Dreamland

Enrique is the son of a family from a rancho in Xalisco, Nayarit, Mexico. Over the course of the book, he follows in his uncles’ footsteps and becomes a successful heroin trafficker in the Xalisco Boys distribution group, which he starts working for at 14 years old. Dreamland features a narrative that charts the arc of Enrique’s journey from extreme poverty to wealth and renown. Quinones repeatedly depicts Enrique as a determined young man whose primary goals in life are social advancement and the accumulation of personal wealth. The moment after Enrique decides to enter into the drug trade, his uncle opens his closet to reveal rows upon rows of Levi’s 501s, jeans that were considered the gold standard of luxury clothing items among young ranchero men, and that were regarded as a visible sign of economic prosperity and used to signify wealth. As Enrique becomes successful, he recalls with great pride the moment he was able to buy his own first pair of Levi’s 501s. Enrique occasionally has reservations about the ethics of his job as a drug dealer, but he counters these doubts with the realities that living in poverty has taught him: the world is unfair, hard work doesn’t always pay off, and only people with money and power will get ahead. For Enrique, drug trafficking is a means to an end: it is a way out of poverty, and a way to become powerful. In many ways, Enrique’s narrative arc mirrors that of “legitimate” drug dealers like giant drug companies peddling painkillers: both cases involve the goal of wealth and a disregard for what rules or morals must be broken to get there. Yet, in the end, Enrique is sent to prison for his drug dealing while pharmaceutical companies are for the most part allowed to go on unchecked. Dreamland parallels Enrique’s heroin trafficking with pharmaceutical companies’ opiate sales to point to the double standards at play in the way that America stigmatizes different drugs.