A Salvadoran writer busts the Trumpian myth of the tattooed immigrant threat
LOS ANGELES - The author Roberto Lovato is strolling around the concrete edge of MacArthur Park Lake, contemplating the role this place has played in the life of L.A.'s Central American community, himself included.
"El Parque MacArthur," Lovato says, using the Spanish wistfully, "is the historic, political, spiritual and criminal center of this part of (the city). And like any center, it's got all this life and death in it."
This is the symbolic heart of Central American Angeleno culture and identity, the largest node of the diaspora in the United States. Yet the park and its neighborhoods are rarely centered in the grand narrative of contemporary Los Angeles.
Not far from here, as Lovato describes in his new book, "Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in
