In Soldiers and Kings, an aggressive, risk-tolerant masculinity becomes a survival method for men living within the violence of the migrant trail. This performance is repeatedly presented as growing largely out of early trauma rather than natural temperament. Chino and Kingston carry scars from childhood losses and institutional harm, and those wounds shape the hardened personas they display on the tracks. Their public toughness keeps threats at bay, yet these behaviors repeat the cycles they lived through, trapping them in the same violence that once overwhelmed them. Their survival skills turn into habits they cannot easily abandon.

The book links these performances to specific childhood experiences. Chino turns toward gang life after the murder of his older brother Miguel, an event that leaves him with a rage that surfaces as a “playful death wish” (59). He numbs this pain with drugs and armed robbery, and violence becomes his routine outlet. Kingston’s early years are additionally punishing. After losing his parents, he ends up in the Honduran military as a child soldier, where he is “tortured mentally and physically” and taught that constant vigilance and overwhelming force are necessary to stay alive (177). There were no escapes from these circumstances; the boys could only adapt to the existing expectations of men. The repeated pattern of frequently scared or unwilling men being coerced or recruited when they were young, and thus becoming less likely to protect or stand up for themselves, demonstrates the cyclical nature of the culture that often intertwines violence—whether through gangs or militaries—with masculinity.

Once these men join the migrant trail, their male identity becomes a daily performance shaped largely by trauma. They use it to claim status and discourage potential attackers in a largely unregulated environment. Chino shows this when he performs dangerous stunts on moving trains to “remind people he is crazy as hell and not to be fucked with” (59). Flaco’s crew polices masculinity through jokes about sexuality and strength, and their banter, filled with anti-gay bias against one of their own members, reinforces a narrow vision of heterosexual dominance that controls them as much as it gives them a sense of power. Kingston responds to a mild provocation in a bar by beating a man with explosive force to reassert control and protect his group. 

These actions are calculated shows of strength meant to guard against danger, yet the narrative highlights how they can create a cycle with no exit. The same traits that protect them also limit their ability to imagine a life beyond violence. Chino knows he cannot return home without rejoining the gangs or risking death. Everywhere he goes, he must continue presenting a harsh strength he doesn’t enjoy to protect himself, even when he doesn’t want to. Kingston expresses this bind when he says, “You live by the sword, you die by the sword” (240), while fearing being murdered by gang members in the same position he once was. Their cultivated toughness becomes an identity they struggle to shed, and the war-like mindset demanded by the tracks shapes their sense of what life will always be.