Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dreamland, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Pain Management and the Normalization of Narcotics
The Drug Business
Stigma, Shame, and the Opiate Epidemic
Community as a Remedy to Addiction
Summary
Analysis
Enrique returns to Nayarit after working for his uncles in Canoga Park. He dreams of returning to California and the life he could make for himself there. Above all, Enrique doesn’t want to be poor. In 1991, Enrique returns to work for his uncles. Since he was gone, more Xalisco cells have set up shop in the Valley, driving down the price of the drug. By the early 1990s, prominent heroin families are established in the San Fernando Valley, including David Tejeda, Beto Sánchez, Beto Bonque, the Bernals, the Langaricas and their cousins, and El Gato.
One day, police raid the house of one of Enrique’s uncles. Lacking a leader, more misfortunes follow: the cell’s drivers are robbed by gangs, more Xalisco men arrive to sell heroin, and El Gato’s network expands, forming their own cells. One day, El Gato, with the help of a junkie guide, opens a new cell outside of the Valley, in San Diego. News spreads that he is doing the same in Portland. David Tejeda does the same in Hawaii. Enrique watches the businesses of others expand and flourish as his uncles’ business flops. Enrique starts his own side tiendita, but his uncles discover the project, beat him, and send him home. Enrique returns to the honest work of laboring in his father’s fields, and his father reminds him that he’d one day inherit and work that land as his own. Dejected, Enrique observs, “I’m leaving my soul in these fields.”
Because each of the Xalisco cells sells a virtually identical product, competition is based on how effectively each business could market their product. Enrique’s uncles’ cell’s lack of a solid leader therefore damaged their business’s infrastructure and diminished their ability to compete with other cells. Enrique’s decision to go behind his uncles’ backs and start his own tiendita demonstrates how his desire for wealth and excess is more important to him than his obligations to his family.
Themes
