Maria Full Of Grace Sparknotes

The 2012 movie, Maria Full of Grace, produced by Joshua Marston, is about drug trafficking in Colombia where marijuana crops are grown and are extremely valuable to cartels and businessmen. It is related to the Reaction and Neoliberalism chapters of Chasteen’s Born In Blood and Fire where great power comes from increased wealth. Maria is the main character who flies to New York with illegal drugs, serving as an example of the danger and risk that people are willing to take to make money to make a living through the drug trafficking ring.

The movie begins horticulturists working tirelessly in a warehouse in Colombia. The main protagonist, Maria, played by Carolina Sandino Morena, quit her job in the warehouse because she felt her boss, who

refused to let her use the bathroom, treated her horribly. Independence is one of the central themes in the movie where Maria desires to leave her family. She experiences many problems with her family, such as her boyfriend getting her pregnant with no desire for commitment and an inability to help out. Because she was the only one working in her family, she was forced by her mother to pay for supplies for the care of the sister’s baby. Maria had enough and left to look for a new job.
The theme of struggle also is brought up throughout the film.

When the protagonist, Maria, understands first-hand the struggle that she must endure when her family forces her to pay for her sister’s baby’s care without being able to enjoy any of the money she worked hard for. Maria starts to work for Javier, a representative of the cartel that attempts to smuggle drugs into the United States for money. She needed to swallow pellets of heroin that were to be well wrapped. It was a struggle for Maria to consume sixty-two pellets at first and it was difficult for her to endure her trip with the pellets inside of her belly, knowing that there was a risk that the pellets could open up and kill her quickly and painfully. Lucy, one of the women on board the flight that Maria was on, had a pellet rupture inside of her upon her arrival to New York. She died shortly after meeting with the drug

traffickers.
Director Paul Mezey’s film also has immigration as another theme that the movie covers. It serves as the transition that Maria has to experience and mature. She sets up her papers for the trip to the US through Javier, who teaches her about the importance of taking opportunities, regardless of the risk, for those she loves. By traveling to New York, Maria enters a new city filled of opportunity. A woman that Maria meets upon her arrival to New York, Carla, who is also Lucy’s sister, described desiring to return back home to Colombia to meet her mother and sister, but decided to remain to raise her baby and provide her baby opportunities that she never had during her youth in Columbia. Carla becomes devastated when Maria tells her about her Lucy’s death and Maria helps to pay for the burial arrangements with the money she got from the drug traffickers.
The themes in the film and Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire are related.

Both show the undergoing of the struggle to survive in poverty and promote the desire to make lives better financially as well as socially. The drug trafficking theme is used in both the movie and Chasteen’s book. During the 1970’s, Pablo Escobar pioneered the Colombian drug trade. He became wealthy off of the business with US consumers, selling marijuana and cocaine to them (Chasteen 314). Since those times, many people have looked to drug trafficking as a profitable business, hiring people to smuggle their merchandise into other countries, especially the United States. They worked behind the scenes like mafia hit men, selling their drugs and transporting them through messengers who were local

citizens.
Maria Full of Grace is a great movie that shows an example of the struggle that many people went through and are still going through today. People are willing to risk their lives for a better opportunity. Just as in Chasteen’s Born in Blood & Fire, people desired to become more wealthy and powerful through dangerous methods of drug trafficking. The protagonist, Maria, inspired to look for a better life, left Colombia while working as a drug mule. However, she refused to return back to Colombia, seeing an opportunity to leave the drug business by staying in the US. I learned that if one were successful in performing a smuggling job, they could get forced to remain on the job by the drug cartels upon returning back to their country through threats on family members. Paul Mezey’s film truly catches the suspense of the drug smugglers’ transport risking their own lives for a better opportunity.