Waking From
Innocent Dreams

With themes similar to Hades, Argentina, and Solito, Waking From Innocent Dreams is a coming-of-age tale based on true events that blurs the line between imagination and memory. It follows a young man haunted by what he’s lost, and by a ghostly boy whose true nature he refuses to see.

On the verge of adulthood, an adoptee is contacted by a human rights organization with news that changes everything. Growing up, Nelson lived in a family that loved him but looked nothing like him. He has spent years longing to meet the one person he believes will make him whole, and trying to ignore the ghost that won’t leave him alone.

A positive DNA test reveals him to be Roberto, the son of revolutionaries who, as an infant, was desaparecido, disappeared, along with his mother, during a violent government raid.

After a miraculous reunion, Nelson/Roberto finds a family ready to welcome him home, and something almost no other desaparecido receives, a second chance. As one of only a handful of survivors, he sets out on an epic adventure to discover a life taken from him and the sense of belonging he has yearned for his entire life.

His journey takes him across Central America and into a magical world where past and present blend and ancient trees serve as doorways between worlds. As he travels from volcanic hilltops to the rural countryside, where, for the first time in his life, everyone around him looks like him, he must learn to navigate two distinct fathers, families, and cultures.

But when his father’s rigid, black-and-white worldview threatens to shatter the family unity Nelson has dreamed of since childhood, he faces an impossible choice. He must learn to see what the ghost has been trying to show him before his fantasies leave him lost between worlds, ni de aquí ni de allá.

When Javier Zamora’s memoir Solito became a New York Times bestseller, it proved that readers are hungry for authentic Salvadoran stories. But as Roberto Lovato points out in Unforgetting, for decades:

“Joan Didion and other white US writers were the only tellers of Salvadoran stories in the English language.”

One story that has rarely been told from the inside is that of the disappeared. Since the 1950s, governments throughout Central and South America have abducted more than 100,000 people as a strategy of intimidation and control. While most are presumed dead, a small subset, almost entirely children, have survived and had their origins concealed. In El Salvador alone, nearly 1,000 children were disappeared during the country’s 13-year-long civil war.

There are many more diaspora stories waiting to be told. Waking From Innocent Dreams is the first novel about the desaparecidos written by one of them.

My name is Nelson de Witt, but it’s also Roberto Coto. I am one of El Salvador’s Disappeared Children, kids who were separated from their families during the conflict.

As someone who was forcibly disappeared and had a loved one taken the same way, I am able to write about this phenomenon from a unique perspective. Not only do I understand the ambiguous grief that comes from having a loved one taken this way, but I’ve also had to wrestle with complex issues such as identity confusion, family separation, and cultural bifurcation that affect many Latinx, Central American, and other marginalized communities.

In 2024, my essay "‘You’re One of the Disappeared?’ How I Came to Accept My Place in History" was published in the NACLA Report. That commitment to writing my truth continued at the Under The Volcano writing residency in Tepoztlán, Mexico, where I joined its Writing of Witness program in 2025 to continue developing my novel.

In addition to this book, I am working on a documentary film called Identifying Nelson/Buscando a Roberto. It centers around a week-long trip I took to El Salvador in 2011, where I got to connect with the other Disappeared Children, interview members of my birth family, and meet the country’s president.

My story has been featured in:

• “El Salvador’s missing children: Part one” — BBC World Service
• “Salvadoran group dogged in search for children missing years ago in civil war” — Los Angeles Times
• “Former ‘missing child’ in El Salvador’s civil war tells his journey in film” — Christian Science Monitor
• "‘Identifying Nelson’: El Salvador Born, U.S. Man Searched For His Roots" — HuffPost

I’ve also appeared on several podcasts and spoken at Dartmouth College, Yale University, Wellesley College, and University of Chicago.

I’m currently seeking representation as I pursue traditional publishing for my novel, which is 115,000 words in its current draft. If you are a literary agent interested in my project, please get in touch. I’m happy to send sample chapters upon request.

Traditional publishing can take a long time, so if you are interested in purchasing a copy when it is available, sign up for my newsletter and I will notify you when it is ready.

Stories like this need to be told. They also need to be found. If you know someone who’d connect with this, please share it with them .

If you want to be part of the process, Los Testigos is a membership program where you can follow along as I write, offer feedback, and witness the story’s creation.