El Progreso industrial park is one of Santa Teresa’s principal industrial zones and a recurring setting in the novel’s account of factory work, urban growth, and women’s movement through the border city. Its maquiladoras offer employment, but the routes between factories and nearby neighborhoods are poorly lit and inadequately serviced; the park’s economic activity is thus set against infrastructure that leaves workers exposed and difficult-to-trace disappearances possible.

Setting and Urban Expansion

El Progreso lies near the Nogales highway and the outer neighborhoods of Santa Teresa. The city’s industrial parks sit at the edge of an expanding urban fabric: poor districts encircle them, while vacant land, roads, and factory buildings meet in an unsettled boundary between built-up city and open terrain. From the south, the city’s industrial warehouses mark the horizon; elsewhere, factory parks are described as being surrounded by slums. The industrial zone is therefore neither separate from the city nor fully integrated into it. It is part of a landscape where employment and settlement spread faster than public infrastructure.

The novel also situates the park within a transnational economy. Santa Teresa is described as having factories and maquiladoras, a steady influx of workers from other cities and of Central American immigrants, and an urban infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. Goods from the maquiladoras move through cross-border transport networks: Pedro Uribe, whose family is connected to local power and criminal figures, owns more than one hundred cargo trucks carrying merchandise from factories in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border at frequent intervals. The industrial park belongs to this system of production and circulation, even as the people who work there travel through streets and neighborhoods where basic services remain absent.

Factory Work and the Daily Commute

Margarita Lopez Santos worked at K&T, a maquiladora in El Progreso. She was assigned to the night shift, from nine in the evening until five in the morning, and her coworkers said that she had arrived on time, as usual. Her disappearance was placed around the shift change and the walk home. Because it was still dark at five or five-thirty, and public lighting was inadequate, no one reported seeing what happened after she left work.

The route from the industrial park led across the Nogales highway and through Colonia Guadalupe Victoria toward Margarita’s home in Colonia San Bartolome. The journey was estimated at roughly fifty minutes. Most houses in the northern part of Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity, and roads leading out of the industrial park—apart from the road to the highway—lacked adequate lighting, paving, and drainage. Waste from the park accumulated in Colonia Las Rositas, where it formed a muddy lake that dried pale in the sun. These details make the commute part of the setting’s social geography: factory work has a fixed schedule, but the journey home passes through places with little lighting or municipal support.

A truck selling coffee, soft drinks, and sandwiches stood each night in an empty plaza beside the parking lot of another maquiladora, WS-Inc. Its customers were mostly workers arriving for or leaving their shifts. The small, routine stop offers a contrast to the darkness of the roads beyond it: workers’ everyday needs are met in fragments around the factories, while the wider routes between work and home remain poorly served.

The Industrial Park and the Femicide Narrative

El Progreso is connected to several women’s cases. Marta Navales Gomez worked at Aiwo, a Japanese maquiladora in the park, though her body was found at a dump in the Arsenio Farrell industrial park. The distance between her workplace and the place where she was found underscores how the industrial zones are linked but dispersed across the city; investigators noted that the dumping site was difficult to reach without a garbage truck. Workers gathered around the ambulance, trying to learn whether the victim was a friend, coworker, or acquaintance.

Paula Garcia Zapatero, a machine operator at TECNOSA, was also associated with the industrial labor force, though her body was found near the Nogales highway rather than in El Progreso. The police questioned two coworkers who had been involved with her, but their alibis were substantiated and the investigation stalled. Such cases place factory employment, long commutes, and the city’s peripheral roads within the same narrative field, without establishing that the workplaces themselves explain the murders.

The novel’s repeated attention to work shifts, dim streets, poor drainage, and the separation between factories and homes gives El Progreso significance beyond its role as a workplace. It is one node in a rapidly growing border city where labor and merchandise circulate across municipal and national boundaries, while women’s ordinary journeys remain exposed to inadequate infrastructure and institutional neglect. The industrial park’s promise of employment stands beside the unresolved disappearances and killings that the city’s authorities repeatedly fail to explain.