ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the autobiography of Carolina Maria de Jesus, nicknamed Bitita. In Diario de Bitita, Carolina Maria de Jesus realized her dream of writing about her childhood in the countryside. The importance of Carolina Maria de Jesus's writing, many Brazilians continued to equivocate. Carolina's description of her dreadful treatment by her mulatto relatives when she traveled on foot to Ribeirao Preto seeking treatment at a charity hospital is one of the most poignant episodes in Brazilian writing. The trajectory of Carolina's wanderings from Sacramento until she arrived in the metropolis of Sao Paulo persuasively documents the travails of countless tens of thousands of lower-class women driven from their places of birth by lack of opportunity for work and by the promise of a better life as domestics or industrial workers in larger cities. Carolina Maria de Jesus's memoirs relate misery and injustice, but she was never a bitter woman.
