Lou Becker
Overweight, middle-aged, obnoxious loud-mouthed conservative talk radio personality. He spews racist talking points with abandon, hitting all the notes expected by his compliant, unthinking Anglo listeners (like Thelma) who lap it up with self-pitying joy. He gets his comeuppance when three mysterious Figures in masks kidnap him and set him loose in the Arizona desert.
Sandi
A dark-complexioned second generation Latina whose first and only language is English will also wind up isolated and afraid in the same desert and becoming an unlikely confederate of Lou Becker as both that commonest of ground: the desire to avoid dying. Sandi finds herself out in the desert scrambling for survival primarily as the result of being the latest in a long, long line of American citizens to discover first-hand that what really binds all cops together is a breathtaking lack of imagination and an unwillingness to have their authority questions.
Arizona Police Officer
Sandi’s road to being detained in the desert begins with a little sexual foreplay with boyfriend Matt. Their car parked just a few miles from the Mexican border is spotted by an Arizona police officer who instant racially profiles Sandi as an illegal immigrant. Sandi is actually an outraged U.S. citizens who refuses to cooperate. This situation is take to another degree by virtue of the fact that Matt is a Canadian who actually has immigrated illegally into the country, a fact which she practically spells out to the cop in her outrage at being profiled herself. Nevertheless, his capacity for imagining that of the two it is the light-skinned male and not the dark-skinned female who is the illegal immigrant here is utterly and totally lacking and, as a result, Sandi finds herself in an immigrant detention center.
Ernesto Martinez
While it may seem that the foil for Lou Becker is bound to be Sandi, that position actually falls to Ernesto Martinez. He is an immigration activist who breaks the law by making gallons of water available to immigrants coming illegally across the border into Arizona. After her experience in the desert, Sandi winds up joining with Ernesto in his immigration activism.
