The Only Road

The novel’s main theme is how economic inequality, corrupt governments, and a flourishing trade in illegal drugs have shaped the politics and social life of countries including Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. The drugs are largely controlled by gangs or cartels who have almost complete power in their territories, as local officials and police either cannot or will not try to stop them.

These gangs, like the fictional Alphas of the novel, are immensely powerful and maintain that power through a double-edged sword of threats and intimidation, along with the promise of riches not available through any other channel. The gangs bring in young children and raise them up in the ethos of the gang, that leadership substituting for actual parents by providing for them and protecting them in a way their own families cannot.

Most of the migrants trying to go north are doing so because they fear they will be killed if they stay in their native countries. Whether they have actively engaged a gang or been the victim of unfortunate circumstance or just simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, once a person has the attention of a gang or cartel, their only options are to join them or try to escape.

Jaime and Ángela are such unwitting victims. After Miguel is beaten to death by the Alphas, Jaime and Ángela are potential threats to their power and must either be assimilated or killed. The Alphas invite the children to join them, but doing so would amount to endorsing the very people who murdered their family member. The children and their families all know what refusal will mean, which is why they sacrifice everything to try to get the children north.

While the events of this novel are fictional, they are based in the real-life experiences of hundreds of thousands of people, from families to unaccompanied minors like Jaime and his friends, who have nothing and risk everything in hopes of getting to safety. Diaz’s novel points out the terrible conditions and circumstances migrants endure, the hardship and depravation and fear that are their constant companions along the way. She also highlights figures who try to help, such as Padre Kevin, and those who seize on the migrants’ desperation and exploit that for personal gain, like El Gordo. By having Jaime and Ángela come from Guatemala, Diaz also shows that the bias against migrants is not limited to Americans but exists among the people of Mexico too; she depicts the way Mexican merchants and citizens regard the migrants from the south with suspicion and disgust, painting a terrible portrait of man’s capability to be cruel to his fellow man.

While the drug trade itself is peripheral to the novel, it is one of the fundamental causes of the region’s violence and political instability. Diaz is writing for middle school children, so her focus is on creating empathy for Jaime and Ángela, but there is also a message in this book about the global consequences for local decisions: Those who deal and buy drugs in America have blood on their hands just as surely as do the gangs who facilitate that trade.