Dreamland: Part 1: Easier than Sugarcane Summary & Analysis

In April 1996, a funeral procession for David Tejeda trails through Nayarit. Tejeda was a ranchero kid who grew up to be one of the first Xalisco Boys in the San Fernando Valley. The Xalisco Boys are a bit like the Herreras, a clan of intermarried families from Durango who were the first ranchero family of traffickers. The Herreras arrived in Chicago in the 1950s, working legitimately at first, but soon after shifting their business to heroin. After the French Connection in 1972, the Herrera clan took over the drug trade, making their heroin from poppies that grew in Durango’s mountains. They spread beyond Chicago, to cities as far away as Dallas and Los Angeles, operating as a system of smaller “franchises.” Don Jaime Herrera-Nevarez, the clan’s leader, and other higher-ups were arrested in 1985; the arrests didn’t completely end the operation, but it never quite recovered. 

Many of the first Xalisco migrants were illegal immigrants who settled in the San Fernando Valley in LA. They started off working honest jobs before some families started selling the black tar heroin, made from the mountains near Xalisco, on the streets. David Tejeda, the son of an affluent farmer, was one of the first Xalisco Boys to expand beyond the San Fernando Valley. He gave jobs to poor kids from his village, which made him a respected figure back home. Rampant gang activity in 1980s Los Angeles prompted the Xalisco Boys to take their business off the streets and into cars, and the delivery system was born. Newly arrived workers “called their businesses tienditas—little stores.”

In 1990, David Tejeda set up new operations in Hawaii, where fewer sellers allowed him to raise the price of heroin. Other operations followed Tejeda’s example, expanding to cities across the Western U.S. These new operations quickly learned that, to steal customers from existing operations, they had “to emphasize customer service, discounts, the convenience and safety of delivery.” During the 1990s, a limited number of addicts kept the Xalisco Boys on the move to tap into “new, less-saturated markets.” The Xalisco Boys used addicts’ connections to find new customers. Because their product was good, the Xalisco Boys were able to work outside of immigrant connections, tapping into “rich new markets” of kids who were making the switch from prescription painkillers to heroin. 

Decades prior to this, Dr. Vincent Dole discovered that the synthetic drug methadone satisfied addicts’ heroin cravings without increasing their tolerance. He opened the first methadone clinic in 1970 in New York City. Methadone clinics opened up around the country, in large part to help Vietnam veterans who returned home addicted to heroin. Xalisco Boys targeted methadone clinics in new cities of operation, giving out free samples to addicts, as well as cards with their contact information. They used trusted junkies as “guides” in new cities, giving them drugs in exchange for finding them new customers.

One of these guides was a bilingual boy from Mexico who was raised in the San Fernando Valley. In 1995, he helped the Xalisco Boys conduct business in Maui, Hawaii, where he had run two cells, one for David Tejeda and one for Toño Raices. Tejeda was shot and killed by Raices’s men outside a club in Xalisco. Tejeda’s murder is important to the Xalisco Boys and the spread of black tar in the U.S. because his upward mobility gave other poor families hope that they could improve their standings by selling heroin in the U.S. His death was “liberating,” too, as sellers no longer had to depend on him: they could start drug businesses on their own.