Tiller of the Earth is the story of Luciano Martello, an ordinary man with an unyielding determination to provide his family a life of plenitude no matter the cost. A man with a monomaniacal obsession: America The impoverished mountain village Luciano Martello inhabits has always regarded America as the only viable, realistic option to escape the emotionally and physically wrenching cycle of poverty passed on from one generation to the next. Luciano Martello is determined to spare his son this fate. But Luciano Martello's path to emigration is strewn with numerous obstacles. He must somehow...

America The word was his prayer. The America of the 1950's: consumerism and conformity, the golden ages of baseball and TV westerns, the easy availability of automobiles, Elvis and rock and roll, segregation and the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the Beat Generation. Luciano Martello immigrates to this America at the age of forty five with no job skills, a forty seven year old wife, and an eight year old son. His family is soon torn apart in the most painful manner he could ever have imagined. As each try to survive their unique environment in their own ways, the growing rifts...

Another hot night in L.A. Another strip club. The stage is lit. A dancer emerges from the swirling smoke. Their eyes lock in a hypnotic embrace and Salvino Quipal's life begins to unravel. A safe comfortable life spent caring for his disabled mother and climbing the ladder of success at work suddenly fills with danger. His pursuit of the dancer stirs to life a painful memory and he is plunged into a surreal world of violent bikers, gypsies, racist motel clerks, and one peculiar vagrant toucan. But isn't that what he really always wanted?

Los Angeles. 1969. Joe Martello and his teammate, Eddie Beltran, join a crowd of longshoremen at the docks. Eddie engages in a game of dice with a violent drug dealer. While Eddie gambles, Joe is focused on Catalina, the drug dealer's wife-a beautiful young woman who wears death's head earrings and has a series of odd markings on her neck. When Eddie loses at the game of chance, Joe is forced to pay the debt. His simple life of college and baseball becomes complicated with beatings, guns, mezcal, hallucinogens, pit bulls, an irresistible and dangerous attraction to Catalina, and a...