Florita Almada’s first televised trance is a public warning about the killings of women and girls in Santa Teresa. During a Sonora TV broadcast, she moves from describing a vision of a desert and a northern city to naming Santa Teresa, accusing its police of inaction, and demanding that the governor be informed. The scene makes a private, involuntary revelation into a televised challenge to official silence, while refusing to explain how Florita knows what she says.

The broadcast and the vision

Florita is on television for the first time when she appears alongside a ventriloquist and his dummy. She has been impressed by the performer and, despite Reinaldo’s discreet signals that she should disregard him, asks about his health and recommends that he consult an acupuncturist familiar with craniopuncture. Only afterward does she turn to her own vision: dead women and girls, a desert, an oasis, and a city where little girls are killed.

As she tries to recall the vision precisely, Florita senses that a trance is coming on. She is concerned because her trances can become physically disruptive, and this is her first television appearance. Reinaldo asks whether she is all right and offers water, but the studio glare and the attention of the audience cannot stop the experience. Florita keeps her eyes open and her mouth shut for a time, afraid that closing her eyes will expose her to what the possessing spirit sees. The delay makes the eventual disclosure feel less like a prepared statement than a struggle to hold back what is arriving.

Naming Santa Teresa

Florita enters the trance, closes her eyes, and repeats the vision: a large desert, a large city in the north of the state, and girls and women being killed. She asks herself what city it is, then names Santa Teresa. Her account becomes an appeal for the killings to be acknowledged: she says women are being killed there and cries that the victims are her daughters. The language shifts from vision to accusation, making the missing women a collective concern rather than an isolated subject of supernatural sight.

In another voice, Florita says the police do nothing and asks what they are watching. Reinaldo tries to bring her under control, but she rebukes him and insists that the governor must be informed. She calls for the silence to be broken and says that the killers must not go unpunished. Her address to the governor and her insistence that the city is beautiful and hardworking place the violence against a specific community whose public image cannot be separated from its hidden deaths.

The interruption of television decorum

The episode becomes increasingly difficult for the broadcast to contain. Florita says that some girls are driven away in black cars but that killings happen anywhere; then, in a normal voice, she asks that virgins at least be left in peace. She leaps from her chair and drops to the floor. Reinaldo and the ventriloquist try to help her, but she tells them not to touch her and insists that they have not understood what she has said. A moment later she stands, turns to the audience, asks Reinaldo what happened, and apologizes directly to the camera.

The abrupt return to ordinary conduct does not resolve the scene. Instead, the televised image holds together an urgent warning, a public collapse, and Florita’s apparent uncertainty about what has just taken place. The cameras capture the event, but the broadcast offers no independent confirmation of the vision. Its force lies in the contrast between the recognizable setting of a television program and the claim breaking through its entertainment conventions.

Relation to the killings

The warning resonates with the novel’s accounts of women found dead, unidentified, or separated from their names by gaps in police knowledge. In January 1993, thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana is found in a vacant lot and becomes the first victim counted on the list for that year, although the narration allows that other girls and women may have died earlier without being recorded or found. A later woman discovered in a field is never identified. Her death is recorded through uncertain estimates and a medical examiner’s qualified conclusions, while her name remains unknown.

The pattern continues beyond the first reports. In 1995, a woman’s skeleton is found in a shallow grave on farmland; the police issue a statement that avoids responsibility by proposing a possible connection to a driver and a killing elsewhere. In October, a teenage girl is discovered near railroad tracks with no identification, and the police scene is described as having been wiped clean. These episodes do not verify Florita’s supernatural explanation, but they give concrete weight to the substance of her warning: violence recurs, identities remain obscure, and official accounts can stop short of explaining what happened.

Narrative significance

Florita’s prophecy changes the register in which the killings are discussed. The dead and missing women are not presented only as individual cases for police records; through her repeated claim that they are her daughters, they become the subject of a public and moral demand. Her insistence that the governor be told and that the silence be broken turns the studio into a temporary forum for an accusation that institutions have not adequately voiced.

The scene preserves uncertainty rather than converting the vision into a solution. Florita names the city and denounces police inaction, but she provides no perpetrator, evidence, or investigative method, and her trance does not halt the killings. Its narrative importance lies in the collision of revelation and unresolved fact: a warning is broadcast, yet the women’s deaths continue to emerge in records marked by anonymity, conjecture, and failure to account for them.