America Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don't look her in the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her, her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her, and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with America. So when America is offered the chance to work as a live-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester County, New York, she takes it as a sign that a door to escape has been opened.

Life in Westchester seems strange, though, to someone who has never left the tropical island where she was born. America quickly learns from the other housekeepers in her neighborhood that the superficial perfection of life in the suburbs is easily scratched. And even as America revels in the comparative luxury of her new life, daring to care about a man other than Correa, she fights to resist the feeling that no matter what she does, she can't get away from her past.