Who is Maria Flores from Lucky and what is their importance?

Maria Flores is a girl in Alice's poetry class. Maria refuses to comment on Alice's poem about her attacker and later jumps out of a window but survives. When Alice visits Maria in the hospital, Maria tells Alice that her poem awakened her own rage..... memories of the repeated rapes she endured from the men in her family. Maria says that her mother doesn't want to hear it about it, and that she will never have Alice's opportunity to confront her attackers.