This is the biography of my mother, a Mormon woman who immigrated to the U.S. from Paraguay where her ancestral records are scarce and unreliable, so we also trace our South American lineage through her memories. Excerpt: "I remember in the airplane leaving Paraguay for the U.S.] thinking, nobody is going to call me Dona Mecha. By the time you got to be Dona, you were fat and ugly. I thought my name is going to be Mercedes and I'm never going to tell anyone my name is Mecha. That's what I was thinking on the plane. I was really gonna be Mercedes, the queen, with a very faithful, wonderful husband. I got it made." She was bound for disappointment. At 18 my mother left Paraguay to marry an American. They met while he was serving in South America as a Mormon missionary. It includes information about Mormon beliefs and practices, and facts about Paraguay. It contains stories about her youth in Paraguay, her relatives, her experiences as a life-long Mormon, her trials being married to a man who had polygamy on his agenda, motherhood, and returning to South America herself to serve as a Mormon missionary "