Colonia Morelos is a neighborhood within Santa Teresa, a city the novel depicts as sprawling outward between industrial parks, poor settlements, and an overburdened urban infrastructure. Its brief appearances connect ordinary neighborhood life to the city’s violence and to the failures of identification and care that recur throughout the account of women’s deaths.

Place in a Growing City

The neighborhood appears among the poor districts spreading around Santa Teresa’s industrial zones. The city’s southern and outer areas include rail lines, makeshift soccer fields, shacks, garbage-filled gullies, and the horizon of the maquiladoras; industrial parks, in turn, are being surrounded by new settlements. The account stresses that Santa Teresa is growing rapidly, without suggesting that its expansion is matched by adequate services or infrastructure.

The Nicanor Incident

On a street between Colonia Ciudad Nueva and Colonia Morelos, a knife sharpener named Nicanor and an ice-cream vendor encounter a woman who has collapsed beside a post. Nicanor goes to seek an ambulance, while the vendor remains behind. When the ambulance arrives, one medic asks who will take responsibility for transporting the woman; Nicanor objects to being made responsible for someone whose name he does not know. The exchange ends with the medics establishing that she has already died. The woman is subsequently identified as Isabel Cansino, who used the name Elizabeth and worked as a prostitute. The police attribute the killing to one or more dissatisfied customers. She lived in Colonia San Damian, and a neighbor reports that a man called Ivan visited her, but he cannot be found. Investigators also try to locate Nicanor, whose rounds brought him to Colonia Morelos about once a week or every other week. They fail to find him; whether he changed his work, moved elsewhere in Santa Teresa, or left the city remains unknown.

A Sonora-wide Pattern

Colonia Morelos belongs to the wider urban landscape through which the novel traces women’s disappearances and deaths. The city’s combination of industrial employment, population growth, poor neighborhoods, and inadequate infrastructure forms the setting for these accounts, but the narrative does not reduce the violence to any single feature of the city. It repeatedly shows how an individual death can be handled as an isolated incident even as killings accumulate across Santa Teresa.

Felicidad Jimenez Jimenez

The neighborhood is also where police find Ernesto Luis Castillo Jimenez wandering several hours after he has killed his mother, Felicidad Jimenez Jimenez, at their home. He admits to the killing and says he is the Penitent, a man associated with the desecration of churches. Asked why he attacked his mother, he first says he does not know, then says he did it to teach her to take him seriously. The officers named in the account include Pedro Negrete, Epifanio Galindo, Angel Fernandez, Juan de Dios Martinez, and Jose Marquez. Ernesto is transferred to the city hospital after lapsing into incoherence and later taken to prison. The police consider whether he might be responsible for other unsolved murders, but Juan de Dios Martinez doubts that he is the Penitent and believes he probably killed only his mother. The account presents this domestic killing as distinct from the still-unresolved pattern of women’s murders: proximity to an apparent suspect does not, by itself, explain the broader series.

Narrative Significance

Colonia Morelos is not developed as a fully mapped or socially uniform place. Instead, separate episodes make it a point within the novel’s scattered geography of Santa Teresa, where routine work and neighborhood movement intersect with violence, uncertain identities, and institutional hesitation. In the Nicanor episode, the question of who will assume responsibility for a stranger exposes a gap between encountering a victim and securing effective help. In the Castillo Jimenez episode, the neighborhood becomes the setting for a family killing that authorities can attribute to a named person, while the larger pattern of women’s deaths remains difficult to account for.