Latinx Speaker Series: Special Guest Roberto Lovato
Overview
Join us as we discuss the importance of looking to our family history to gain both a sense of self-understanding and an awareness of how our family secrets are often connected to the dark secrets of nations. We will discuss Roberto Lovato's process of looking to his family's past as well as that of El Salvador-uncovering secrets that are reinforced/held on a familial and a national level. Throughout our conversation we will be centering how the personal is connected to the social/political and how understanding our familial, national, history can help us have clarity about our own lives and those of our loved ones. Roberto will share how he began to do the work of uncovering family secrets and engaging in conversations with his family members.
The Latinx Speaker Series at San Francisco State University is a strong partnership between Latinx Student Services and the Latina/Latino Studies Department. We host monthly Latinx identifying individuals to discuss various salient topics that impact the Latinx community. This spring semester we are virtually hosting a distinguished line-up of speakers/artists that express their work through the arts. The Latinx Speaker Series is free to all SFSU students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members.
About Special Guest Roberto Lovato:
Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting (Harper Collins), a “groundbreaking” memoir the New York Times picked as an “Editor’s Choice” and hailed as a “kaleidoscopic montage that is at once a family saga, a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the vicissitudes of history, community and, most of all for [Lovato], identity.” Newsweek listed Lovato’s memoir as a “must read” 2020 book and the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of 2020. Lovato is also an educator, journalist and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, California. As a Co-Founder of #DignidadLiteraria, he helped build a movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off of bookshelves in the United States and out of the national dialogue. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war, and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France and the United States, among other countries. Lovato is a lifelong resident of San Francisco’s Mission and Outer Mission neighborhoods.