In the 1970s, an impoverished and intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American woman Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem, is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental hospital due to her supposed violent criminal tendencies. She had been recently released from a previous voluntary commitment in a mental institution after an episode of drug-related child neglect, which led her also to lose custody of her daughter. Connie is caught within the government welfare and child custody labyrinth of 1970s New York City. She is after the first scene recommitted involuntarily by her niece's pimp on grounds of violent behavior, after she strikes him in the course of protecting her niece, Dolly (Dolores), from him. Dolly had sought protection from Connie because she was being forced by the pimp into having an (illegal) abortion.