An article in a random travel magazine - about coyotes freely roaming the banks of the Rio Grande right in the middle of the city of Albuquerque - comples talented but sociall-isolated artist Margaret Shaw to pack up and move from New York City to New Mexico. She quickly settles into a Chicano/Mexican barrio near the river, spending long days at local junkyards attempting to satisfy another recent obsession - her determination to mover her art from two dimensions to three. As she collects rusty parts from obsolete machinery, she imagines welding them into sculptures, and she never looks back at the sorrowful past she left behind in the east.Her new life takes an unexpected turn when she meets Rico Garcia, a car mechanic known locally as "El Rey," the king of low rider welders, and impulsively asks him to teach her to weld.
