The Role of the Media in Society
The broader theme of the play is the role that media plays in society, and the way that it can actually influence what people think, rather than simply report what has already happened, which is what it is actually intended to do. The television and radio news of decades ago was simply a window on the world. The news camera filmed what was happening, the news anchor reported it, and we the people were largely better informed than we were before we sat down to watch.
The advent of the shock jock, and of a media landscape in general where the media does not report what is happening in our world, but aims to dictate and shape it instead, has led to an inevitable decline in people's awareness of what the reality of situations actually are. Lou, the radio personality in the play, is a shock jock, and his comments are inflammatory at best, and provocative at worst. His kidnappers feel so strongly that his rhetoric has inflamed an already anti-immigrant populous into violence, and they blame him for the murder of their father. Lou, for his part, never intended anyone to become violent because of his ranting and his main objective is ratings. The play shows the role that the media has taken on in society and the way in which they have been allowed to become the arbiters of what the narrative should be, rather than reporting on it impartially.
Ethnic Profiling
Sandi is a second generation American, and has identification that attests to this. However, when stopped and asked to provide it she chooses not to as a protest against what she sees as racial profiling by the authorities. Because she has dark skin, she believes she was stopped when a lighter skinned person would not have been. Despite the fact that light skinned people would also have to provide their identification if stopped, Sandi makes a stand and refuses to cooperate. She is taken away on a bus that is headed to a detention center. The play's theme of ethnic profiling takes a similar point of view to Sandi's own, and suggests that people are assumed to be illegal immigrants on their skin tone rather than on anything else.
Supposition versus Reality
Sandi believes that because she feels that, as a Latin woman, she lives in an environment that is hostile to her, she can identify well with those who are living in the desert because they are immigrants. When she is actually trying to survive in the desert she realizes that her supposition is a long way removed from reality and that she had no idea at all about how difficult life is for those trying to survive there. She mistakenly believed that as a Latin woman she knows the experiences of the other Latinas in the desert but comes to understand that her experiences and theirs are vastly different.
Lou has never really given the realities of desert survival much thought at all. His opinion is that people should not be living in the desert because they are there illegally, and so the "how" of their survival is not something that has ever occurred to him. His experiences in the desert after escaping from his kidnappers make him realize how difficult life is there and focuses his attention on the realities of the lives he had never given any thought to before.
