Misogyny in Santa Teresa’s police culture

Misogyny in Santa Teresa’s police culture is shown as a routine, collective practice rather than a private prejudice: at a coffee shop where officers gather after night shifts, a policeman delivers a long sequence of jokes that reduce women to domestic labor, sexual availability, and targets of violence. The scene’s force comes from its setting within a city marked by femicide and from the uneven response around the table: some officers laugh, others remain silent, and the inspector who briefly questions where such jokes come from ultimately joins the laughter. The episode connects everyday speech to the institutional atmosphere in which women’s lives and deaths are treated as negligible.

The Coffee Shop and Its Audience

At Trejo’s, a long coffee shop with few windows, officers finishing their shifts drink coffee and eat breakfast while telling jokes. The narrator emphasizes that the jokes are often about women. The place functions as an informal gathering point for police after work, and the performance is addressed to colleagues rather than to women themselves. That audience matters: the jokes are tested, repeated, and affirmed within a male professional group.

The routine is framed against the quiet labor of the medical examiners, who also meet for breakfast nearby. The contrast sets two forms of occupational culture side by side: the examiners sit in near-silence, while the police breakfast is animated by jokes that turn women into objects of ridicule. The scene does not present misogyny as a formal policy or a written rule; instead, it shows how it circulates through ordinary social habits among officers.

The Joke Sequence

Inspector Gonzalez sustains the performance through a succession of degrading punch lines. Women are imagined as confined to the kitchen, incapable of intelligence or independence, and properly controlled through violence. Other jokes treat women as sexual objects or frame their injury and death as comic material. Their repetition gives the scene its cumulative structure: each joke extends the same premise, while the group’s responses establish how familiar that premise has become.

The narrator distinguishes among the listeners. Some laugh; others keep eating and drinking without joining in. Gonzalez praises the jokes and continues, while another inspector repeatedly responds approvingly. When someone might object to the chauvinism, Gonzalez’s reported defense shifts responsibility to God, claiming that men were made superior. The exchange turns a social convention into something presented as natural and beyond challenge. The humor’s apparent lightness thus carries a harsher implication: domination is rehearsed as entertainment, and objections can be dismissed before they are voiced.

The Inspector’s Turn

After Gonzalez’s extended routine, an exhausted inspector wonders how much of God’s truth might be hidden in ordinary jokes. The pause briefly opens a space for reflection. He asks who first invents jokes and sayings, and who first tells them. The questions point beyond the individual comedian toward the cultural origins and circulation of familiar ideas.

That hesitation does not become a rejection of the group’s assumptions. The inspector invokes his own perspective as a one-eyed man, offers another misogynistic saying, and the room erupts in general laughter. The reversal is central to the episode: a moment that could have exposed the jokes’ assumptions becomes another contribution to the same performance. The laughter blankets the room, while a few officers remain silent or apart from it. Their silence marks difference in response, but the scene offers no evidence that it interrupts or changes the group’s prevailing atmosphere.

Speech and Police Practice

The breakfast scene sits within a broader portrayal of Santa Teresa, where women’s disappearances and deaths meet institutional failures. Margarita Lopez Santos, a sixteen-year-old maquiladora worker, leaves her night shift before dawn and disappears on the poorly lit route home; her body is found more than forty days later. In another case, the killing of radio reporter Isabel Urrea is initially explained as a frustrated robbery, while the autopsy is not performed and the ballistic analysis is later lost in transit between courts. These accounts do not establish that the officers at Trejo’s handled those specific cases, but they place the jokes within a city where women’s vulnerability and the failures of investigation are repeatedly visible.

The institutional setting is also marked by practical constraints and competing priorities. The city’s rapid growth has outstripped its infrastructure, while factories, maquiladoras, migration, poverty, and violence coexist. Against that background, misogynistic humor is more than a series of offensive remarks: it reveals a social environment in which women can be spoken of as lesser beings even as their deaths demand serious attention. The scene does not claim that jokes directly cause the killings. It instead makes the contrast legible between the gravity of the violence and the casual contempt with which women are discussed.

Narrative Significance

The passage makes ordinary speech part of the book’s account of violence. Its extended list of jokes reproduces the repetitive character of the culture it depicts; the laughter that follows does not resolve the inspector’s questions but absorbs them. Silence, too, remains ambiguous: some officers decline to laugh, yet the narrative does not turn their nonparticipation into an organized challenge.

By placing the scene among the broader reports of women who disappear or are found dead, the narrative links police culture to the conditions of public attention and institutional response without reducing the crisis to one cause. Misogyny appears as a normalizing language that makes contempt familiar and resistance difficult to hear. The room’s laughter is therefore not an aside to the femicide crisis; it is one of the ways the novel shows the crisis embedded in everyday life.