A young Iowa mother discovers she is a survivor of one of the most horrific episodes in Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war. Denese Becker (born Dominga Sic Ruiz) was a nine-year-old Maya Indian girl living in a remote highland village in 1982 when soldiers and paramilitary patrollers killed her parents and more than 200 other villagers after they resisted relocation for a World Bank-sponsored dam. The massacres at Rio Negro, one of 440 villages nationwide considered "subversive" and eliminated by the army, were later termed "genocide" by a UN-sponsored Truth Commission. The young Dominga escaped to the mountains, running from army troops. Months later, surviving relatives brought her to safety in a nearby town, and at age 11 she was adopted by a couple from Iowa. Dominga became Denese, with a new family and a new identity. Years later, housewife and manicurist Denese Joy Becker, now thoroughly American, wonders whether her nightmares and scattered memories of the violence are true.

Discovering Dominga documents Becker's personal odyssey from the cornfields of her adoptive Iowa to the highlands of Guatemala on a journey of self-discovery and political awakening. As she uncovers the truth of her past and the atrocities committed against the Maya people, this shy young woman decides to emerge from her cocoon of silence and become an advocate for her people. Finally, she becomes a witness in a landmark human rights case, which for the first time in Guatemalan history seeks to prosecute former military commanders responsible for the genocide.