Chuquiago, the Indian name for La Paz, Bolivia's capital city, is a mixture of different classes and races that are kept separate and segregated. The film interweaves four stories as a way of illustrating this diversity, with its various cultural and social tensions.

Isico, a young Indian boy, grows up in a lower, working-class atmosphere. His parents hire him out to work as an assistant to an old woman in the marketplace.

Johnny, an Indian teenager, is ashamed of his background and aspires to assimilate into the white culture. He wants to leave Bolivia and turns to theft to pay for his fares to the United States.

The bureaucratic middle-class is represented by Carlos, whose working and family life is so tedious and unfulfilling, that his only pleasure is in getting drunk with the boys on Friday nights.

Patricia, on the highest rung of the social ladder, is a student, who briefly flirts with radical ideas, but she soon abandons these and marries a man of her own class.

Jury Prize, Cartagena.