Nuyorican Dream

In 1968 at the age of eighteen, Marta Gutierrez moved from Puerto Rico to New York with her infant son. The life she found did not prove to be much better than the one she left: lack of employment opportunities, daycare services and education, she ended up among Puerto Rican mothers living below the poverty line. The film’s central character is Robert Torres, Marta’s eldest child and the only one of his siblings to have made it ‘out of the ghetto’ by obtaining a diploma and getting a job. He works in an alternative school for underprivileged children in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. With very little hope left for his brother Danny, who has not escaped prison, his sisters Tati and Betty, who have succumbed to drugs, he fights to convince his younger 13-year-old sister Milly to continue her studies.