Colonia Lindavista is an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Santa Teresa where Oscar Amalfitano makes a home with his daughter, Rosa. Its yards and shady sidewalks suggest domestic refuge, but nearby streets, open fields, and industrial edges reveal a city whose growth unsettles any clear boundary between settled life and exposed terrain.

Setting and Domestic Arrival

After his contract at the University of Barcelona ended, Amalfitano accepted a position at the University of Santa Teresa. Professor Silvia Perez had rented a house and bought furniture for him; he repaid her before receiving his first paycheck, seeking to prevent misunderstandings. The house stood in Colonia Lindavista, among one- and two-story homes with yards. Two enormous trees had cracked the sidewalk, though their shade made it pleasant to walk there.

The neighborhood’s apparent comfort was not complete. Behind the gates, some houses were badly run down, as if their residents had departed in haste. The contrast complicates the impression of an established, secure residential district: even its homes suggest unsettled occupancy and a city in transition.

Streets and the City’s Expanding Edge

Colonia Lindavista is also a point of reference in Santa Teresa’s uneven urban growth. As Amalfitano walks along Avenida Madero, older ranch houses give way toward Lindavista to newer houses and open fields; some streets remain unpaved. The neighborhood’s edge is therefore not a firm boundary around orderly domestic life but part of a changing landscape where residential development meets vacant ground and incomplete infrastructure.

The city’s broader geography reinforces this impression. Its western districts include unpaved streets and makeshift housing; toward the east are middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, public playgrounds, shopping centers, and the university. Elsewhere, industrial parks are encircled by poorer districts, and the horizon is marked by maquiladora warehouses. The critics visiting Santa Teresa observe a city they believe is growing by the second, with urban districts and industrial sites pushing into one another rather than forming a settled whole.

Encounters and Unease

A late-night episode makes the neighborhood’s residential setting vulnerable to the unease beyond its gates. After hearing a warning from the voice he has begun to hear, Amalfitano goes onto his porch. A black car starts about thirty feet from his house. Its driver, a heavyset man in a cheap suit, looks at Amalfitano as he passes without stopping. The voice warns him to be careful and says matters seem to be coming to a head. The scene does not establish that the driver has a specific purpose, but it makes the quiet frontage of Amalfitano’s home a threshold where domestic space meets an unexplained threat.

On another occasion, Marco Antonio Guerra, the dean’s son, offers Amalfitano a ride home and then persuades him to travel away from Lindavista for a drink at Los Zancudos. They pass new houses, open fields, a soccer field, warehouses enclosed by barbed wire, and a trash-carrying canal before reaching the highway to Ures. This route places Lindavista within a wider landscape of incomplete development and industrial and roadside spaces, rather than isolating it as a self-contained suburb.

Narrative Significance

Colonia Lindavista’s significance lies in the tension between domestic refuge and urban exposure. The house gives Amalfitano and Rosa a place to live, and the tree-shaded sidewalk distinguishes the neighborhood from the city’s poorer, more crowded districts. Yet neglected houses, unfinished streets, nearby open land, and the episode of the passing car keep that refuge provisional. The neighborhood condenses Santa Teresa’s larger spatial condition: relative comfort exists alongside visible disrepair and rapid expansion, with no reliable separation between the private home and the city’s uncertainties.