Rosalina Rosay’s buoyant coming-to-America memoir,

Rosalina’s trek begins in a mud-brick home in a small town in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, where she recounts skimpy meals, weekly baths and coarse clothing, and follows her illegal immigration into California in the 1970s, where her family piled into various apartments as they acclimated to the new culture, attending schools, finding jobs, putting food on the table.

This illegal-immigrant autobiography sheds heartbreaking light on Mexican poverty and despair and reveals how

Rather than blame the United States’ immigration policy for the problems associated with illegal aliens, Rosalina points the finger at Mexico’s elite ruling class and decades of politicians who’ve ignored joblessness, poor schooling and poverty in their nation. “For decades America has been giving millions of Mexicans the hope that the Mexican government has brazenly failed to give to its poor citizens,” Rosalina writes. “But America cannot continue to do so, for its culture may be at stake.”

Readers will come away from Rosalina’s book with intimate knowledge of day-to-day life in poverty, with compassion for those who’ve journeyed to a land of hope, and with a greater understanding of the complexities of immigration issues in the United States.

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$12.95 on Amazon. (Suggested Retail $16.95)