Colonia Maytorena is a peripheral neighborhood in Santa Teresa whose significance emerges through the city’s uneven expansion and the discovery of bodies in its open fields. The novel places it near the Pueblo Azul highway and among districts and roads where urban development, industrial activity, and exposed ground meet; its recurring appearance as a place where women are found dead makes that geography part of the account of Santa Teresa’s femicide crisis.

Setting and Urban Context

In a survey of Santa Teresa, the city appears to grow outward without a stable edge: poorer neighborhoods, vacant land, highways, gullies, industrial parks, and the horizon of the maquiladoras overlap. Colonia Maytorena belongs to this extensive outskirts, where the built environment is interrupted by open ground and roads. The surrounding city is described as growing rapidly, while its infrastructure cannot keep pace with population growth and industrial activity.

That setting is not merely a backdrop. The novel repeatedly shows women moving between work, home, and transit routes through poorly lit or underserved areas, while bodies are later found in fields, valleys, or other exposed spaces. Colonia Maytorena’s proximity to the Pueblo Azul highway and its open land place it within this larger geography of movement and abandonment.

Bodies Found in the Neighborhood

In July, investigators found a woman’s body in a sewage ditch east of Colonia Maytorena, near a dirt track and high-voltage electrical towers. The woman had been dead for at least three months, had no identification, and was subsequently buried in a public grave in the Santa Teresa cemetery. The case was shelved, leaving her identity and circumstances unresolved.

On December 3, another woman’s body was found in an open field in Colonia Maytorena, near the Pueblo Azul highway. She was identified as Juana Marin Lozada, who lived in Colonia Centeno and worked at a computer store. Investigators arrested her husband as the principal suspect, while the report proposed that she may have been killed indoors and her body left in the field. He was released after two weeks for lack of evidence, and the case remained unsolved.

The two discoveries are distinct, but their shared location makes the neighborhood part of a recurring pattern: women’s bodies are deposited in peripheral terrain, while the investigations produce neither lasting resolution nor reliable accountability. The contrast between the victims’ different circumstances and the repeated absence of answers resists reducing the killings to a single, neatly bounded case.

Narrative Significance

Colonia Maytorena connects the novel’s urban map to its account of institutional failure. A sewage ditch and an open field become places where women can be found, identified—or left unidentified—and then absorbed into procedures that may end with a case being shelved, an unsolved file, or a public burial. The neighborhood’s appearances show how the city’s neglected margins are not separate from its social order: they are where the consequences of inadequate infrastructure and continuing violence become visible, even as the victims’ stories remain incomplete.