Plot
The film depicts 30 years of Chicano gang life in Los Angeles. It focuses on Montoya Santana (Panchito Gomez), a teen who, with his friends, J.D. (Steve Wilcox) and Mundo (Richard Coca), form their own gang. They soon find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time and are arrested.
In juvenile hall, Santana murders a fellow inmate (Eric Close) who'd raped him and as a result, has his sentence extended into Folsom prison after he turns 18. Once there, Santana (now played by Edward James Olmos) becomes the leader of a powerful gang, La Eme. Upon his release he tries to relate his life experiences to the society that has changed so much since he left. La Eme has become a feared criminal organization beyond Folsom, selling drugs and committing murder.
Santana starts to see the error of his ways but before he can take action, is sent back to prison for drug possession. There, he tells his former lieutenant, J.D. (William Forsythe) that he is no longer interested in leading the La Eme. However, following a precedent set by Santana himself earlier in the film, his men murder him to show the other prison gangs that, despite having no leader, they are not weak.
Read more about this topic: American Me
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)