Damnificados

Winner:
2016 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, Fiction
2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year, Multicultural Fiction
2017 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold, Multicultural Fiction

Nominee:
2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Debut Fiction


Uses magical realism, revolutionary politics, and romantic adventure to bring to life a colorful community of squatters in an imaginary Latin American city

Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, 600 "damnificados"--vagabonds and misfits--take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical "owners." Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven's Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse.

JJ Amaworo Wilson is a prize-winning author of more than 20 books about language and language learning. His short fiction has been published by Penguin, Johns Hopkins University Press, and myriad literary magazines in England and the United States. He lives in Silver City, New Mexico.