Emilio Mendez is a 17-year-old Chicano man in California comes to realize that the gang life is not what he really wants but doesn't know how to get out. Robby Benson plays a young gang member in Los Angeles who begins to question himself when Mendez meets and starts to fall for a White girl who encourages him to try and leave. Emilio, with great pride in his Native Mexican heritage, suffers a further identity crisis upon meeting his father, a European-American who got his Brown mother pregnant when she was just 16.