After rushing from Chicago to Mexico City to say goodbye to her dying grandmother, Rosa discovers documents revealing a family secret: her father is not actually the son of the man Rosa grew up knowing as her grandfather. This discovery sets Rosa on a quest to understand the early life of her grandmother, Amanda Diaz.
Amanda grows up in Mérida, Yucatan during the years of the Mexican Revolution, as the country struggles to throw off centuries of repression of indigenous people by their masters, who are of European descent. Amanda is part of the "divine caste", but her troubled mother ignores her from the time of her birth and Amanda grows up under the care of her Mayan Indian nurse JOVITA and Jovita's daughter CACHO, who is the same age as Amanda and her best friend. As the girls become young women, they begin to move in circles that include FELIPE CARRILLO PUERTO, the progressive governor of Yucatan, his fiancée ALMA REED (both true historical figures), and CARLOS ANCONA, a journalist who chronicled the Revolution at the side of Pancho Villa but now seeks a more peaceful life working for his friend Felipe back in his native Mérida. Amanda's family pictures Carlos as a suitor for their daughter.
Just as a coup topples Felipe's government and leads to the arrest of the governor and his family, a Diaz neighbor whips Cacho almost to the point of death.
The story follows Amanda through her horror at the social injustice of the two-class Mexico to the sacrifices she makes in the name of friendship. Parts of the story take place in modern times, where the discovery of an old birth certificate sets Amanda's granddaughter in search of a secret about her father's birth. Her search, told in the first person, is blended with a third-person account of the lives of Amanda and her contemporaries in the 1920s.
