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
In 1993, Enrique boards a bus home to Nayarit. He is wearing new cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and new Levi’s 501s; his pocket is stuffed with cash. He spent the past several months working for a heroin cell in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was promoted from a delivery driver to a supervisor. Enrique returns home bearing his many gifts, and townspeople who had before looked down on Enrique’s family now treat them with respect.
Enrique outwardly flaunts his wealth, showing how much his involvement in the drug business is motivated by greed and excess. One might compare Enrique’s flashy appearance to David Procter, who also dresses flamboyantly to display his wealth. Procter and Enrique both sell drugs and flaunt the riches that their drug-money brings them.
Themes
Enrique continues to work as a Xalisco Boy but grows increasingly “unsettled.” The more he earns, the more he spends: “his ambitions were greater now.” Heroin buys him so many things, yet he still wants more. At 22, he decides to marry his girlfriend, a butcher’s daughter who still lives in Mexico. In 1996, the couple elope. He brings his wife to his new house in their village, then returns to the U.S., to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to break into a new heroin market.
Quinones seems to compare Enrique’s economic pursuits to the cravings of an opiate addict. Enrique has grown addicted to wealth and excess. Just as an addict needs increasingly higher doses of an opiate, Enrique’s “ambitions” have grown “greater” and he requires more to satisfy them.
Themes
