Are
young Mexican girls kidnapped by recruiters for Tijuana brothels
and held against their will to serve rich American clients?
The Spanish-language film Santitos [in Spanish,
little saints], directed and produced by Alejandro
Spingall, with John Sayles as executive producer, is based
on this premise of white slavery. The film begins in the small
town of Tlacotalpán in the state of Veracruz. Esperanza (played
by Dolores Heredia), a young widow, is grief-stricken on learning
that her teenage daughter Blanca is dead. While using her
oven at home, she sees the image of St. Jude, who informs
her that Blanca is not dead. She rushes to Padre Salvador
(played by Fernando Torre Lapham) to reveal that she has seen
a vision, but the priest cautions her not to tell a soul,
and soon she is praying to St. Anthony for guidance. Esperanza
then goes to the coroner and demands to see the face of Blanca,
but her request is denied, as the casket is wrapped in plastic
because the cause of death was a strange virus (filmviewers
will suspect HIV). The attending physician also mysteriously
disappears. From these pieces of evidence she concludes that
her daughter has been kidnapped and is working against her
will in a brothel, conjuring up a subplot of the Philippine
classic Macho Dancer (1989), directed by the
late Lino Brocka. Esperanza now has hope (the English translation
of her name) that she can find Blanca. She first becomes a
maid in a Tlacotalpán whorehouse to see whether Blanca works
there, but all that she learns is the rumor about a special
brothel in Tijuana that offers virgins for clients to deflower
for an extraordinary price. She then takes a bus trip to Tijuana,
is robbed by a prostitute on the bus, and one of her two pieces
of luggage is snatched shortly after arriving in town; she
is happy that the other piece, a box containing statuettes
of St. Jude and St. Anthony. She then embarks on her search
for the brothel where Blanca works but that means becoming
a prostitute herself, and she decorates her room with the
"santitos." A long-distance phone confession to Padre Salvador
also eases her mind, but he is distressed that she has become
crazy. When she fails to find Blanca at various cathouses,
one run by a transsexual who prefers sex with the tits of
a cow, she arranges with her special client, a San Diego judge,
to be smuggled into the United States so that she can continue
her search in Los Angeles. Once again a reluctant prostitute,
she becomes enamored of a masked wrestler named Angel de Justicia
[Angel of Justice], who appears on television. She eventually
attends a wrestling match, wild with excited spectators, in
which the Angel de Justicia (played by Alberto Estrella) defeats
an opponent named Imigración (representing the U.S. Immigration
authorities). Knocking on the door of his dressing room after
the fight, she begs for a date, and the Angel takes her out
dancing. After a few more dates, she unmasks him, they make
love and later fall in love, having discovered the purity
of each other's souls. However, Esperanza soon gets in trouble
because she cannot stand to be a prostitute, so she flees
to Tlacotalpán with her "santitos" and gives up the search
for Blanca. Before she can get readjusted to life in her hometown,
however, Angel tracks her down and takes her back to the United
States along with the wall (containing the oven) where she
first saw the vision of St. Jude. MH
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