Connie Ramos is a poor Latina woman who has not had an easy life. She grows up poor, works hard for her education, and goes to college. She ends up sleeping with a man she barely knows and getting pregnant. She has an abortion. She marries a man she loves but loses him when he is killed in a knife fight on the street. She marries a second man, Eddie Ramos, who gives her his last name and a lifetime of trouble and misery. He is a drunk and an abuser, but they have a daughter to whom Connie gives birth shortly before Eddie leaves her for good.
Then Connie meets Claud. He is a blind saxophone player and a skilled pickpocket who loves Connie's daughter, Angelina, as if she were his own. Claud is arrested for picking one pocket too many. Whilst in prison, Claud participates in a medical testing program but dies after having a hepatitis vaccine tested on him. Connie plunges into a depression and takes life out on her daughter whom she starts to beat. Angelina is removed from her care and Connie is committed to a mental institution but nothing much changes in her disposition, and when she gets out she is just as depressed, and far more bitter about life; she also has no money.
Connie gets into an altercation with her niece Dolly's pimp, Geraldo, when Geraldo tries to influence Dolly into an abortion, which is illegal. Connie breaks Geraldo's nose, and Geraldo responds by knocking Dolly unconscious, and then having her committed into an insane asylum. Since Connie has previously been committed the hospital believes the story given to them by Geraldo and Dolly, who sides with her pimp over her aunt, and Connie is committed once more.
Whilst she is in the hospital, Connie begins to have visions, and is "visited" by a woman named Luciente who is visiting her from the future. She even takes Connie to the future with her, because it is so nice that she feels Connie ought to see it. The future is a place of total equality. There's no poverty and no discrimination. Everyone recycles without being reminded, and everyone is loved. Luciente has two lovers, one of whom Connie sleeps with, the other, Jackrabbit, is killed. Something bad happens in the future whenever the future worries about its past. Therefore, Luciente believes that the key to a positive future is to make changes in the past whilst you are still living in it.
Connie begins to lose the ability to contact Luciente once she meets Dr Redding. Dr Redding is a doctor on the edge of the line between experimentation to further the cause of medicine and experimentation for his own personal enjoyment. He chooses Connie for an experiment that he claims will help her; he wants to implant a device in her brain that will enable her doctors to "turn off" her violent impulses and thereby keep her out of trouble. Connie doesn't want anything to do with the experiment; she doesn't want brain surgery of any kind, least of all experimental, and the other patients in the asylum who have had surgery do not make her feel any more confident in it. She plans an escape and does get away for a couple of days, but is recaptured and forced into the experimental surgery.
Connie's brother allows her to come home for Thanksgiving. Doctors want to remove the part of her brain they think is responsible for the violent urges since the implant they put in causes her to faint all the time. They remove it but still want to experiment on Connie. She doesn't want brain surgery and so uses her Thanksgiving break as an opportunity to plan a second escape. She finds plant food that is a poison to humans in Luis' greenhouse whilst she is working out there - Luis makes her work in return for allowing her to leave the asylum - and initially thinks about poisoning Luis, but changes her mind. Instead she laces her doctor's coffee before he drinks it.
All of this behavior makes Connie seem as insane as her brother and niece claim her to be. She succeeds in halting the brain surgery but is committed to the asylum with no release date in sight. She no longer has contact with Luciente, who doesn't visit her anymore, perhaps because she is now too bitter and miserable to create a better future, and perhaps because now that she has done away with the team of doctors working on her brain, she feels that she has already made a better future for herself.
