salvador myself. I can't just tell it as a journalist. And then I realized, damn, my dad has this heavy secret that he never talked about, that I had to go in and find out about, that I won't tell you about because I want you to read the book. So. But I think maybe we could talk about La Matanza for those who don't. Yeah, yeah. I'll always say that Salvador has been one of the most consistently violent places on earth since not just 1932, but since its foundation in 1821. Just if you look at graph, I've talked to people at Oxford, like Anders Sandberg who told me that El Salvador in 1932 was arguably the single most violent place in world history in terms of the numbers of people killed per day, per week in a concentrated space. They did these graphs and studied like the Holocaust in World War I, World War II and the Armenian genocide in El Salvador was this little dot above all of them on his graphs. And I'm like, damn, man, I think I know something about this. So there's a connection I wanted to make between these children who are living today, their violence in generations, like my nephew, Eric, he lived, he was born into war. And they came to the U.S. and then he was shipped out to Iraq and Afghanistan. So he grew up just knowing war, but we don't talk about it. We see each other at parties and we're just there and there's these deep, heavy stories lying in the background. So I wanted to make the connection between these children in the present and my dad when he was a kid and things that he dealt with. And then I realized, damn, I'm kind of the middle between there. And how have you been affected? And how I've been affected by violence and things in different settings. So I had to put myself in and I ended up writing not the journalistic book that I was gonna write, but a more memoir-ish book. Well, but it's all, that's what's so appealing about the book. There's like those different modes and tones and what makes it so powerful. Yeah, I learned a lot about writing. Right now, by the way, I'm a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And I realized, even at this stage of my game, I feel I get imposter syndrome. You know, we all do. We don't feel, if you're a aspiring writer and you feel like an imposter, that's kind of part of how this system makes you feel when you're not Roxanne Gay or something. So don't let that hold you back. And so I think we need to tell these stories. And that was really my driving force. Yeah, well, but speaking of systems, I think you so skillfully depict those systems of oppression and depict the history and how the U.S. involvement then and now has shaped the violence that we see, you traced how Giuliani's broken windows theory then led to crackdowns and policing that then, I mean, you just, could you maybe just explain that and then, you know, it's just so effective. I don't know if you're talking about this. I just sound more like you're left disoriented kind of ideas being imposed on my story. I have people know me, no, I'm a good liberal. I vote Democrat, be Obama kind of guy. So I'm kidding on that one. So no, the U.S., the blood of El Salvador is all over every single president of the United States, Republican and Democrat, but we don't live in a system that tells us the United States is as bloody an empire as it is. So we can all live and have our five 401ks and retire and all that and feel good about ourselves, being American, while Russia and China and all these evil countries are doing all this evil stuff when in fact, the story of the United States is one of blood and destruction. As much as this is about like some of the good things that come out of this country, I don't deny the good things. I just take a different perspective as a Salvadoran but also as a descendant of indigenous people. Like I found out in writing my book that my great-grandmothers on both sides were indigenous, people not white indigenous people. So there's a whole story underneath any country that's a Native American story and it doesn't look like you see on TV. You're starting to see it in some of the stuff like on Netflix and whatnot. But yeah, and I think you are able to take that longer. Well, there was a moment where you visit a family in the aftermath of, I think a family had been killed by U.S. backed or trained troops and could you maybe describe how that, you went to that realization of being not only angry about the Salvadoran government but kind of seeing that connection to the U.S. Yeah, I started off my journey here in San Francisco working with organizations like Caresen, Cresen, and this was during the war and I started becoming aware of stuff about the history of the Salvador. I didn't know, because I grew up kind of with a postcard view of El Salvador like many kids do, like, oh, I don't know anything about it and so I started working with refugees here and then I decided to go down there and I worked with an organization called Criptes which worked with displaced and refugee populations and I saw things that no human should have to see, you know, what they do, what a bomb will do to a child, what a strafing of a town will do to an entire town of elderly people, mostly. Places like, you know, I wasn't there when it happened but, you know, I visited afterward, I've seen the bones of the people slaughtered this one town of about a thousand people was wiped off the face of the earth, they killed it, almost every single person except for maybe one or two survivors. Half of the people killed in that town were under 12. Half of those children under 12 were under six. Under six years old, even pregnant women were killed as well. This is the, and so these troops were, the people that perpetrated that slaughter were trained at the School of the Americas for bending Georgia by the United States. They were funded, paid for, politically protected by the Reagan administration, you know, gotta give, had to give Ronald Reagan some of his due back. And so, you know, after I saw that I said, you know, as I tend to do, I'm gonna do something about this and I decided to start working and I actually fell in love with somebody here in San Francisco who was a diplomat with the Padawondo Marti National Liberation Front, G, who asked me not to use her name so you guys know her, can't say her name, but. And you also joined the FMLA. Yeah, I was doing logistics in and side by load in here helping them out, attacks on infrastructure and other stuff. And there's actually a, I had an issue at one moment when we were like, damn man, we need walkie-talkies, video cameras, you know, different material to help mount these attacks. And I was like, damn, I need, and we wanted to get some from the United States. So my initial thing was, man, you know what, I think I'm gonna ask Armando, my friend over there, if he could come over here and do it, you know, Armando's from Mexico and you know, they won't suspect that. No, I don't wanna put Armando at risk. I sound like, damn, who could I hit up to get, and I realized, shit, the person that inherited a transnational network of contrabando, bras, diamonds, electro-domestics, pop, my father. The last man and an enemy go with suspect of being a base for the front, a base of support for the front. So my dad, I'd be known to him, but he kinda, well, he helped me secure material to support the fight against the fascist military dictatorship that was backed by the United States. Well, and what was so amazing about that move was that when you were growing up, you felt very conflicted about his contraband. Oh yeah, yeah, my brother and people here will know, I hated my dad's contraband, I was like, damn, man, it made me feel like I was connected to this criminal stuff. And I was, you know, and I had other issues with my dad. As you read in the book, you know, we were kind of, you know, had some tensions in our life at different moments, but I love my dad, and so like, but I was like, oh, you know, I don't wanna be connected to that. I didn't want any of the clothes. I eventually changed, I eventually accepted things, and yeah. You look very sharp on the cover of the book with the suit, yeah. Yeah, the suit, and so, yeah, it was back and forth. You know, it was how we are with our fathers. You know, we live in a patriarchal society that doesn't really equip men to be the best that they can be all the time. You know, we've been, but I was fortunate. You know, I had best can be like my brother, Omar Ramon, who were examples to me of what it meant to be a different kind of a man. Well, and it was just, and then the women in your life too. Maybe you could talk more about Mamate, how she like trained the Buddhas, like a jobs program in El Salvador, and then kind of was the first to come in the U.S., and like, tell the remarkable woman. One of the fun things about writing the book is the research you get to do family, but also history, and you connect the two. That's really fun, I think. I geeked out on that. So like, you know, I started, and a lot of the research is primaries through my dad and people that were around or heard stories from the period of the early 20s and 30s in El Salvador. You know, which was facing a great depression that made John Steinbeck's scrapes of wrath look like a wine festival, really. When you think about La Matanza and the extreme poverty, it was like, there's just, so you know, I always thought my dad was the one who innovated this kind of network of like, you know, kind of taking stolen goods from San Francisco's mission and you know, going to sell them in El Salvador for profit. And then in the research, I started talking to Omar and other people and I really, I find out, no, it was Mamate. Grandma was the criminal front. My grandmother was one who organized this network, and you know, I had to think twice, man, do I want people to look at my family as criminals? I said, no, I want to attack the idea of criminality. It's a construct. You know, it's a construct that justifies, you know, increasingly fascist policing and militarization of our community, that's right. Let's not kid ourselves. You know, we're at a moment of crisis, the elites need, anyway, that's me getting politically, my family's looking at me, oh, there he goes. So like, Mamate was the, I wrote the book, part of it, yeah, La Boheme on 24th, where there's a singer-song machine that has a kind of a metal, lattice, treadle, wheel, and it's still, and I can do my, I put my computer on top of it, because I would feel like Mamate weaving words together, like Mamate did, because Mamate literally sewed her way out of the shanty towns of San Salvador. Mezones, they're called, which are the poorest of the poor in the urban areas of El Salvador, and she, they basically, my dad grew up in a Mezones, which was mostly sex workers. My dad's first job was being a kind of entertainer and kind of providing drinks and stuff for the clients and he told these great stories, this is why my dad was so funny, hilarious guy who would just look at you and make you laugh. So Mamate was the one who sewed her way out of the Mezones and brought our family to the United States, she's the matriarch then all these people followed. There are people here right now who are here because of Mamate and Mamanena and Papamon, basically creating this kind of like underground railroad for immigrants, you know, because, you know, a lot of people came from, from El Salvador, indocumentados, families, like family that I have that had to come during the war y no pudieron ver a sus hijos por since just after they were three years old and then not being able to see her kid again until he had a mustache. Just think about that, the work. So yeah, this is the dignity and the power of our people that I wanted to raise up and I guess I just want to say one other thing like, the book has a lot of heavy stuff, gang war, war war, genocide and things, but really that's what I would call the dark background, velvet background for what it's really about, which is the rainbows and waterfalls and the rubies and the diamonds and all the color and kaleidoscopic beauty and power of our people to overcome all of the darkness. That's how bad we are as a people, bad ass. And that's what I wanted to kind of bring out in the book that when you meet a Salvadoran, you're meeting bad ass people. Definitely. And you know what I was also really What are they trying to track? ¿Qué significa bad ass? Talegón, talegón. So, you know, Pop is such an indelible character but then he's Ramon and then he's Ramoncito. You at times are Mr. Peabody, Tito, Robert, Roberto and I was just, can you talk a bit about just like these different selves that you had and like why that was important, how you were able to, how you wanted to portray that in your book? Wow, that's a hard question. It's kind of a writer's question. But you know, when you write, you wanna tell a true story. So you're always in flux, whether you're a Buddhist or a Marxist, you're always in flux. So you're not who you were just a moment ago when you blinked, you're someone else. And so you go back far enough and you're different people at different times. So, and I have to confess this, part of the thing I have to confess to Alejandro and Melissa and folks at the library is that me and Freddie Weinstein stole the entire collection of Danny Dunn books from the Mission Branch back in the 70s. What were the, what were the Dan, is it like Hardy Boys or? The Science Fiction Adventure series. And we were all into it. I was the one who was keeping this 80 year old librarian who was kind of half asleep anyway at the Mission Branch because there was no Homeland Security like they got now, right? She was the Homeland Security. She was like kind of falling asleep. And I was the one keeping her busy though. Hey, hey, you know, tell me about what it's like to be a librarian. And I was keeping her busy while Freddie was doing the dirty work of ripping off the Danny Dunn series. So I thought he was going to take maybe a couple and, you know, I got busy and we went outside and there's Freddie with the entire set of books and some on the floor. I was like, damn, he got the whole set. So I'm sorry, I lost the question. Or it just feels, yes, do you still ever feel like Mr. Peabody? So that was Mr. Peabody when I was a bookworm. I loved to read, I used to walk around with cases, full of books and I, you know, or I had like a San Francisco 49ers jacket. I put books in there and, you know, I loved to read and I literally, I really did. Our youth, a lot of our youth was spent in the library, you know, playing, stealing, you know, looking at girls but not doing anything about it. You know, I had to wait until some of these guys over here taught me the ways of men and women and love and whatnot. Well, and then I didn't even mention you write about how you were so many different selves. You were an evangelical Christian and you were, you know, the FM on, yeah, yeah. I would, right now, if I was growing up in like I was in the 70s and 80s, I would be a right wing fascist Christian right now because, you know, I had to get out of a certain lifestyle that wasn't kind of too good for me in the mission like a lot of, because oftentimes the only way to get out of a certain way and to get discipline is to join these churches which were starting to develop this now giant conglomerate industry of, you know, kind of youth ministry. This is a multi-billion dollar industry now, right? They've mass produced right wing fascist Christianity and we're living the products of that. I think something liberals lack is an understanding of that. So like, I became that because I didn't see a way out of a certain lifestyle. I remember, we were at my friend Armando's house and, you know, he was drinking, you know, wood-wisers and celebrating how to forget wood and, and I'm like, so, hey, bro, here, have a beer, tea. I was like, no, man, I gave my life to God. And Armando just cracked up, yeah, right, bro. And what the truth was, I had actually gotten on my knees like St. Paul and given my life to Jesus and gone through that whole right wing ideology and I got on my knees and I prayed for the election of Ronald Reagan in 1984. Little did I know I would go and fight the fascist people that were backing, that Ronald Reagan were backing. So I tried to redeem myself from that. So that's another self. Became a journalist, now I'm a teacher and, you know, we're a lot of things. We're brothers, we're sisters, we're sons, you know, daughters. I think I go back to the discussion of representation that like, you're not just only even one person, no community is a monolith, no person is a monolith. I don't even need to answer that. I was beautifully stated, I don't need to answer that. But speaking of joy, which is something that you've brought up earlier in our conversation, I noticed there's a lot of music, references to music to Santana, Led Zeppelin, Kenny G. Maybe you could share how Kenny G played into the book. Kenny G, damn, you got me on that. I'd rather be wearing a turtleneck to talk about Kenny G. Let me think about it. No, actually, what happened with Kenny G was like a friend of mine during the war was one of our top commanders in the front. He was part of the FPL, Fuerza Populara de Liberación, one of the five political military organizations. After these 12 years of savage war, you know, my friend was at the table literally negotiating the future of El Salvador. So like, I'm always curious like, what's going on, what happened? So, you know, he's telling me about, you know, the sticking points about the police and the military dismantling these fascist, murderous structures, which was our main goal and the main reason for the fight. And, you know, they were at a sticking point, he told me one time and they were kind of like, not really, there was tension at the table, negotiating table and my friends, you know, said, well, we were, you know, we took a break for lunch and some of them, you know, generals from the military, from the murderous military and some of the commanders in the Frente were around the coffee table and they were trying to make conversation in this awkward situation where there's these fascists and these revolutionaries kind of in an informal position, not under the cover of the negotiations and they kind of say, hey, what music do you like? And my friend says, you know, in the one music that we agreed to, that we could all like was Kenny G. So I never heard, I never listened to Kenny G the same again. Kenny G, how Kenny G brought the peace to El Salvador. Exactly. Alejandro, how much, is it time for questions or from the audience? Yeah, I had a couple more questions, but I'll save that for, we'll turn it to the audience for now. He, as we all know, we all know and love Roberto. Does anyone have a question? There's a mic in the back that can get past you. No questions from my family or friends, by the way, just. If you have a question, let us know and we will pass you a mic. Thanks for being here. I have a comment and a question. I really like the title of your book, Unforgetting because it's like going through and remembering the traumas that happen to try to heal. I look at it as a sort of healing and it reminds me of this movie that I saw called Active Killing, The Active Killing or the Indonesian military. They, the movie's pretty, it's interesting. And so I was curious, and I just, even your comment about how like Kenny G was bringing the two gangs together, but it's like the truce in LA, I think about that. And I think about the truce that also El Salvador had to have between the two factions, I guess. So I just was curious if, what would you, do you feel like that it was healing to go through the journey of writing this book for yourself? Great question. First, I don't teach my students to write to heal. There's people making a lot of bucks, hey, you know, write your story and heal. I don't believe in that. I think we need to respect the integrity of the story. And if I impose my healing on the story, then it's gonna be a story about my healing and not the story itself. That said, however, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I did a piece for Alta on what I call the gentrification of consciousness. And one of the wisest things I ever did as a writer was retain a therapist before I started writing the book. Yeah, no, really. And the gods of health and good writing would shine favorably upon me because they gave me a therapist from the mission who was a former hippie, son of a Holocaust witness and survivor, and part of a clandestine network that prescribed the most powerful medicines we know to deal with depression, alcoholism, trauma. I put trauma in quotes because it's a cheap and word at this stage in history. People, everything's traumatic and severely traumatic things kind of get lost in that. So, and so I wrote the book under the guidance of this beautiful man of a therapist who prescribed LSD and microdosing and macrodosing for about two and a half years. So it allowed me to look at the abyss because you know, like writers like Friedrich Nietzsche will tell you, be careful if you look at the abyss because it will look back at you. And so I took to heart what Nietzsche and others have warned about and I was like, got that help and it allowed me to go, I think deeper than I would have gone without that help. And as a result, another story, like my dad Papamon in the latter years of his life, he calls me in his living room, I go, hang out with my dad in the living room and says, look at my son, I feel you softer. Son, I feel you softer. And you know, my dad was the object of my heart edge, which I do have sometimes, just be told, if you know me. So my dad was the object of that and like he felt me softer. Why? I'm like, damn, should I tell him? What the fuck, he's 90 something anyway, man. It's LSD, Pap. It's LSD, Pap. LSD, what's, what's that? You know, like Luna Droga, Cicadelicna, de Veras, really. And you know, he had dementia by this point and I wanted to see if I could, easy, you know, cause there's like ketamine treatments and other treatments for people who could use the neuroplastic, to kind of develop better neuroplasticity with the help of these medicines. And he just said, well, you know, Hamas, I'll never do that, but it's good for you Son, so you keep doing it. So I had at the end of the day, my Catholic anti-drug father supporting my LSD treatments. And if you want to read more, look at the, get the pick up the issue of HALTA, yeah. Roberto, could you talk about the origin of the violence that made El Salvador the most violent country in the world? You hint at it, but you have such a profound understanding. Okay, Alejandro, that's one of those people I wanted not to ask a question. I know Sandy's, I just wanna give a shout out to Sandy because Sandy was, gave me my first writer's job after at Tecolote in San Francisco. She believed in me and she trusted me with her organization and with the writing and she ran New America Medium Pacific News Service. She's a MacArthur genius and just a beautiful person who really helped me along in my writing life. Thank you, Sandy. This is my revenge. I do get to take my revenge. So, yeah, it's the book. I mean Sandy, you gotta read the book, man. It's all about how, you know, but really the source of the violence is fastened, your seatbelt starts with a C, ends with an M. Anybody wanna guess? Communism. You need some psychedelics to get over whatever you're doing. Capitalism. Capitalist, you know, capitalist order around the world has created a world where the U.S. Empire, because there's, you know, this idea of a superpower is just bullshit, right? Superpower, what is that? It's an empire made to sound nicer, but still the same historic function of empire that empire has had, which is domination and control of the resources. And in the contemporary age, we've developed the language of colonialism, neocolonialism, so the control of people's resources, the extraction of resources from the South, generally, by the countries of the North in Europe, Asia, and North America in this hemisphere. And so the violence is rooted in that control and domination backed by militarism and militarized policing. And so one of the things I do in the book is look at, for example, I mean, if you read some of the news stories, you think Salvadorans are just born gangs, right? Like my niece's beautiful kids are, you know, half Salvadoran, so they're just genetically modified to be Mareros, right? That's, if you read the news, this is how people look at us. So like the amnesia that we have, the forgetting is the reason that I felt like we needed to show how, for example, Pentagon trainers who were sent to Salvador in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, after the war ended, ended up, guess where? Nope, Los Angeles, California, New York. They were training police forces in counterinsurgency policing. And so then when you have this counterinsurgency policing applied to these kids in Los Angeles, you start getting the image of the hardened gang member and the police are starting to push the gangs, break up their truce and their peace activities, and then with the then immigration and naturalization service, deport the gangs to El Salvador, where El Salvador is barely coming out of this multi-billion dollar war effort that the US did not put a billions of dollars to improve the country like they did in the martial law after World War II. So, you know, so then they, instead they exported the gangs and then they exported the policing model that was militarized from El Salvador. So you've got these circuits of counterinsurgent policing that enhance violence. Like, you know, we really should be abolishing police, ladies and gentlemen. We're really there among the least useful kind of institutional things in our government. They don't produce anything except criminals. And so I, anyway, my family's looking at me right now. So can I say we have a altered journal here. We have books by Vanessa back here that you can purchase. Books by Roberto that you can purchase. Litcrawl is tonight and it's right. It's a partnership between Litcwake, Alta, the library, the friends of the library. We're right about time, but I want to give you both a chance to close this out. Well, do you have time for a speed round? What's that? I finished all my Q and A's with a speed round. There is no right answer. Okay. I don't even know what I'm saying yesterday, but yeah, okay. Hunts or Mr. Donut? Hunts Donuts or Mr. Donut? Hunts Donuts. Old fashioned or cake donut? Old fashioned. 101 or the 101? The 101. What's that? I'll explain later. 101 freeway. That's supposed to be the dividing line between, if people from Northern California say 101 and Southern Californians say the 101. Oh, wow. No question. A special shout out for my friends. Anyway, thanks for playing along. It was such a pleasure to be in conversation with you. I do want to ask, I have one last thing. I want my friends and family to come up with me after we're done, because I want to get this once in a lifetime picture with you all. Because I live in Las Vegas in the desert now and I'm still trying to get to know people. It's kind of lonely. I'm gonna have this picture and I'm gonna look at this picture to know that I'm not alone ever. So, thank you all.