Arizona is the neighboring American territory against which Santa Teresa’s desert border city takes shape. In 2666 it is at once a physical landscape beyond the international fence, a destination and point of passage for people and goods, and part of the wider setting through which the novel links urban growth, labor, violence, and disappearance.

Border Landscape

From Santa Teresa, Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Liz Norton drive north to the fence separating Mexico from the United States and look out toward the Arizona desert. Their survey of the city also carries them through its expanding industrial margins: industrial parks are themselves being surrounded by poor neighborhoods, while the distant horizon is marked by maquiladora warehouses. The border does not end the city’s growth; it sits within a landscape of ongoing expansion and uneven development.

The novel also places Arizona within a broader Sonoran environment. Oscar Amalfitano’s thoughts associate northern Sonora and southern Arizona with lights visible in the night sky, while the desert and mountains east of Santa Teresa shape a drive with Rosa Amalfitano and Professor Perez. These references make the region more than a national boundary: it is a continuous desert terrain whose natural and inhabited spaces are experienced across the border.

A Route Across the Border

Oscar Fate reaches the American side at Adobe, a settlement that had once been an adobe factory and is now a line of houses and appliance stores along a main street. At its end, a brightly lit empty lot leads directly to the American border post. The compact sequence of street, vacant ground, and checkpoint turns the crossing into a visible threshold between everyday commercial space and state inspection.

Fate presents his passport and press identification to the American customs officer, who asks whether he is coming to write about the killings. Fate says he is instead going to cover a boxing match. After traveling another three hundred feet, he reaches the Mexican checkpoint, where officials ask him to leave his car, open his suitcase, and show his documents and vehicle papers before filling out forms. From the customhouse window, he sees the long fence between the two countries and four birds perched on it. The contrasting encounters make the border both an administrative system and a scene of observation: Fate’s stated assignment is accepted on one side, while the exhausted faces of the Mexican officials and the birds on the fence remain in view on the other.

Trade, Growth, and Uneven Development

Arizona is connected to Santa Teresa by the movement of people and merchandise, not merely by proximity. Chucho Flores describes Santa Teresa as a city of factories, maquiladoras, a cocaine cartel, and a constant flow of workers from elsewhere, including Central American migrants. Its infrastructure, he says, cannot keep pace with demographic growth. He sets the city’s money and poverty, violence and wish for peaceful work against a stark shortage of time: the city has not been given time to become something else before its crises press in.

The account of business networks further complicates the national boundary. Pedro Uribe’s transport company moves goods from maquiladoras in both Hermosillo and Santa Teresa, and its trucks cross the border every half hour or hour; his family also owns property in Phoenix and Tucson. The border therefore permits the circulation of commercial capital and manufactured goods even as it divides jurisdictions. In the novel’s spatial map, Arizona belongs to the same economic system as the Mexican industrial city, though the two sides do not share equal conditions or responsibilities.

The Desert and the Novel’s Wider Geography

Arizona’s landscape recurs in moments that join distance to unease. After his mother’s death, Fate drives through Arizona at night, thinking of her ashes and the belongings left behind, including a neighbor’s cup and videotapes no one will watch again. The road through a darkening valley makes private bereavement part of the same movement through which he approaches Santa Teresa and its killings.

Across these scenes, Arizona is neither a simple refuge nor an isolated American backdrop. The border post, the fence, the routes of freight, and the adjoining desert show how national lines coexist with shared terrain and cross-border traffic. By placing Arizona beside Santa Teresa’s industrial expansion and ongoing violence, the novel makes the border a structure that organizes movement and jurisdiction without containing the consequences of the systems operating on either side.