The Cananea highway is both a route through Santa Teresa’s expanding industrial outskirts and a recurring marker in the novel’s record of violence against women. Its importance lies not in a single incident but in the way it links maquiladora work, residential districts, open desert, and police investigations—spaces through which women move routinely and where their disappearances become difficult to explain or resolve.

Route and Urban Setting

The highway is one of two major roads leading out of Santa Teresa. From the city’s southern outskirts, rail lines and makeshift soccer fields give way to garbage-filled gullies and neighborhoods that appear to have grown in damaged or incomplete form; industrial warehouses mark the distant horizon of the maquiladoras. Around the city, industrial parks themselves are encircled by slums, while the urban edge continues to spread. The highway belongs to this unsettled boundary between built city and open land, where infrastructure and habitation do not keep pace with growth.

That geography has a cross-border dimension. In the city’s north, a fence separates Mexico from the United States, with the Arizona desert beyond it; at the American border, the small settlement of Adobe and its border post stand along a long main street. The Cananea highway is also associated with routes toward the border and with movements among Santa Teresa’s industrial districts. The novel thereby places the highway within a connected system of work, transport, and national boundaries rather than treating it as an isolated road.

Workers and the Unlit Commute

The route’s relationship to industrial labor is especially clear in the account of Margarita Lopez Santos, who worked the third shift at K&T in the El Progreso industrial park near the Nogales highway. She left work around five-thirty in the morning and faced a walk of roughly fifty minutes to her home in Colonia San Bartolome, passing through Colonia Guadalupe Victoria. The roads beyond the industrial park lacked adequate lighting, paving, and drainage; many homes in the northern part of Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. Waste from the industrial park collected in nearby Colonia Las Rositas, where it formed a muddy lake that dried pale in the sun.

Margarita’s disappearance was thus situated within an ordinary commute shaped by night work and inadequate public infrastructure. Her mother reported her missing on the second day, but after more than forty days her body was found near a shack in Colonia Maytorena. The medical examiner could not determine the cause of death. The narrative does not establish that the highway itself caused her disappearance; instead, it records the distance between a reliable shift-ending time and the unobserved journey that followed. The commute’s precise route and duration are known, while the decisive event remains unknown.

The highway’s industrial setting recurs in the case of Lucy Anne Sander, who traveled from Huntsville, Arizona, to spend a night in Santa Teresa with her friend Erica Delmore. After visiting downtown clubs, the women drove around the center and stopped at the plaza. Lucy Anne got out of the car and ran across the grass; Erica could not find her afterward. She searched with other people, then reported Lucy Anne missing at dawn and went to the consulate. The evidence presented here describes the disappearance and search, not a confirmed recovery, but the case places cross-border visitors’ nighttime movements in the same urban landscape shaped by factories, roads, and unevenly monitored public space.

Bodies, Evidence, and the Limits of Investigation

The highway appears repeatedly as a point of discovery and a reference line for police reconstruction. In one investigation, Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez and Inspector Jose Marquez considered the body of an unidentified woman found in a field beside Morelos Preparatory School, near the Nogales highway. Martinez reasoned that the perpetrators had probably arrived by car, left the body in the field, and were traveling toward Cananea. He based that inference partly on the location: someone coming from Cananea, he argued, would have had better opportunities to dispose of a body before reaching Santa Teresa. The reasoning gives the road a place in a proposed route of disposal, but it does not identify the perpetrators or establish their direction of travel as fact.

Other cases locate bodies directly near the Cananea highway. A girl of about sixteen was found there with no identification; the police suggested she might have been a hitchhiker assaulted while traveling toward Santa Teresa, but the account presents this as an official supposition, not a verified history. Her case was closed without identification. In July, a naked girl was found roughly five hundred yards from the highway. Investigators could not determine conclusively whether her death resulted from head trauma or stab wounds, and forensic students’ further studies were filed and then lost. She, too, was never identified.

In the last week of March 1997, three students and an American history professor found a woman’s skeleton about four hundred yards from the highway, at a place called El Pajonal. Santa Teresa police initially detained the four visitors, treating their account with suspicion; Epifanio Galindo later heard them, accompanied them to the location, and found the remains where their map indicated. The body had been poorly buried, and the medical examiner identified the victim as a young woman with a fractured hyoid. Her clothes and identifying belongings were absent. The scene confirmed the visitors’ report but did not supply the woman’s identity or explain how she came to be there.

A Geography of Disappearance

Across these episodes, the Cananea highway is not a self-contained crime scene or a clue that solves the cases. It is a recurring edge and passage: workers cross it on the way home, investigators use it to orient their theories, and unidentified victims are found near it or in nearby open ground. The associated spaces—industrial parks, unlit streets, school fields, and desert margins—make the city’s rapid expansion legible while exposing the gaps in its infrastructure and oversight.

The highway’s narrative force comes from the contrast between precise spatial details and unresolved human histories. Distances, work shifts, neighborhoods, and likely travel times can be recorded; identities, routes, and causes of death may remain uncertain, or evidence may be lost. The road therefore gathers separate cases without turning them into a single solved account. It marks how ordinary movement through Santa Teresa’s working landscape intersects with a persistent crisis whose victims are too often left unnamed and whose institutions repeatedly fail to make the route from disappearance to accountability.