The General Sepulveda industrial park is a manufacturing district at the expanding edge of Santa Teresa, where maquiladora production meets inadequate infrastructure and nearby informal settlements. The novel makes it more than a point on the city map: its factories, worker routes, and adjoining dump reveal how industrial growth and the city’s femicide crisis occupy the same ground.

Setting and Urban Growth

The park stands near the city’s northern highway and the last neighborhoods of Santa Teresa. Its industrial buildings are part of a larger, uneven urban landscape: factories and industrial parks are ringed by poor neighborhoods, while the city continues to push outward into vacant lots, dry riverbeds, and former ranchland. From a distance, industrial warehouses mark the horizon of the maquiladoras, but their presence does not mean that surrounding areas share in the same level of infrastructure or security.

The park’s physical arrangement brings work and precarious settlement close together. Near its factories are shacks, dirt roads, and a dump that receives both household refuse and industrial waste. The landscape registers the consequences of expansion without presenting them as a simple transition from rural land to modern industry: the new facilities stand alongside, and partly within, places already shaped by poverty and inadequate services.

Factories and Workers

The industrial complex includes four maquiladoras assembling household appliances. New silver-painted power towers supply them, while buses bring workers from neighborhoods across Santa Teresa to a stop in a plaza. From there, workers walk along dirt roads to factory gates, where guards check their passes before allowing them into their workplaces.

Most of the workers described at the factories are women. Only one plant has a cafeteria; elsewhere, employees eat beside their machines or gather in corners until a siren signals the end of the lunch break. The production routine is tightly organized, but the routes connecting homes, buses, and workplaces are not comparably equipped. The park thus joins regular industrial time—shifts, checks, and sirens—to the exposed journeys workers must make through a city whose growth has outpaced its infrastructure.

The Dump and a Woman’s Death

In May, a woman’s body is found in the dump between Colonia Las Flores and the park. The refuse there includes waste from the surrounding settlements as well as from the maquiladoras. The call to authorities comes from a manager at Multizone-West, a television-manufacturing subsidiary of a multinational company. Three company executives meet the responding officers at the dump, and one asks that the body be removed as soon as possible.

The woman is never identified. The medical examiner’s assistant determines that she was strangled and raped and that she was five months pregnant. The account marks her as the first woman found dead in May, but not as an isolated end to violence: another victim, Guadalupe Rojas, is killed three days later. Rojas is identified, lives in Colonia Carranza, and works at the File-Sis maquiladora on the road to Nogales. Her death occurs at the door of her building rather than on the dangerous stretch near her workplace, resisting any tidy equation between a particular route and the violence surrounding women’s lives.

Space, Labor, and Invisibility

The park’s surroundings link industrial production to conditions that leave workers exposed: long walks from bus stops, dirt roads, uneven services, and a dump where industrial and residential waste accumulate together. The woman found there remains unnamed, while the institutional response moves through company representatives, police, ambulance, hospital refrigeration, and examination. The sequence records that her death is processed, but does not restore her identity or establish who she was.

The industrial park’s significance lies in this conjunction. It is a place of employment and organized production, yet the infrastructure that serves production does not erase the insecurity and neglect around it. By locating the discovery beside factories that depend on women’s labor, the novel places the victims’ social invisibility against the visible machinery of economic expansion. The park becomes one of the settings through which Santa Teresa’s growth, labor system, and ongoing violence are shown to coexist.