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DANA:  Hi, everyone.  I'm Dana 
Blanchard from Haymarket Books 
and I am moderating today's 
conversation, Unforgetting 
family migration, gangs, borders
and revolution with Roberto 
Lovato and Mike Davis.     
This is a book lunch event for 
Roberto's incredible new
memoir.
Before I further introduce our 
speakers and our events, I want 
to thank the organizers and 
sponsors Haymarket Books and 
Unabridged Bookstore.  It is 
critical that we support 
independent bookstores and 
publishers during this time and 
you can do so in a couple of 
ways.  First by buying 
Unforgetting tonight.  There 
will be a link posted in the 
chat to actually help you do 
just that.  Actually right now. 
Second, you can join the 
Haymarket book club.  We now 
have a $10 a month e-book 
subscription that you should 
check out.  Finally in your 'in 
a position to make a donation 
via investment
-- Venmo.     
Please subscribe to our channel,
like this video and share it 
with as many people as possible 
I want to let everyone know 
about an upcoming event in the 
Haymarket livestream series on 
Tuesday night when we fight, 
voices from the L.A. teachers 
strike.  There will be a lot of 
discussion about L.A. today so 
this might be a good event as a 
follow-up.  You can register on 
eventBrite and the link will be 
posted in the chat    A couple 
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captions, there will be a link 
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for Deaf and hard of hearing 
folks.  Thanks Nicole Kochy for 
doing the live captioning 
tonight.     
We will have Q and A.     
Now is my pleasure to introduce 
our speakers and begin our 
discussion of this amazing book.
First of all Roberto Lovato, who
wrote this amazing book, is a 
journalist and a member of the 
writer's Grotto.  He's one of 
the country's leading thinkers 
on American gangs and other 
issues.  He's also a cofounder 
of Dignidad Literaria, the 
national movement to combat the 
invisibility and silencing of
Latinx stories and books.  And 
his essays in reporting have 
appeared in numerous national 
and international publications. 
Roberto is being joined tonight 
by Mike Davis.  He's the author 
of city of Quartz, late 
Victorian holocausts, Buda's 
wagon among others.  He is the 
recipient of a MacArthur 
fellowship.  Both    Of our 
speakers are not just authorizes
they're also political activists
and organizers so there will be 
a conversation not about what is
written, but what is written 
influences and impacts the world
around us.  And they have known 
each other and worked together 
for quite some time as evidenced
in this amazing photo of them 
out on a protest line somewhere 
in Ireland I believe.  Now I 
want to talk about the book
Unforgetting.  The one in the 
New York Times yesterday, it was
listed as one of news week's 25 
must-read books for this fall, 
let me share a little bit more 
about the book.  So Unforgetting
is unurgent tale of gang life 
gorilla war fare and 
interconnected violence between 
the United States and El 
Salvador.  Reveals the intimate 
stories bee need
headlines and one in which the 
perspectives of central 
Americans in the United States 
have been silenced and 
forgotten.     
So my first question to get us 
started in the conversation is 
about the title.  Unforgetting 
is a title, but it's also a 
theme that runs throughout the 
book.  It's based on a Greek 
concept of Alathea uncovering 
the truth.  The idea that we 
must grapple with things that 
are difficult, of personal and 
political history that might be 
ugly and violent, but only 
through facing these truths can 
we really understand ourselves 
and our work as activists and 
change makers.  Why is 
Unforgetting, this unbackpacking
of decades of liberation 
struggles, this bringing to 
light the role that U.S. 
imperialism has played and 
continues to play in 
perpetuating violence across 
Latin-America, why is this so 
important that we do this unfor 
getting now in this particular 
political moment.  In other 
words, why this book, why now?  
ROBERTO:  First of all, I need 
to thank Haymarket, up ended, 
Anthony, you Dana, and 
especially Mike Davis for 
joining me on this very 
emotional moment for me in my 
life where I've waited a while 
to write a book about my life 
because we were kind of busy 
doing things, as you will read I
hope in the book.  I need to 
take a moment to unforget who 
Mike Davis is to me.  Did you 
show the picture on the screen, 
Dana?  
DANA:  I think so. 
ROBERTO:  I have hair in there. 
We need to forget that.  That 
aside, in all seriousness.  When
I came from El Salvador to Los 
Angeles in the early '90s, you 
know, after the war was ending, 
you know, traumatized and trying
to kind of understand myself as 
a person of the United States, 
because I'm born here, as you 
can see on the cover of my book.
I have Hunt's doughnuts.  That's
how Americano I am.  There's a 
guy can'tly using the word
companiaro.  He opened his table
to me to break bread.  And he 
opened my mind.  And he 
encouraged me to, along with Ben
Martinez and Rector Tobar, and 
Maricela in L.A., they 
encouraged me to tell my story. 
They said I had a story to tell 
and I might be able to tell it 
in as beautiful way as possible 
and his example speaks for 
itself.  So I just want to say 
to Mike Davis, we still have 
Mike with 
us, thankfully.  An example in 
word and indeed to be Mike, and 
I'm so grateful to you for 
joining me.  And I just want to 
say, like, I know you love brekt
so I'm going to use Brett to 
honor you by saying: 
[  Speaking Spanish ]
That's a translation of a 
beautiful song.  It says there 
are those who struggle one day 
and they're good.  There are 
That's a translation ofthose who
struggle many days and they are 
very good.  And there are those 
who struggle all of their lives,
these are the essential ones.  
So you honor me, Mike, in 
joining me with this very 
important moment in my life and 
I'm grateful to you for all the 
support for so
long.  
Okay.  
MIKE:  I'm overwhelmed by that. 
I want to talk about your book
first.  From a writerly 
standpoint.  And I know Roberto 
is shy about admitting to be a 
wonderful writer.  But the thing
that overwhelmed me in the book,
really, apart from the story 
itself, and all the important 
messages, it's just the
detail he records of people, 
conversations,
smells, one character who's very
important in the book who 
Roberto should talk about at 
some point, a major gang leader,
and spokesperson in El Salvador 
named Santiago, the way that his
gold tooth sparkles signaling a 
certain kind of menace, or in 
the period when Roberto is 
visiting and working with the 
forensic pathologist examining 
both the bones and remains of 
people slaughtered way back in 
the big massacre 1932.  People 
slaughtered in
1981, and people murdered the 
day before in El Salvador.  The 
smell of the body parts.  But 
also the tropical fragrance and 
beauty of El Salvador, a country
that's been more vilified than 
almost any country on earth.  
Because of course, the -- in the
period of the U.S. intervention 
in the Civil War, the most 
well-known
account, she's repulsed by El 
Salvador from the minute she 
touches foot in the airport in 
South Salvador.  It's her 
personal heart of darkness.  And
unfortunately that's the way 
that not only right wing 
intellectuals have seen El 
Salvador and the rest of Central
America, but far too many 
liberals.  Salvadorans are 
victims, or Salvadorans are 
criminals.  Instead of seeing 
what Roberto allows us to see in
this wonderful book, which is 
Salvadorans as lovers, as 
exuberant people, as fighters.  
And the kind of joy that is 
managed to survive unspeakable 
crimes, and a U.S. intervention 
in El Salvador that started 
under the Kennedy 
administration, and
continues today.  
ROBERTO:  I want to take on both
of your comment, Mike, and 
Dana's question as far as the 
title of Unforgetting.  It does 
come from the Greek alathea 
which refers to the journey into
the underworld that the dead 
would have to take and cross the
river of forgetting.  So the 
dead were supposed to forget who
they were in life before they 
went on to Hades.  And I saw 
because I have inhabited 
numerous underworlds, whether 
it's criminal underworlds that 
I've visited as a journalist or 
that I've had in my family 
through my dad, whether it was 
the underworld of the
FMLM gorillasgorillas of 
guerillas or believe the low 
levels of awareness as we've 
done with many of us and we 
don't know what we're doing when
the subconscious takes over or 
the underworld of desk squads 
that I've interviewed or pursued
me.  I felt like I wanted to 
tell a full story because as 
Mike says, there's a lot to our 
story besides the two dominant 
symbols which during the war was
the poor little refugee and in 
the post-war era was the gangs. 
And so I grew up with family 
that underwent astonishing 
poverty, for example, that made 
John Steinbeck's grapes of Wrath
look like a wine fest, quite 
frankly.  My grandmother 
literally sewed her way out of a
shanty town that was all 
prostitutes.  She brought her 
family to the United States, to 
San Francisco, following like 
the coffee that was -- the 
reason El Salvador has suffered 
so much is the capitalist 
comodification of coffee and all
themodification of coffee and 
all the suffering that that 
brought that we can talk about. 
Stories in my life -- . 
MIKE:  Let me ask you to pause 
for a second.  Tell us more 
about Mamate.  
ROBERTO:  My grandmother was a 
seamstress.  So sewed her way, 
like I said, out of a shantytown
during the Great
Depression.  It was mostly 
prostitutes around her.  So my 
dad grew up his first job was 
with prostitutes. 
So my grandmother inherited to 
us this thing about you just 
look at people for being human. 
You don't just accept the label 
of puta or of pandiero.  
Prostitute or gang.  She taught 
us values that are
transend event values and she 
taught us to create national 
networks of contraband, it was 
my grandmother who first started
our family bringing contraband. 
If you talk to people like 
Maria, her family used to do 
contraband.  The woman who's on 
NPR.  When she heard my story 
she said yeah, my grandmother 
dealt in
falluca.  So I grew up with 
people like this, but I don't 
see that image anywhere as a 
journalist, even now.  I've done
research with volunteers, for 
example, to look at stories, 
reporting on the child 
separation story, which was one 
of the dominant stories of 2018 
When Trump was formalizing the 
pomcy.  How many of these 
stories were central American 
scholars or how many are 
lawyers, how many are leaders of
community organizations that 
should be household names, but 
they're not.  How many are 
community activists?  How many 
are journalists?  I mean, there 
were a total of steer row in  --
zero in most of the stories in 
major media.
The dominant image was the image
of pain and the sound bite of 
suffering.  You look at 
literature, you have American 
dirt.  You mentioned Dignidad 
Literaria and my role in helping
found that.  Part of my 
foundation what passes for 
literature the colonial 
approach, the heart of dark nes 
mark talked about, or the 
hideous repertoire that excludes
our own people and our own 
story.  I grew up as an adult in
a country -- I mean, relating to
a country where the CIA said one
of the most formidible people's 
movements in the 20th century 
was the guerillas.  One in every
3 people was organized against 
the state during the war.  
According to the central 
American university.  Poets 
would form organizations.  The 
distinction was the norm in El 
Salvador.  So I wrote the book 
because as an active political 
imagination to share what I had 
learned about things like 
revolution at a time when we 
really need it, like now.  So
that's -- 
MIKE:  One of the things that 
most impressed me, and I have to
admit I'm a little jealous of 
this, was the way you wove into 
all this, a central mystery.
The mystery of your father.  And
so you become the forensic 
pathologist, the archaeologist, 
trying to understand your 
conflicting relationship with 
your father which leads you back
to unspeakable events in your 
country, in El Salvador's 
history.  And it's just a 
tremendous story.  And it makes 
the book so dramatic.  Because 
you keep wondering, are we going
to find out who el general is?  
And what is the mystery that 
your father's biography 
conceals.  Speak a little about 
that?  
ROBERTO:  Well, I'm not going to
give away the plot, Mike.  
Because otherwise I won't sell 
books dude, right?  Let me just 
say I chose the braided 
narrative structure because my 
friend Brad Kessler, a fellow 
writer and teacher of mine 
introduced me to this concept 
and I thought this was perfect 
for what I want to do.  I want 
to tell my story in a way that 
brings the reader with me on the
journey.  I was a crazy dude as 
a kid.  The things I was 
involved in, not a gang, but we 
had a little group of guys, and 
we would rob and we would steal 
cars, we would deal pot, do 
things that were part of the 
community that I grew up in.  
And then I -- why the hell did I
decide to join the FMLL?  I 
never knew why I did these 
things.  Only later did I start 
kind of the introspection in the
post-war era to excavate and do 
the archaeology of family and 
countries.  The archaeology of 
nations is related to the 
archaeology of personal.  And I 
start finding out all these 
secrets because my dad, in the 
house, we had all kinds of 
pictures of my family, my mom's 
side of the family.  But there 
were none of my father's family.
And so like I wanted the reader 
to experience the a-ha moment 
that Mike is trying to get me to
give up, but I'm not.  I want 
the reader to experience that, 
because that's how it was to me,
as far as living this life, 
doing this crazy stuff.  And 
then how the hell did I do that?
And I didn't find out why I did 
this stuff until 2000 and it all
comes together.  My dad's 
secret, one of the most violent 
episodes in the western 
hemisphere in terms of the 
number of people killed per day 
per week in modern history 
according to folks I interviewed
at Oxford who are students of 
violence.  My dad had a lot to 
say, but so did other members of
my family.  I didn't even know 
about it until I started 
investigating.  I want the 
reader to experience the 
fragmented nature of memory and 
of trauma and the way that we 
stitch together those fragments 
by when we tell our stories.  
And if we do it as beautifully 
as possible, then we're 
deploying what I call the 
strategic value of the sublime 
and beautiful which is what 
we're going to need right now to
struggle before the things we're
facing on the planet right now. 
MIKE:  I think so many of us, 
our adult lives, have ultimately
been shaped by a quest to 
understand such unspoken 
experiences, the memories that 
aren't revealed to us.  Some of 
us, it's too late our parents 
die before we can know them.  
For instance I have a good 
friend, Japanese-Hawaiian guy.
His father was part of a famous 
regiment that was decimated 
trying to save a bunch of 
Texans.  But he never talked 
about his war experiences.  He 
would go out on a dock with 
other veterans and they would 
talk and drink but they wouldn't
tell their children.  Because in
their case, they were kind of em
balmed in this mythology
, who won the admiration of the 
Americas despite the war in the 
Pacific.  But in fact they hated
many of their white officers.  
They hated these guys that they
sacrificed after.  And my friend
spend years just trying to have 
-- his father is now dead and 
he's trying to have a 
conversation with his father.  
And trying to understand why his
father wouldn't tell him these 
things that explain so much.  
But in your book which is about 
unforgetting, how of course 
people have oppressed these 
memories or learn to live in
two realities.  Seemingly 
without contradiction.  And an 
astonishing figure in your book,
I forget his name.  Talk a 
little about him, and how you 
found out about his past. 
ROBERTO:  Yeah.  One of the 
parts of my journey in the book 
is to go and try to understand, 
in the present -- it has three 
strands, there's a present level
which is 2015, there's my 
adolescence in the '70s to the 
2000s, I'm a little older than 
that, and my father's childhood.
I tie all three together 
throughout the book.  In the 
present moment, the driving 
narrative, the arc in it is my 
search to understand why, what 
turns a kid into an innocent 
child into a killer.  Or into a 
victim, in a country where more 
and more when I was there in 
2015 and El Salvador was the 
most violent country on earth in
August of that year, a lot of 
the victims were children.  And 
a lot of the perpetrators were 
kids.  And so what I'm trying to
understand this and it's as much
about as external journey and 
internal, which is why I chose 
memoirs.  I'm trying to get a 
meeting with this top-level gang
member.  He's basically kind of 
like a gang diplomat for MS13 
And 18th Street, the two 
dominant gangs in El Salvador.  
And he's part of the political 
commission that they established
in order to do things like 
negotiate a truce with the 
government.  And I finally get a
meeting with him and I'm like 
here talking to him, and he's 
got this book on the table.  
He's got
Marlboros.  Salvadorans love to 
smoke Marlboros for eternity, it
seems.  And he's got his cell 
phone.  And he's got Hunger 
Games too.  The book.
He wanted to talk about books 
and literature.  He was a 
brilliant guy.  At the top of 
the killing chain, but he was 
super brilliant.  And it just 
kind of blew me away.
He started identifying with the 
slain archbishop of El Salvador 
who is now a saint in the 
Catholic church, who was a man 
of peace and he identified with 
Romero as far as being 
persecuted.  I didn't by that 
from him, but the fact that he 
was thinking and looking at 
Romero, but like my father grew 
up in a shantytown with no 
lights, no water and he read
voraciously.  It blue me away. 
 -- blew me away.  I went to 
interview him as a journalist 
and I came out interviewing 
someone who was a fellow reader,
and I had to, despite my 
discomfort, I had to accept this
person as a human being.  At the
end of the day I realized, like,
I had to go in and humanize the 
gangs.  Because Salvadoran 
humanity is hidden behind the 
inhumanity with which the U.S. 
government, whether it was 
Barack Obama and the heavy 
funding of policing in El 
Salvador, or Donald Trump who is
accelerating the nefarious 
patterns established under Obama
in many ways since 2008.  And it
began previous under Bush, but 
Obama really accelerated the 
policing models in El Salvador 
to do the awful things they have
done.  
MIKE:  Your book is trangulated 
between three places that are 
essential to experience.  The 
Mission district where you grew 
up, San
Salvador, and rural El Salvador.
ROBERTO:  And L.A.  
MIKE:  And L.A.  So Salvadorans 
fled the violence that killed 
over 100,000 people in the 1980s
to come to the city only to 
encounter other forms of 
violence, state vee lens in 
terms of LAPD, particularly the 
Ramparts division of LAPD.  But
also gang violence.  So if you 
-- I'm sure if you drew a map of
San
Salvador, maybe not today, but 
ten years ago, when people were 
gang kids, 20 years ago when 
gang kids were being deported 
back to El
Salvador, if you drew a gang 
map, it looks uncannily like 
that of Los Angeles.  Somebody 
once showed me, who's doing 
research on this, a map of 
Belize.  And it had all the
sets from South central there.  
I'm sure it's probably the same 
case in Guetemala.  Talk a 
little about about how the role 
of the LAPD and daily violence 
in Los Angeles,
treated this identity and then 
about the role of the
police and particularly one 
individual who's still 
unfortunately interfering in our
lives today, attorney general 
William Barr, and turning the 
war on gangs into a terroristic 
campaign against Central America
and Mexican
kids.  The history of its 
emergence in the 1980s. 
ROBERTO:  You've got to love 
Mike Davis's way, man.  He gets 
it.  The way that when we're 
focusing on the gangs, we don't 
even talk about the policing of 
the gangs that frames them.  
Like look at the border, how 
sophisticated they are with 
media now.  The Department of 
Homeland Stuart they're 
extremely sophisticated as far 
as their use of the media.  The 
use of the media includes 
criminalizing entire groups of 
people.  I have a quote in my 
book from the L.A. times where 
immigration and naturalization 
service says man, this isn't 
just about profiling gangs, this
is about profiling an entire 
people.  It's not an exact 
quote.  But this was part of the
way that the LAPD, local 
politicians, and eventually 
people in the Pentagon and even 
in the White House started 
framing the gangs and the gang 
experience in their way to 
justify this new internal enemy 
that I think people in national 
security circles started coming 
long ago.  So for example I 
remember there were trainers in 
El Salvador from the Pentagon.  
And there were also people in El
Salvador, the worst killers, who
were responsible for,
where almost a thousand people 
were killed.  Half of them were 
children under 12, and half of 
the ones that were under 12 were
under 6.  The ten of the 12 
officers that were in charge of 
that operation were trained at a
place called the school of the 
Americas that may be familiar.  
It's familiar because the border
patrol now goes to train at the 
School of the Americas.  You can
read the
books by Stuart Schrader or Todd
Miller but you won't see them on
MSNBC just like you don't want 
to see Mike Davis or me on 
MSNBC.  Anyway, I don't want to 
go there.  You have these 
trainers in El Salvador training
people for mass murder they were
responsible for 85% of the 
killing -- 
MIKE:  They even issued 
handbooks, is that correct?  
ROBERTO:  There were manuals 
that were exposed later on.  It 
took decades for us to unforget 
these manuals that were finally 
available on the Internet.  
After the war ended I found out 
that some of these trainers who 
train the Salvadoran military 
came back to the U.S.  And who 
did they end up training in the 
U.S.?  LAPD and other U.S. 
police departments whose 
uniforms went from like the Adam
12 uniform, those thin uniforms,
to robocop.  The militarization 
of U.S. police has actually an 
Salvadoran component to it.  
There's a quote in my book from 
a cop who says, hey, you know we
got this high level training and
counter insurgency from these 
guys who came from the jungles 
of Central America and South 
America.  So then William Barr, 
in '92, seizes on the L.A. riots
to redeploy FBI resources in a 
historic way to focus away from 
external threats to the internal
threat of gangs, one of which 
was MS13.  And he then, together
with the immigration and 
naturalization service, which 
was also under William Barr, 
they then, together, exported, 
deported, the gang structures of
U.S. gang style to El Salvador. 
So you go to my grandmother's 
hometown, cobblestone street, 
church up the blook and suddenly
there's Hoover Street.  So whoa.
So Barr and others later 
deployed in the post-war era, 
they deployed U.S. police 
trainers to train the new police
force of the post-war El 
Salvador thereby worsening the 
police problem in El Salvador to
continue what you see right now,
which is the military and the 
police as a repressive force 
under cover of social media.  
MIKE:  The pivotal event in your
book, of course, are the 1992 
riots.  Which is still 
fundamentally misunderstood in 
so many ways.  In 1965, after 
the upriding in Watts, there was
a riot commission convened, they
issued a long report which 
basically exculpated the LAPD 
but was immediately challenged 
by journalists and social 
scientists, blew it out of the 
water.  But in the course of 
this produced a portrait of what
really happened.  After '  92, 
nobody wanted a report.  Nobody 
wanted to know what happened.  
And I think few people 
understand that if the ACLU 
found out an investigation, that
the ajort -- majority of people 
arrested were not arrested in 
south central.  The majority of 
people were not arrested, who 
were arrested weren't 
African-American.  And along 
with the uprising against the 
LAPD over Natasha har lens and 
Rodney King, there was 
essentially a bread riot in Los 
Angeles.  Because the recession 
that occurred in the last two 
years of the Bush administration
cut right into the heart of L.A.
Something like almost a fifth of
the unemployment in the country,
and this was the biggest 
recession since 1938.  Of course
it pales in magnitude compared 
to what we see today.  But 
heavily concentrated in L.A.  
And it was just devastating in 
the tenement communities, 
neighborhoods west of downtown 
and PECO union and in parts of 
south central which were heavily
Latinized by that time.  People 
were desperate.  And they went 
out -- what did they loot?  
Groceries.  Pampers were on the 
top of the list.  Teenaged kids 
preferred tennis shoes.  DVDs, 
which are essential to single 
mother families, working 
families.  And thousands of 
people were arrested without the
media every contextualizing 
this, in terms of what was 
happening, the socioeconomic 
conditions in the communities.  
And as I pointed out in 
something I wrote later, I 
thought the most important 
photograph of the '92 riots was 
one taken the previous Christmas
which showed -- appeared in the 
L.A. times showed 12,000 mothers
and children, mainly Mexican and
Central American, waiting out in
the cold, outside of a downtown 
mission to get a free chicken 
and a toy.  L.A. had seen images
of deprivation on that scale 
since the Great Depression.  The
Chicano politicians wanted to 
shift all the blame on 
Salvadorans, despite the fact 
that outside of peco union and 
one of the other major 
concentrations of Salvadorans 
was in the West
Lake-MacArthur park area.  I 
went through the census data.  
It was half Mexican and half 
Salvadoran.  
Everyone wanted to shift the 
blame.  But the one and in the 
long run, one of the most 
significant parts that I would 
like to hear from you about, was
the federalized reign of terror 
that followed the rebellion 
itself.  Totally 
unconstitutional reign of terror
in the neighborhoods, 
particularly in the Salvadoran 
stronghold of peco union.  You 
were there tell us what happened
and what some of the long-range 
consequences of what they were. 
ROBERTO:  Before I go into the 
gravitas of that, I need to say 
that's actually around the time 
I first met Mike Davis I have to
confess before the world right 
now.  Mike Davis was in my book.
I had a scene where I just met 
this guy and he's taking me on a
tour.  He said you see that 
corner right there?  It's the 
most dangerous coroner of the 
United States. 
It was Alvarado and 7th.  
MIKE:  The southeast corner of 
MacArthur park.  
ROBERTO:  I had just came from 
El Salvador and people are 
saying it's like war.  No, war 
is like war, nothing else.  But 
the people who did use the 
imagery of the war were the 
people of the federal 
government.  People like William
Barr who starts the war on gangs
under the excuse of the L.A. 
riots.  But also the military, 
Mike.  You remember.  They 
deployed, there's quotes you can
see about already that 
militaristic and imaginary, 
seeing an opportunity to start 
doing what Pentagon strategists 
had already started talking 
about at the time which was they
were going to find a way to 
militarize the cities.  They 
were talking about that back in 
the '90s with the riots.  Mike 
could probably speak volumes to 
that.  But I remember seeing 
some of those
off-the-shelf reports that had 
been revealed. 
Salvadorans were populated with 
this along with Mexican.  There 
were Chicano elected officials 
who were trying to scapegoat 
Salvadorans with the white folks
but there were also the 
activists who were months later 
we would organize the historic 
marches against proposition 87 
which is looming, right?  
Because Pete Wilson helped to 
kind of like -- what's the name 
of the book, Learn like a State?
States learn, right?  The state 
was learning how to use 
immigration for its raison de
raison de tete.  They were 
taking the immigration to 
milltor rise communities.  
There's a quote in a nation 
article where you put me in a 
position to quote that back 
then.  So we were there we saw 
-- I was at Central American 
refugee center at the time.  We 
later changed the name to a 
resource center.  They had all 
kinds of clients where who like 
a pregnant, a woman who was 
pregnant who miscarried because 
they had her in one of these 
prisons that -- jails, that they
had -- we documented this.  It's
in the public record.  But not 
much changed.  Because 
proposition 187 and the wave 
that we're still living with now
began in Southern California, 
which you remember was home to 
one of every three migrants in 
the United States.  Astonishing 
numbers.  I'm trying to plug my 
book, but let me put a plug for 
Mike's book.  L.A. really is the
city of the future in many ways 
as City of Quartz is titled and 
I woke up to being in this 
fabulous place. 
MIKE:  The things I will never 
forget, when we went together on
this project you were working
on, that -- they converted a 
motel a cheap, run-down motel, 
into a prison for undocumented 
women and children.  And they 
were signaling to people out in 
the streets about conditions 
right there in the middle of the
city.  You wouldn't see such a 
makeshift business on the west 
side or so on.  But the 
MacArthur park area, the 
Salvadoran community.  I was 
shocked to my roots by that.  
Tell us a little about that 
prison and some of the work that
they were doing. 
ROBERTO:  We were protesting 
that, dealing with clients, we 
were Salvadoran and we were like
you're coming from a country 
where one of every three people 
was organized the state, many of
whom were organized in -- by day
I'm working in a community 
organization, by night I'm going
to go subvert the fucking 
system.  You said I could swear,
Dana.  We were doing this kind 
of unique thing under the 
nonprofit structure that at some
point I hope gets documented 
along with the history of 
solidarity with groups that were
creation of the Salvadoran 
revolution.  Our community 
orkizations were also creations 
of the Salvadoranganizations 
were also creations of the 
Salvadoran revolution.  There's 
a revolutionary culture that 
moved us to fight back against 
that.  
And you remember Mike Hernandez.
Councilmember Mike Hernandez.  
He was inspired by us to the 
point where he got the idea of 
poetic justice after the riots, 
after the uprising, and taking 
that building and donating it to
Caresen to become our offices 
after it was closed down.  
Unfortunately it was not 
structurally not good for our 
family-based service model, 
because it was single-room 
occupancy, SRO which is a term I
learned in L.A. 
MIKE:  Can you tell us a little 
about community organizing today
in the Salvadoran California, 
San Francisco and L.A. 
ROBERTO:  There's a lot going on
in California right now.  You 
have -- you had a group, the 
united Salvadoran students.  
They had a lot of members just a
few years ago.  They kind of 
went -- got diverted from stuff.
But you still have a lot of 
groups, Unica, UCLA and others 
who are organizing at the 
university level.  You have 
right now School of the marks, 
CSPIZ, for example, now having 
the strong, young, mostly 
central American women leading 
the charge.  Thereby inverting 
the traditional north-south 
model.  Rich white north give 
solidarity to poor brown or 
black or non-white south.  Now 
inverting that model of 
solidarity, which is kind of 
what we need to be doing right 
now.  We need to kind of change 
the industrial age models of 
organizing.  And I think a lot 
-- I think a lot of Salvadorans 
in university, in groups like 
those I mentioned, in the 
community groups, the Caresens 
are still around.  
There is a visionary 
organization, but just doesn't 
organize Salvadorans but 
organizes across most migrant 
groups in the U.S.  It's founded
by a Salvadoran who came out of 
the Salvadoran revolutionary 
movement like a lot of us.  But 
he took his knowledge, his Jedi 
knowledge of the Salvadoran 
experience and has applied it to
organize across not just 
diasporas of the entire country,
but connecting them to the 
Americas.  I know you're a big 
fan of that, Mike.  The struggle
has to be hemispheric and 
global.  
MIKE:  Absolutely.  
ROBERTO:  To show our 
experience, our revolutionary 
experience, organizing across 
borders.  
MIKE:  Absolutely.  I wanted to 
put a topic in here that is 
rarely discussed, but has become
urgent today. 
About 15 years ago, I had 
written a book about famine and 
el nino droughts in the 19th 
century and I became friends 
with some of the climate 
scientists in Columbia
University.  I remember Richard 
Seiger telling me -- we were 
talking about climate change and
drought.  And he said the place 
nobody is looking at is the 
Caribbean and Central America.  
Some of the most dramatic
changes with the most 
devastating impacts in our 
agriculture are going to occur 
there in Central America.  And 
now we see that so many of the 
refugees flee northward, 
particularly amongst Hondurans, 
it's been a combination -- 
they'll been expelled by a 
examination of violence but also
an incredible drought but also 
an agricultural crisis.  Failing
crops, coffee harvest.  So 
they're not only refugees from 
state terror, they're also 
refugees from climate change.  
And this is just a hint of what 
we'll see more of every year 
from now on.  I mean, how is El 
Salvador dealing with these big 
structural and environmental 
issues?  How do you see the 
future of the country?  
ROBERTO:  The future of the 
country is tied to the United 
States.  It's part of one of the
points of my book.  It's like 
we're not going to change El 
Salvador without changing the 
United States.  That became 
clear to me after the war.  
That's why I decided to come -- 
they had enough folks in the 
movement down there, they didn't
need me a U.S.-born kid from the
mission here.  I decided to come
and fight here in the U.S. and 
I'm still doing it in word and 
in deed, I hope.  As you are, 
Mike.  As a journalist I've gone
to Turkey and defendant with -- 
interviewed all -- dealt with, 
interviewed Syrian refugees.  
I've been in Juarez where there 
is -- during the intense 
violence and I was an El 
Salvadoran I would find reports 
that talked about the way 
climate change was flooding, 
heating the tensions that were 
there are there from capitalism.
Right?  The scarcity of 
resources, or the perception of 
scarcity were being worsened by 
climate change.  So there's a 
connection between the violence 
in El Salvador and climate 
change, just like there is in 
Juarez and Syria.  So you know, 
I started one of the things I 
wanted to say here is like, I 
put -- the title, the subtitle 
of my book, family a memoir, 
family, migration, gangs, 
revolution.  Three of the terms 
have what they call search 
engine optimization value.  If 
you go on the computer there's a
search engine optimization it 
will click, will do good to sell
the books.  Just don't go to 
Amazon.  But the world 
revolution doesn't have as much 
search engine optimization value
yet.  I insisted that be part of
the title because it's so 
important to me, that I think --
like I don't have the answer.  I
don't think just solely taking 
state power is the answer 
anymore.  I don't have that 
answer.  But I do know that any 
revolutionary from here on in is
going to have to think about how
to -- we're in disequilibrium 
with the planet and the planet 
is making our life-sustaining 
systems in radical 
disequilibrium.  So any 
revolutionary is going to have 
to think about and act upon 
equilibrium.  How do we 
establish more equal 
relationships as human beings, 
racially, class-wise, abolishing
police.  These kinds of things 
and that's kind of the great 
hope for me.  Just to be clear, 
my book is not a downer.  I hope
it's not a downer.  I didn't 
write it with being a downer.  I
wrote it as an example of the 
struggle of the Salvadoran 
people to deal with genocidal 
violence, to deal with one of 
the longest standing military 
dictatorships, fighting them 
throughout.  To deal with a 
savage civil war instituted by 
the United States.  And to deal 
with gang wars also instituted 
by the United States.  And to 
still smile and laugh like my 
grandmother, like my father, 
like I do.  
MIKE:  There's another 
dimension, of course, apart from
U.S. intervention and support 
for the very rich haciendados 
and business people in Central 
America and that's the way it 
keeps being turned into a caste 
war.  Which the FMLL tried to 
overcome between urban Latinas 
and indigenous people in 
Guatemala and southern Mexico 
and El Salvador.  You talked 
about some of your own 
indigenous ancestry in the book.
Can you explain this a bit?  
ROBERTO:  Yeah.  My father is --
he grew up, and according to
people, scholars, many people, 
perhaps most people, born in El 
Salvador during the Great 
Depression were already defined 
as I legitimate.  It was a -- 
illegitimate.  It was a label on
the poor.  You became 
illegitimate because in my 
father's case, he was born to a 
rich coffee baron who didn't 
recognize him.  I have a picture
on my Twitter feed, you can see 
the sample of my father's birth 
certificate that I have, the 
picture of it.  So his -- the 
woman who was my grandmother, 
the mother of the coffee baron 
was actually indigenous.  So as 
was another one of my 
great-grandmothers on my mom's 
side as well.  I don't go into 
that.  But both my grandmothers 
were indigenous women.  But that
identity went underground, 
especially after 1932.  Like if 
you go -- you have scholars like
Eric Ching who would go and look
at the birth records of children
before 1932 when they 
slaughtered tens of thousands of
indigenous people.  Most of the 
children born in my dad's 
hometown at that point were 
Indios, in quotes.  Because 
that's a racist term, still 
used.  If you look at the birth 
records after, many of these 
things were things called 
mestizo and the peasant term is
really state-sanctioned identity
alternative to indigenous 
identity.  So I grew up really 
not having a connection to the 
indigenous identity because it 
was kind of a prohibited thing 
except to look at a statue in 
San Salvador.  I got a briefcase
as a kid from my parents who 
wanted to instill pride in me.  
It had a picture -- every Latin 
American country has this 
indigenous myth where somebody 
was heroic and fighting off the 
colonizing Spaniards.  I was 
later on teaching, trying to 
find material to teach, I find 
out that it was a myth created 
by some French priest.  And 
there are banks, there are 
suitcases like the little 
briefcases I had when I was Mr. 
Peabody and there were murder 
rust battalions.  A massacre 
that killed a thousand people, 
that was named for a myth, an 
indigenous man that didn't even 
exist.  So this is kind of the 
layering of the way that indijus
identity -- thankfully there's 
still a struggle in El Salvador,
there are some friends of mine 
who are teaching now and trying 
to preserve the language and the
culture.  Just within like a 
block or two of one of the many 
unexcavated mass graves of not 
just the gang violence or the 
war of the '80s, but in 1932.  
But that's kind of the point of 
my book and the thing with the 
forensics, the comingled grave 
sites in El Salvador are 
massive.  Not just in terms of 
the gangs and the war, but in 
1932 because nobody has gone and
dug them up.  I talked to people
who said they would do that.  
They said there's no government 
that wants to go and look at 
that.  So most people in El 
Salvador don't even know about 
La Matanza.  So you have 
basically a country that has 
this genocidal path that isn't 
even acknowledged and that's the
kind of things we need to 
unforget.  
MIKE:  I think now we have 
audience questions. 
DANA:  Yeah.  I'm going to jump 
in and share a few questions 
from the audience before we 
close out today.  This first 
question is about how much 
involvement do the wealthy have 
in keeping gangs going in El 
Salvador and I'm going to build 
on that a little bit and say you
brought up the term revolution. 
I'm going to throw another word 
in there, capitalism.  There was
a mention about the coffee 
industry.
I think just maybe elaborating 
on the role of wealthy, both in 
El Salvador and in the U.S., and
their interests, how are their 
interests represented in kind of
keeping the gangs going, keeping
the war on gangs going, and 
using that as a lever of power 
in both countries?  
ROBERTO:  Good question.  One of
the things I do is interview 
desk squad operatives in my 
book.  Some of them I didn't 
know they were operatives until 
later.  Remember that model 
comes from like -- they were 
trained -- the U.S. Pentagon was
trained by the French that did 
the desk squad model as we know 
it in
Algeria.  The Nazis were admired
by the founding officer.
So the desk squads have never 
left El Salvador since the war 
and before.  Since the '70s and 
'60s.  The model of kind of 
state-sanctioned desk squads, 
paramilitaries, remains.  And 
they were financed, not just in 
El Salvador, but out of Miami.  
And there are still people -- I 
haven't had a chance to 
investigate it, but I've got 
sources telling me that there 
are groups in the U.S. who are 
funding the death squads that 
operate in the police and 
military today.  And I even 
heard about like a tour that 
they would give you, you 
remember where they would show 
people being killed.  They would
give you this fantasy island 
trip to go see a gang member get
killed as kind of a tourist 
thing.  The gaze of the murder 
is so normalized in our society 
through these digital immediate 
yams.  You have video games 
where the gaze of the murderer 
is the gaze of the good guys.  
The government has turned a 
blind eye, sadly, to the death
squads.  As all these different 
folks that have been supported 
by the U.S. have.  
MIKE:  The death squads also 
came to L.A., didn't they?  
ROBERTO:  Yeah.  There's a 
little bit about that.  We were 
pursued by death squads when I 
was meeting Mike Davis in 
MacArthur park.  The 
transnationalization of 
repression.  We were -- at 
Caresen we did community service
but we recruited lawyers and we 
would send them to El Salvador 
to document human rights cases 
of some of the worst 
perpetrators.  So the squad 
didn't like we were doing that. 
And the Congressional record is 
rife with surveillance of the 
group of the committee of people
of El Salvador.  They had death 
squad operatives posing as 
people who wanted to get service
or wanted to be organizing with 
the Salvadorans.  But again, 
that's the beauty of having a 
real revolutionary, very 
disciplined experience.  They 
were unable to get and break 
through our systems of security.
Which I think our social 
movements need to learn right 
now, because we are so open to 
-- I mean, state repression 
because of this digital stuff.  
And so yeah.  The death squads 
operated in L.A., they raped 
women, they
kidnapped AnitaAnita Marino and 
others and they tortured them 
and they shot at us.  This is 
part of the unforgoting I want 
to bring out.
It's dark and ugly but we 
survived all of that and we're 
still fighting.  Salvadorans are
still in it.  
DANA:  So on that note, that's a
good transition to the next 
question from the audience; 
which is what can children of 
the Salvadoran diaspora do to 
show solidarity and support with
the people of El Salvador, 
especially given the presidency 
and the uprising against the 
police in the U.S.?  
ROBERTO:  If I had the answer to
that one, I would be Mike Davis 
in Salvadoran.  I think that 
what you can do is affiliate 
with groups that are doing some 
of the work in El Salvador and 
in the
U.S.  Like church groups that 
are still -- it's kind of 
amazing the number of people in 
solidarity in El Salvador who 
are still out there.  It was a 
transformative moments what they
do.  Movements transform the 
political imagery in movement 
compels us to alter our lives.  
And that's kind of really the 
thing.  That's why for me, and 
Mike I would love to hear -- you
actually are a historian.  
People don't really realize this
brilliant dude I think you 
primarily identify as a 
historian even though you pretty
much know everything.  But you 
know, we have to really get 
history right for the 
sustainable struggle we're going
to need in the face of COVID, 
fascism, economic decline, and 
then climate change, right?  
We're going to need a 
millinarian sensibility.  That's
something I didn't want to hear 
without hearing what Mike had to
say about it.  That's one of the
points of my revolutionary thing
in my bok. 
MIKE:  I think theok. 
MIKE:  I think the starting 
point is the American left, the 
new generations in the American 
left, is a generation that's 
conducting such magnificent 
protests in the streets.  People
who supported, young people who 
supported Bernie Sanders.  This 
was fantastic for me, totally 
unexpected.  But the current 
American left has one major 
deficit, which is history in 
international solidarity.  This 
has been a very weak component 
of the current left and the 
Sanders campaign.  So the 
American left also needs to 
unfor get and recover its 
traditions in solidarity and 
immense importance in centrality
that solidarity with 
Latin-America played in the 
1970s, 1980s in a kind of 
reconstitution of the left and 
the whole generation of CSPIZ.  
We need to relearn all of this. 
Because it's not just history, 
it's the fundamental point of 
your book, is it's also our 
lives today.  And particularly 
because the Trump administration
has picked up
Salvadorans to be the symbol of 
everything evil and sinister in 
immigrant communities.  This is 
why it's so essential people 
read your book and begin to 
understand the history that 
we're still trapped in.  And 
that's still being perpetuated 
by this country.  
It's been a great honor to be on
this interview with you.  Thank 
you so much, Roberto.  
ROBERTO:  No need to thank me, 
Mike.  I owe you way more.  
DANA:  I got one more question 
from the audience and then I 
have a closing question for you 
both.  So the final audience 
question is, who are current 
individuals and organizations 
that give hope to people in El 
Salvador in a time of multiple 
crises?  I know you've mentioned
some of these, but I think maybe
for folks who are looking to 
learn more about how to support 
folks in El Salvador, do you 
have specific organizations or 
groups or I would also add maybe
publications or people to follow
or to read besides you and your 
book, of course.  
ROBERTO:  I'm happy to put some 
of that stuff on my website.  
One of my points of my book is 
that Salvadorans are here in the
U.S.  When I went to the 
publishing industry, I said 
whatever you do, don't 
tropicalize me.  That's one of 
the only avenues for Latino 
writers to come in like take a 
picture with some rubber tree in
the back or tropical colors or 
some other shit like that.  
There's plenty of groups in El 
Salvador to support.  I start 
off talking with groups here 
like CSPIS that are connecting 
things on both sides of the 
border but connect with 
Salvadoran communities here in 
the U.S. who are integral to the
life of El Salvador, in terms of
money, politics, and the 
transnational flows.  So
yeah.  
DANA:  There's also a request in
the chat, I think, to read -- I 
don't know if you have anything 
you want to read from your book,
maybe before we get to our last 
question, if you want to share a
particular passage.  
ROBERTO:  Oh, boy, you put me on
the spot
here.  
DANA:  Sorry.  Someone also 
asked what the amazing house 
plant is.  
ROBERTO:  My attempt to be 
tropical.  I'm kidding.  Let me 
read this passage here.  You 
mentioned cafe
la Boem.  She's a Californian 
through and through like me.  I 
don't know what drugs you tried,
you can tell me later.  Mike's 
averse to drugs, I know that for
a long time.  I won't bring Mike
into it.  I'm sitting at my 
favorite table with my laptop in
front of me attempting to stitch
together 
thethe.  Its 12 boy 10 and the 
iron gears it powers still in 
place. 
Even though there's no longer a 
sewing machine above, the medal 
moves the metal beast lying 
below most customers' awareness.
It's black elegance and noisy 
rotation remind me of bouncing 
on the lap of mama te, who 
fueled her family's 3,000 mile 
journey.  Pushing the pedals 
slowly I start typing.  The pin 
attached to the pedal of the 
sewing machine below pushes and 
pulls the wheel.  To the 
annoyance of the techie sitting 
next to me, it squeaks every few
revolutions, but still, the 
wheel turns.  Up and down, up 
and down, up and down.  The
1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 motion 
hypnotizes me.  Next to the 
wheel in the center space below 
the table, slightly rusty silver
and faded black Laurels spelling
the Singer Manufacturing 
Company.  Coming here is a 
ritual of mine.  Something about
coming to the neighborhood of my
birth to write atop on an old 
soeg machine in a cafe named for
an opera makes it easy to 
recover the fragments of my 
memories especially the ones 
that are more painful to 
conjure.  I look out the windows
at my old junior high and I 
remember the shame, confusion 
and molten anger I felt as a 
kid.  
MIKE:  I told you.  He's a 
magnificent writer.  
DANA:  That is beautiful.  One 
final question for both of you 
to kind of close us out, to end 
on a hopeful note.  Because I 
was talking to Roberto, the book
is hopeful.  So it has these 
violent history, but it's also a
book about liberation and hope 
and the revolutionary struggle 
then and now and the thread that
runs through.  So another part 
of the book that I think is 
important is this idea of 
radical imagination.  And I 
think that's really important 
right now, and I hope you agree 
with me.  What do you both 
radically imagine for our 
future?  
ROBERTO:  I'll let Mike speak 
first to that one.  I'm going to
take notes.  
MIKE:  I'm notorious, because I 
think -- I'm not a great 
believer in hope.  It's too much
like a in one great novel I know
of where the protagonist is in 
prison and the sergeant turns to
him and says well, they're going
to kill you, but they're not 
going to eat you.  And he says 
oh, that's great.  That's my 
solace.  They're not going to 
eat you.  I think that 
revolutionaries need different 
kinds of rations to struggle 
with.  Look.  Right now 
capitalism is a threat to human 
survival.  And particularly the 
survival of the poorest people 
on earth in a bunch of different
ways.  It cannot translate the 
biomedical revolution into 
public health.  It is unleashed 
and will inevitably be in 
lifetimes of people listening to
this regional nuclear wars.  It 
cannot feed the planet.  It has 
failed now totally as a job 
machine.  And that planetary 
basis, several billion people 
are not just simply access to 
the demands of capital 
accumulation on a global scale. 
The majority of working classes 
in Latin American cities in 
Africa toil in formal economy, 
which is the kind of synonym for
structural unemployment, and 
capitalism cannot decarbonize 
the planet or bring about the 
adaptations to protect the 
poorest people who are the least
responsible for carbon emissions
from the floods and droughts and
famine that follow.  I mean, we 
act not because we have hope, 
but because we're humans. 
And the essential slogan I think
has to be that we must always 
advocate the necessary.  Not the
possible.  We must embrace the 
kind of millinarian spirit that 
Roberto is talking about.  
Because this is decisive battle 
for human survival.  That's 
begun.  And I think that there 
is unparalleled fighting spirit 
amongst the current generation 
of young people, particularly my
younger children who are still 
in their senior year in high 
school.  And I've seen them and 
their friends a kind of 
resolution and courage, and also
refusal to accept realistic 
politics, because they 
understand very deeply that it 
has to be profound change has
to occur.  Not just reforms, 
promises of moderation and 
civility from Democratic 
candidates.  In other words, 
they've taken measure their 
future and they know the tasks 
in hand.  But it does raise some
questions that Roberto also 
alluded to, which is necessity 
for revolutionary organization, 
maybe not in the failed forms 
that some of us tried in the 
'60s or '70s, but there has to 
be a community of organizers 
drawn together in solidarity and
conserving and studying and 
learning from struggles of the 
present, to develop new tactics 
and strategy and it has to be 
internationalist.  That's
absolutely essential.  If it's 
not internationalist, we'll end 
up practicing our own version of
America firstism.  Roberto?  
ROBERTO:  I have just made the 
strategic blunder of following 
Mike Davis in talking about 
revolution and politics in the 
future.  I'm screwed.  But let 
me try nonetheless.     
I take to heart everything Mike 
is saying, and I will add just 
first that I wrote this book 
because I was very clear that we
are not going to liberal or 
progressive our way out of the
crises, the intersecting crises 
we face.  They're too massive to
confront with a politic of death
and capitalism.  It's not going 
to happen.  I don't even think 
Bernie Sanders political imagery
embraced the kind of things we 
need, but it was a start.  It 
hined at things we need.  And we
have to rescue that.  I'm here 
in California and I can give a 
flying rolling doughnut about 
Kamala Harris's background but I
do care about how many kids and 
family she jailed.  How many 
cops she failed to put in jail. 
I'm not even going to mention 
Joe Biden because I've seen 
enough zombie movies.  We're not
going to liberal progressive our
way out of this.  Instead we 
have to again, pursue militant 
acts of political imagination 
right now.  I'm a person that 
believes that with all my heart.
I introduce people to the 
revolutionary sensibility that I
experienced, not through the 
bombs and guns thing, but 
through a love story.  Because 
you know, people think your guys
are hard-core, but actually 
there was so much gorgeous 
poetry in Latin-America and El
Salvador, that have produced a 
lot of beautiful work and it's 
not known but it should be 
known.  We have to unforget the 
beauty.  We have to remember 
that revolution doesn't -- it 
needs dancing, but it also needs
love.     
More concretely, I think -- and 
I'll close with this, is I have 
friends, some of whom I hint at 
in the book, who are trained by 
some of the greatest 
strategists, not just in the 
modern era, but in world 
history.  These 5'2" generals 
who defeated some of the most 
powerful empires of their time, 
the Vietnamese.  And my friends 
were trained by them.  And they 
would go and I asked them later 
on, what is the Jedi knowledge 
of revolution?
So one of my friends, he's very 
bookish, he says, well, it's 
that [  Speaking Spanish ]
It's a spiritual act or what you
would call psychology.  You need
an animous that allows you to 
stay positive, not just positive
like feels good, but positive in
struggle.  Positive to take on 
intrepid risks in the name of, 
like Mike is saying, literally 
saving the planet from 
ourselves.     
So with that, I wanted Mike 
Davis to be my interlock tour 
here, because Mike is a 
beautiful writer in addition to 
being a beautiful human being 
who's committed for so long.  I 
try to write as beautifully as I
could.  I don't know if I 
succeeded.  You be the judge and
criticize the shit out of it can
you could.  I wrote to become 
poet warriors.  You can't just 
be progressive and left and 
unhealthy.  You've got to be 
clear about the spiritual 
battle.  Look at the Trump 
forces.  I used to be a right 
wing evangelical Christian.  I 
can tell you the prop began ta 
of those troops is high.  We're 
not going to get the animus we 
need, even with Bernie Sanders. 
We need something greater.  With
that I'll introduce my 
experience of the greater good, 
which was the Salvadoran 
experience.  And with love and 
affection for Dana, for Mike, 
for Anthony and Haymarket and 
upended books, thank you for 
joining me on this launch of my 
book.  
DANA:  Thank you so much.  It 
has been an honor to be in 
conversation with you.  And 
please everyone buy Roberto's 
book.  It will move you.  It 
will inspire you.  And it will 
give you some of that radical 
animus that we so desperately 
need.  Have a good night and 
thank you so much.  
>> Thank
you. 
