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