Carmelita Carreras's life over the past sixteen years has been a lie. A lie that was right in front of her green eyes the whole time. Huddled over her mother's deathbed, Carmelita leans close as she hears the story of how she came to be. A kitchen worker in the sprawling Mexican estate of a mining mogul, her mother, Edelmida, was brutally raped by an Irish immigrant supervisor. Furious and feeling helpless, Edelmida steals a bejeweled antique cross, handed down since the days of Cortez, and plants it in the room of her rapist hoping for revenge. She gets her wish, and the man is run out of town as a thief. Edelmida marries a miner who Carmelita always came to think of as her father, but the true biological identity of her father is unclear. Carmelita sets out to find the truth about her father, the cross-missing for years and said to bring good fortune-and herself, sparking events that lead to the Mexican Revolution.