Carmen is a good student with a bad attitude who lives for dancing in the underground clubs of Chicago. She yearns to be ?somebody? but is afraid to believe in herself. Her immigrant Mexican, working-class parents want her to stay in school and get an education, so she attends junior college while working at a grocery store. Carmen?s professor catches her performing one day in the neighborhood and challenges her to audition to a formal dance school in California. She gets into a fight with her chaotic family and runs away to her best friend Gina?s place only to find out Gina?s been getting beat up by her boyfriend. Meanwhile, Carmen?s boyfriend, Jared wants her to commit and move in with him. Pulled apart in every direction, her dream of dancing fades. Can Carmen overcome her fears and take the biggest chance of her life, or will she succumb to her self-doubt?

It is 1939, the end of three years of bloody civil war in Spain, and General Franco s right-wing Nationalists are poised to defeat the left-wing Republican forces. A ten-year-old boy named Carlos, the son of a fallen Republican war hero, is left by his tutor in an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. The orphanage is run by a curt but considerate headmistress named Carmen and a kindly Professor Casares, both of whom are sympathetic to the doomed Republican cause. Despite their concern for him, and his gradual triumph over the usual schoolhouse bully, Carlos never feels completely comfortable in his new environment. First of all, there was that initial encounter with the orphanage s nasty caretaker, Jacinto, who reacts even more violently when anyone is caught looking around a particular storage room the one with the deep well. Second, and more inexplicable, is the presence of a ghost, one of the former occupants of the orphanage named Santi...