Colonia Felix Gomez is a neighborhood in Santa Teresa repeatedly connected to killings of women and to the city’s uneven geography of policing, industry, and waste. The cases associated with it show how a victim’s identification and the official handling of her death could vary sharply, even as violence recurred across the expanding city.

Setting within Santa Teresa

The neighborhood appears within a city growing outward across sharply divided landscapes: poor districts, industrial parks, maquiladoras, vacant ground, and highways coexist with more affluent residential areas. Colonia Felix Gomez is named in reports of women’s bodies found behind trash cans and in a street where a woman was shot. In the novel’s larger urban map, such locations sit within a border city whose expansion and infrastructure have not kept pace with its population.

Santa Teresa’s industrial growth is described alongside poverty, migration, and a strained urban infrastructure. The city has factories and maquiladoras, workers arriving from elsewhere, and a constant movement of goods across the border; it also has extensive dumps and neighborhoods where public services and police presence are limited. Colonia Felix Gomez belongs to this broader setting, where residential streets and sites of abandonment are part of the same urban landscape.

Cases and investigations

In September, Ana Munoz Sanjuan’s body was found behind trash cans on Calle Javier Paredes, between Colonia Felix Gomez and Colonia Centra. She was identified as an eighteen-year-old waitress who lived with three other women in Colonia Ruben Dario. Her disappearance had not been reported. The last people known to have been with her were three men, but police could not find them, and the case was shelved.

On November 12, Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez went to a scene between Calle Caribe and Calle Bermudas, in Colonia Felix Gomez, after hearing over the police scanner that another woman had been found dead. The initial impression at the scene was that the death might have resulted from a dispute rather than a sex crime. Witnesses said two officers had seen the woman arguing with a man near the El Vaquero club shortly before the shooting, but had chosen not to intervene, taking it for an ordinary lovers’ quarrel.

The police subsequently described the killing as a crime of passion and named Ruben Gomez Arancibia, known as La Venada, as the likely murderer. He was the victim’s husband, and the account says he may have heard that she planned to leave him. Juan de Dios Martinez suspected the shooting may have begun as an effort to hurt or frighten her before escalating. The police search for La Venada failed; he disappeared.

Institutional context and significance

The cases associated with Colonia Felix Gomez resist a single, stable account of how violence is recognized. Ana Munoz Sanjuan’s identity and employment were established, but her case was shelved when the men last seen with her could not be found. In the other case, officers had reportedly witnessed a heated argument before the shooting, yet did not act, and the official explanation later reduced the killing to a crime of passion. Across these episodes, police knowledge is partial, delayed, and shaped by decisions about which leads to pursue.

Colonia Felix Gomez therefore functions not merely as a point on Santa Teresa’s map but as one of the neighborhoods through which the novel makes recurring violence geographically legible. The juxtaposition of a named victim, an unpursued disappearance, a missed opportunity to intervene, and a suspect who vanishes gives the neighborhood’s brief appearances a larger force: the cases are local, but their repetition belongs to a citywide crisis that remains unresolved.