Maria is seventeen years old and lives with her parents in a coffee plantation at the foot of an active volcano. A marriage has been arranged for her with the factory foreman, but she wishes to discover the world on the other side of the mountain, a place which she is not even able to imagine. And so she seduces a coffee picker who wishes to flee to the United States. But not everything goes as she has planned, and her ancestral culture returns to the centre of her life once more.
