Interzone-Berny

Interzone-Berny is a maquiladora in Santa Teresa, embedded in a city whose industrial expansion coexists with stark poverty and inadequate infrastructure. The factory provides employment to members of a local family, but its surrounding working conditions—long shifts, difficult journeys, and poorly served neighborhoods—also form part of the context in which the novel recounts women’s disappearances. It is not presented as the cause of those crimes; rather, the factory’s ordinary place in the city’s labor system makes visible the pressures and vulnerabilities around workers’ lives.

Identity and Place in the City

Interzone-Berny is one of Santa Teresa’s maquiladoras, a type of factory central to the city’s economy. The city is described as having factories, a low unemployment rate, substantial poverty, rapid demographic growth, and infrastructure unable to keep pace. Its industrial warehouses mark the horizon, while industrial parks are surrounded by expanding neighborhoods. Chucho Flores’s account of the city brings these elements together: employment and money exist alongside poverty, bureaucracy, violence, and a shortage of time. Interzone-Berny belongs to this landscape of economic activity without standing apart from its material constraints.

The factory is also situated within a transnational industrial system. Pedro Uribe’s cargo trucks transport merchandise from maquiladoras in both Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border at frequent intervals; his business links factory production to cross-border freight and property in Phoenix and Tucson. This detail places Santa Teresa’s manufacturing within a wider commercial network, even as the people whose work sustains that network remain exposed to local insecurity and poor infrastructure.

Workers and Household Survival

Interzone-Berny employs the mother and older sister of Penelope Mendez Becerra. The family had migrated north in search of work, and after Penelope’s father left for the United States and never contacted them again, her mother became responsible for supporting the household. A friend helped her find work at the factory. She worked hard and took overtime, and she also sold sandwiches to coworkers; she endured consecutive shifts and nights with little sleep while trying to secure a more stable home for her children.

Her older daughter, Livia, began working at Interzone-Berny at fifteen. As a result, the family’s livelihood and care arrangements were organized around factory employment: Livia had looked after the younger children before entering the workforce, and Penelope remained the only child still attending school. The factory is thus part of a family economy in which adult and adolescent labor helps sustain the household, while education and domestic responsibilities are divided among the siblings.

The mother’s response to danger in the neighborhood also underscores the limits of that security. After a drunken neighbor tried to assault Livia, she confronted him and warned him not to harm her daughter. She then continued working and saving until she could rent a small house with sturdy walls and a lockable door. This episode does not establish any connection between Interzone-Berny and the neighbor’s actions; it shows how factory wages, overtime, and additional work were used to seek greater safety at home.

Penelope’s Disappearance and the Workday

Penelope, an eleven-year-old fifth-grade student, disappeared after leaving school. The next day, her mother sought permission from Interzone-Berny to report her missing at Precinct #2, and her brother went with her. The factory’s permission procedure shaped the family’s immediate response: Livia could not accompany them because the workplace considered it sufficient that their mother had been granted leave. At the police station, the family was told to wait, and a policeman rebuked them when they returned to ask what progress had been made.

The episode places the factory within the practical chain of events surrounding a missing child, but does not suggest that the workplace caused her disappearance. Its significance lies in the family’s dependence on factory employment and the limits that work schedules and leave arrangements placed on who could respond. The school principal and teachers were present at the station and led the family away before they could be fined for disorderly conduct; the search continued without an effective response from the authorities.

Labor, Infrastructure, and the Novel’s Wider Pattern

Interzone-Berny’s workers live and move through a city where industrial employment is not matched by adequate public services. In the case of another young factory worker, Margarita Lopez Santos, the novel specifies how a night shift, a walk home before dawn, and inadequate lighting around industrial areas left important parts of her route unobserved. Her case concerns a different maquiladora, not Interzone-Berny, but it sharpens the broader pattern surrounding Santa Teresa’s factory labor: shifts and commutes intersect with dark streets, poorly serviced neighborhoods, and the recurring disappearances of women.

The factory’s narrative role is therefore contextual rather than accusatory. It represents employment that families need, a point in the daily geography of workers’ lives, and a component of a cross-border industrial economy. Against the city’s rising production and rapid growth, the novel sets households struggling to secure shelter, children whose care is bound to work schedules, and investigations that fail to protect the missing. Interzone-Berny’s ordinary operations become part of the account of how economic necessity and institutional neglect coexist in Santa Teresa.