La Raza de Green Valley

La Raza de Green Valley is a small southern Arizona newspaper whose crime reporting connects the communities around Green Valley with the killings in Santa Teresa. Its work gives local visibility to events that larger outlets and authorities may leave at the margins, but the paper is also vulnerable: it has little advertising, pays poorly, and one of its reporters disappears after covering the case. Through the paper, the novel makes journalism both a record of violence and a precarious attempt to establish what can be known about it.

Identity and Reach

La Raza is described as a small weekly, sometimes appearing only every two weeks or once a month. It survives with almost no advertising, relying on subscriptions from lower-middle-class Chicanos in the area between Green Valley and Sierra Vista, including former farmworkers settled in communities such as Rio Rico, Carmen, Tubac, Sonoita, Amado, Sahuarita, Patagonia, and San Xavier. The paper’s narrow economic base and dispersed readership define its reach: it is a modest local publication rather than a well-resourced outlet, yet it carries news that other publications do not necessarily pursue.

Its stated editorial character is starkly specialized. It publishes crime stories, with a preference for the more gruesome kind. That description is not merely a label for its style: it frames the paper as an outlet that makes crime central to its account of the region, while the novel also shows how sensational presentation can weaken a report’s reliability. La Raza’s local focus enables it to record disappearances and violence close to the people involved, but its small scale does not guarantee either institutional influence or accurate interpretation.

Reporting the Santa Teresa Killings

The paper enters the account of the killings through reporting as well as through the circulation of news among people who encounter the crisis. When two European critics explore Santa Teresa, a local boy tells them that more than two hundred women have been killed since 1993 or 1994, and suggests that the total may be higher. He has read a book by Benno von Archimboldi in Jean-Claude Pelletier’s translation, obtained through an online bookseller, and speaks to the visitors in French. His report illustrates how information about the killings travels through informal conversation and across languages, while its scale is difficult for outsiders to absorb.

Another character, Chucho Flores, describes a repeated media cycle: the numbers rise, the killings become news again, reporters and residents talk about them, and then public attention fades as people return to work. His comparison of the killings to a brutal strike emphasizes both their continuing disruption and the public’s return to routine. Against that cycle, La Raza’s crime coverage serves as a local record, though the novel does not suggest that publication alone can keep attention sustained or secure an official response.

The paper also appears among the outlets following Klaus Haas’s statements from prison. After Haas asks how killings can continue when the authorities have imprisoned the supposed killer, six newspapers have sent correspondents to the penitentiary. La Raza is one of them. The press response is sharply divided between Haas’s dramatic public claims and the authorities’ denials: five reporters seek police comment before publication, while the police and major national newspapers reject his account’s credibility. The episode shows how criminal reporting depends on competing sources and official rebuttals, and how an arrest does not settle the question of whether the killings have been explained.

Josué Hernández Mercado

Josué Hernández Mercado, a reporter for La Raza, covers the killings and becomes the subject of another disappearance. A notice in the paper reports that he has been missing for five days. He is thirty-two, lives alone in Sonoita, was born in Mexico City, and has lived in the United States since he was fifteen; he is an American citizen. The account identifies him not only as a crime reporter but as a poet and playwright: he has published two Spanish-language poetry collections through a small Hermosillo publisher, probably at his own expense, and two plays in Chicano or Spanglish in a Texas magazine.

His writing about farmworkers draws on experience as well as reporting: the paper says he knew their work from watching his parents and doing the work himself. The profile closes by saying he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, though Mary-Sue Bravo thinks it reads less like a profile than an obituary. That unease gives the article a double function. It supplies concrete information about the missing reporter while making his absence feel unresolved, without establishing what happened to him.

Hernández’s coverage of Haas is described by Mary-Sue as shifting between sensationalism and flatness. She finds clichés, inaccuracies, generalizations, exaggerations, and outright lies in the piece. In it, Haas alternately appears as the victim of a conspiracy by wealthy Sonorans and as a wronged investigator who is still closing in on his tormentors from prison. Mary-Sue doubts that such a report would provide a reason for someone to kill and conceal a person, but the article’s weaknesses do not answer the question of Hernández’s disappearance. The reporting can be unreliable without explaining the fate of the reporter who produced it.

Investigation and Vulnerability

After reading the notice, Mary-Sue asks her editor to let her investigate Hernández’s disappearance. The editor initially dismisses the possibility of a crime, speculating that Hernández has lost his reason and wandered into a state park. He ultimately allows Mary-Sue to pursue the story. She travels first to the paper’s offices in Green Valley, speaks with its editor and a teenage reporter who wrote the notice, and then goes with the young reporter to Hernández’s home in Sonoita. The reporter lets her in with a key kept at the paper’s offices, although Mary-Sue suspects it may be a picklock.

The sheriff offers a different explanation: Hernández may have gone to California because he had debts, owed six months’ rent, and earned too little at the paper to support himself. The teenage reporter confirms that La Raza pays poorly, explaining that it is a paper for the people. The sheriff says Hernández did not own a car and usually took the bus when he needed to leave Sonoita. At the bus stop, accounts of whether he boarded on the day he disappeared are confused and inconclusive. Inside his orderly home, Mary-Sue finds no obvious sign of violence. His computer contains a Spanglish mystery novel in progress, published articles, sketches of seasonal and farmworker life, and his pieces on Haas, but nothing that resolves his absence.

Mary-Sue later tries to contact a Mexico City reporter who interviewed Daniel Uribe, hoping to follow that lead. He refuses to give her the source’s phone number, invoking the need to protect his sources. Meanwhile, there is no news about Hernández. After reviewing his Haas article, Mary-Sue decides not to write about the disappearance, reasoning that she has nothing to report and that he probably left voluntarily. The teenage reporter challenges her conclusion, insisting that if Hernández had left of his own accord, he would have done something inconsistent with the evidence he encountered at the house. His objection leaves the matter open rather than confirming either a voluntary departure or a crime.

Narrative Significance

La Raza’s place in the novel is defined by a tension between proximity and powerlessness. Its readership, built around subscriptions rather than advertising, and its low wages make the paper’s material vulnerability part of its reporting context. It can document the disappearance of a reporter and examine a public suspect’s claims, but it cannot compel an answer from the sheriff, the police, or the wider press. Its access to local experience is real; so are its limitations and the uneven quality of its coverage.

The paper’s stories also sit within a broader contest over visibility. The killings periodically become news and then recede from public attention; officials deny allegations, investigative resources are redirected, and journalists encounter unanswered questions or guarded sources. La Raza reports from the region where those processes unfold, but its own reporter becomes missing, and his colleagues cannot establish why. The paper thus embodies the novel’s distinction between making violence legible and resolving it: a record can preserve names, dates, work histories, and disputed explanations without closing the gap between what has happened and what can be proven.