Casas Negras highway is one of the routes marking Santa Teresa’s expanding outskirts, where industrial development, informal settlements, and isolated terrain meet. The novel repeatedly places women’s bodies near the highway or in nearby dumping grounds, making the route more than a point on the city map: it becomes part of a landscape in which economic growth and routine movement coexist with abandonment and persistent violence.

Setting and Urban Context

The highway belongs to a city whose edges are continually spreading. Santa Teresa’s industrial parks are ringed by slums, while the city’s southern reaches include rail lines, impoverished soccer fields, garbage-filled gullies, and the distant silhouettes of maquiladora warehouses. The wider urban map is uneven: middle-class neighborhoods give way to settlements, dry riverbeds, and the remains of old ranches, while industrial and residential zones press against one another.

The Highway and the Dump

In October 1994, a teenage girl was found at the new municipal dump, a vast site in a gully south of El Ojito ravine and off Casas Negras highway. More than one hundred trucks unloaded there each day, yet the dump was already expected to outgrow its capacity; authorities and residents were discussing another site near or west of the highway. The girl’s body was found by scavengers, and she could not be identified. The account links the scale of waste disposal and the routine movement of trucks to a terrain where a person could be left without recognition.

The dump is not an isolated backdrop. The novel describes Santa Teresa’s industrial waste accumulating alongside the refuse of poor neighborhoods, and its urban growth producing new edges faster than infrastructure can support them. At Casas Negras highway, the expanding city’s systems of production, transport, and disposal converge with spaces where the dead may remain unnamed.

Killings Along the Route

The highway recurs in accounts of killings and discoveries. In July 1995, one young woman’s body was found behind Pemex tanks along Casas Negras highway. Investigators assigned her case to an inspector, but it soon stalled for lack of witnesses or leads. The body’s placement beside industrial infrastructure and the absence of a usable investigative trail reinforce the novel’s pattern of violence occurring in spaces that are visible enough to be traversed, yet difficult to make accountable.

In September, an unidentified woman was found beside the Santa Teresa–Cananea highway, with no one coming forward even after details about her were published. The same month, workers moving the El Chile dump found another woman’s body. These discoveries do not establish that every case is connected to Casas Negras highway; rather, they show how the route sits within a broader network of highways, dumps, and industrial margins where women are repeatedly found and often remain unidentified.

Movement, Infrastructure, and Meaning

The city’s growth is described as relentless, but its supporting infrastructure lags behind it. Roads serving industrial areas can be isolated, poorly lit, or inadequately paved, while settlements and factories spread into terrain that has not been equipped to sustain the population. The highway’s importance therefore lies not only in its role as a transport corridor but in the contrast it exposes: goods and industrial traffic move through the region in large volumes, while the people who live and work there may lack safe, well-supported routes and reliable public attention.

As a recurring edge-space, Casas Negras highway helps organize the novel’s geography of disappearance. It links the city’s factories and dumping grounds to the wider desert region, placing ordinary circulation beside repeated evidence of neglected deaths. The road does not explain the crimes or identify their perpetrators; its narrative force comes from the way it makes visible the setting in which victims can be discovered, left unidentified, and absorbed into the expanding margins of Santa Teresa.