Bernice and Fontayne grew up so tight they could ‘go for sisters’. After twenty years apart, they are reunited when Bernice is assigned to be Fontayne’s parole officer — just when she needs help on the wrong side of the law.

This film is made up of three segments that share no plot but have a general thematic relationship. In the first segment, Virginia and her three children are left by her shiftless husband and she is courted by an old beau who is now divorced. In the second, a divorced woman reacts to some unexpected revelations from her aged father. In the third, a childless, middle-aged social worker is swept into an affair with a young cab driver and finds herself pregnant.

1931, a year of nationalisms and excesses: The Chinese are expelled from Sonora; the US deports Mexicans and closes its borders. Twelve desperate people cross the Sonoran desert in a 1929 Chrysler, hoping to find peace in Baja California. As their sojourn exposes both the best and the worst of human nature, racism, greed, and paranoia prove as deadly as the merciless landscape around them.

A farm girl's life turns upside down after she moves to Chicago and becomes trapped in a vicious cycle of prostitution and crime.

A child witnesses drug dealers murder his parents. He escapes and grows up wild in the city's slums. Years later he emerges to help the residents of the area who are being terrorized by street gangs and drug dealers.