Welcome to a small Arizona border town where the summer heat bears down upon the inhabitants and creates discontent in young and old alike. Dona Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo), the Garcia family matriarch, still lives alone in her own home. She angers her middle-age daughter Lolita (Elizabeth Pena) by taking her small savings and purchasing a used car. She is bored to death and wants a new challenge to perk up her spirits. Her gardener Don Pedro (Jorge Cervera Jr.) volunteers to teach her how to drive the stick shift vehicle. Gossip spreads like wildfire in the small town and Lolita worries about what people must be thinking about her inability to control her mother's strange behavior.
Lolita's life has hit a dry patch as well. She runs a butcher shop inherited from her father with the help of Jose Luis (Rick Najera). She is divorced and comes home most of the time to an empty apartment. She is very lonely as demonstrated one evening when she has no other options but to drink a beer by herself, listen to some music, and weep over the sad state of affairs in her life. Lolita is so desperate that she tries to spend an evening with Victor Reyes (Steven Bauer), a married friend's husband who is a womanizer.
Meanwhile, her teenage daughter Blanca (America Ferrera) is prowling the streets with her girlfriends looking for some companionship with the opposite sex. She chooses to hook up with Sal Juarez (Leo Minaya), an outsider in the community who is working at a garage for the summer. On a date with him, Blanca tells him that she doesn't want to get married after having seen the poor marriages of her mother and grandmother. But as a virgin, she is fascinated with the idea of having sex and discovering its mysteries.
In her debut as a director and writer, Georgina Garcia Reidel does a commendable job capturing and conveying the role of desire and fear in the lives of these three women. The popular spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle has observed that "desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby become diminished and be less." Despite their age differences, the Garcia women share a yearning to spice up their lives with sex. Dona Genoveva enters new territory by having an affair; Lolita finds romance in a surprising place, and Blanca learns that intercourse is not all it is cracked up to be when devoid of loving intimacy. It is easy to identify with these sexual explorers with their foibles and their missteps. They do not fare very well with their fears but in the process of dealing with their desires they find a new path to each other.
