Border Patrol Agent Bud Buckwald is a married father of three living near Mexico, and he feels vaguely threatened by ethnic changes taking place in his neighbourhood. His next-door neighbor, Ernesto Gonzalez, is an ambitious patriarch who is doing better than Bud despite having been in the United State for less than a decade - which is a sore spot for Bud. As the paths of the two families begin to cross, they soon become bound together by a romance and, eventually, a friendship that span the cultural divide.