Maria wakes up with a splitting headache. She shakes her head as she remembers how much sleep she got the night before. She dreads heading off to work where she acquires ten dollars an hour working at the local Best Buy.

She struggles to the shower, turns on the water, and blasts some music. She washes her body while rapping along to her favorites, Biggie Smalls and Tupac. She sprays mounds of her dark brown hair with about twenty different products making her hair as crunchy as raw noodles. She covers her face in dark face makeup to match her Latina skin tone. Maria quickly adds a thin line of cherry rep lip liner and takes one last glance in the mirror. Right before Maria gets dressed in her blue shirt and black pants, she puts on gigantic silver hoops. The excitement rushes over her as she gets to work another ten-hour shift dealing with the most awful people in the world.

Maria continues working a dead-end job to buy herself a beloved iPod, which she pronounces “ee-pod.”
She strolls into work and immediately unpacks loads of boxes and then drops a large box and screams, “Ay no!” Maria waits for her angry boss to yell at her once again.

Maria begins to work as a cashier for the remainder of the day where she constantly listens to people say “What?! I cannot understand your accent ma’am.” She grins and thinks of a million Spanish swears she wishes she could say right now. She thinks to herself “I may be getting ten dollars an hour, but that just isn’t enough.”

Finally she completes her ten-hour shift and her boyfriend, Jose, picks her up in his broken down mini van. He walks into her apartment, grabs a cold beer, and sits down in front of the television.

Maria checks her answering machine as soon as she gets home and hears the voice of her mother. Her mom cries hysterically on the phone.

“Maria, we miss you so much. Please come home. I do not understand why you had to leave all of us to another country,” cries her mother in quick Spanish.

Maria groans as she remembers all her troubled times in Mexico and thinks to herself “you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back there, “even if she is living here illegally. She clicks erase on the answering machine and sits down to watch TV with Jose.