What is the importance of the color blue in the novel, We Ride Upon Sticks?

The color blue represents an artificial quality or an artificial intervention. This artificiality can be neutral but at times is also negative or harmful. The most obvious example of this is in the team’s blue armbands, which are intended to tie them to Emilio’s powers and to each other but are sometimes portrayed as constricting. Julie Minh at one point feels that her armband is a “blood-pressure cuff squeezing her bicep” (66).