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
The rancho where Enrique grew up had neither paved streets nor electricity. Eventually, the family moved from the rancho to a barrio called the “Toad.” Enrique resented his family’s poverty and longed to escape. His sole joy in life came from his mother’s brothers who worked in LA; this familial connection to the U.S. was enviable among Enrique’s peers. One day, Enrique found out that his uncles were returning from LA. Their relatives anticipated all the flashy gifts the men would bring them form the States. However, because of an existing feud with his father, the uncles brought gifts for everyone but Enrique’s family.
Enrique’s eventual involvement in the Xalisco Boys heroin distribution system is motivated by his desire for economic prosperity and personal wealth. Quinones depicts Enrique sympathetically to create moral ambiguity: Enrique’s future career as a heroin trafficker might be morally reprehensible, but he only enters this line of work in order to improve his social and economic standing, an ambition that is typically admired in American culture.
Themes
Enrique dreamt about becoming a ranchero or cop, but his father rejected these dreams, as he needed someone to take over working their land. Enrique grew to dread his future and longed to escape. The feud between Enrique’s father and his uncles subsided and the family’s living conditions improved. Still, Enrique longed to join his uncles in LA. One day in 1989, at age 14, Enrique left the Toad. With money he stole from his parents, he boarded a bus out of Tepic in search of his uncles and a better life.
The book will later reveal that Enrique’s uncles are Xalisco dealers operating out of the San Fernando Valley. Again, Enrique enters the heroin business because he dreads the poverty and misery he associates with his future. Enrique flees the Toad in search of a better, more economically prosperous life.
Themes
