Rosa: … I fucked him for you! I fucked him for you! Because I’m tired. Tired! All
my life. My husband gets sick, I go fuck. My dad leaves, I go fuck. … You
want a job? I go fuck. All the time!
Maya: Goddamn it, I didn’t know!
Rosa: No? Everybody looked the other way … Now do you feel bad? Do you feel
bad? (Crying) I have a husband! I have two kids! And what? And I’m a fucking
whore, right? That’s what I am! Because I didn’t think I’d keep on doing it here,
right! How do you like that, Maya? My own daughter, my baby asks me where
her dad is. What am I going to tell her, Maya? I didn’t even remember his face.
I didn’t know who the fuck is her father. “You were born in a brothel, honey.”
You’re right, Maya. I am a fucking traitor. A traitor who is lying to herself, to
my own family, to my baby girl …
Maya’s shock, pain and disbelief upon learning of her sister’s prostitution
provides a conflicting contrast in the film: the daring but naïve Maya on the progressive
path of social movement and justice, and the equally bold but experienced and
succumbed Rosa who has “learned” in a hard way how power in this society functions
and how as a subordinate subject one has to extract the very last bit of her body and soul
to keep on surviving, including “selling one’s body” and selling others out. The film
applauds Maya’s bravery, faith, sense of justice and her associated labor movement,
while cutting into a silent “understanding” (through Maya’s felt speechlessness) towards
Rosa’s painful revelation of having prostituted herself as an immigrant to support her
family. Rosa has sold her co-janitors out, yes, but the film provides a forum for her
subjectivity to come forth—so that even if the audience does not approve of betrayal or
applaud selling bodily service in exchange
for money and favors, one can at least achieve an understanding of how the difficulty of
living as a poor working-class immigrant woman facing the force of global capital may
propel her to engage in “such” activities in order to make do.
But it is also at this critical juncture one wonders whether the divergent paths
taken by Maya and Rosa in the film provide too comfortable an outlet of the conflicting
emotions of the audience by placing Rosa in the dark category of whore, victim, betrayal,
3
Convention