Koriyama

Turkey vultures are recurring birds in the landscape of Santa Teresa, appearing at the city’s expanding edge, in its border imagery, and above places where women’s bodies are found. They are not presented as active agents in the human story; instead, their repeated presence gives the city’s neglected spaces a stark, nonhuman witness and links urban geography to death and social abandonment.

At the City’s Edge

During a drive around Santa Teresa, the critics see the city spreading through sharply contrasting districts: poor neighborhoods, industrial parks, rail lines, vacant land, and the horizon of the maquiladoras. At its far edge, flocks of black vultures walk through barren fields. The observers note that where the vultures are, no other birds are present. The detail makes the birds part of a landscape defined by absence, while the city’s growth seems to continue without limit.

The vultures appear alongside the city’s industrial and infrastructural margins rather than in a pastoral setting. Factories, dumps, slums, and newly forming neighborhoods press against one another; the birds occupy the barren ground left in between. Their presence helps make visible the material consequences of expansion that the city’s busy center and better-off districts might otherwise obscure.

A Borderland Image

On the American side of the border, Fate reaches Adobe, a town of houses and appliance stores strung along a main road ending at the border post. At the crossing into Mexico, he sees four birds perched on the high fence separating the two countries, their heads tucked into their feathers. The scene gives the border a quiet, exposed life of its own: the birds are neither on the move nor clearly sheltered, but held in place on the line that divides the countries.

That image resonates with the vultures at Santa Teresa’s outskirts. Both sightings place birds in spaces shaped by human borders and development, where movement is controlled or the landscape is made barren. The novel does not identify the four border birds explicitly as vultures, so the scene extends the bird imagery without establishing that they belong to the same flock or species.

Near the Sites of Death

The association between vultures and death becomes more pointed in the account of a woman’s body found on a field beside Morelos Preparatory School. The school’s janitor notices buzzards flying over the field before he understands what has drawn his attention. The birds’ presence precedes discovery, making them an unsettling sign of a death that lies close to ordinary routines: the school has bright classrooms, a sports field, and students who sometimes play there.

Elsewhere, the narrative describes El Chile, an illegal dump where people living among the refuse are few, ill, and short-lived. Vultures recur in the wider landscape of such dumps and abandoned ground, but they do not solve the mystery of the dead or secure recognition for the missing. Instead, their association with these sites throws into relief the human systems that leave bodies exposed, unidentified, or forgotten.

Narrative Significance

The birds form a visual motif rather than a symbolic code with one fixed meaning. Their watchfulness can suggest that death is present before it is formally recorded, yet their presence also belongs to the ecology of a city built beside dumps, industrial zones, and barren fields. In Santa Teresa, the boundary between urban life and discarded space is unstable, and the vultures make that instability visible.

The contrast between their conspicuous presence and the victims’ frequent lack of social visibility is especially sharp. A flock can be noticed at the city’s edge, and birds above a schoolyard can draw a janitor’s attention, while women killed in the same landscape may remain unnamed or be reduced to entries in an official count. The vultures witness the terrain of violence without explaining it; their recurrence gives the novel a spare, unsettling image of a city where death is visible in the landscape even when its victims are not fully seen.