Nogales is a border city and a recurring point of orientation in 2666: highways bearing its name connect Santa Teresa to industrial sites and desert roads, while the nearby international boundary links local work and commerce to the United States. The novel places this ordinary geography beside the repeated discovery of women’s bodies, so the routes toward Nogales become part of a wider map of precarious movement, inadequate infrastructure, and unresolved violence.

Setting and connections

Nogales appears most often through the highways and roads leading out of Santa Teresa rather than as a fully described city in its own right. The Nogales highway connects the city to maquiladoras and industrial parks, and to stretches of desert where workers and travelers move through spaces with few services. The route is therefore both practical infrastructure and a recurring frame for the novel’s account of Santa Teresa’s expanding urban edge.

The critics’ drive around Santa Teresa takes in two highways leading out of the city, industrial parks encircled by poor neighborhoods, and the distant warehouses of the maquiladoras. They also see a fence separating Mexico from the United States and look across it toward the Arizona desert. Further east, middle-class neighborhoods give way to slums; the city’s growth presses into hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of old ranches. In this broad geography, the Nogales route belongs to a border region where urban, industrial, and desert spaces meet without forming a reliable boundary between them.

Work and movement along the route

The highways associated with Nogales carry workers to factories whose distance from residential areas makes daily travel difficult. Guadalupe Rojas, a machine operator at the recently built File-Sis maquiladora, lived in Santa Teresa; the factory stood about five miles away on the road to Nogales. The area around it was described as deserted and dangerous, and the nearest bus stop was at least a mile from the factory. Her murder took place at her apartment building, not on the journey to work, but the account establishes how industrial employment and the geography of commuting shaped the setting of women’s lives.

Margarita Lopez’s disappearance makes the conditions of that commute more explicit. She worked the night shift at K&T, in the El Progreso industrial park near the Nogales highway, and left work at about 5:30 in the morning. Roads around the park lacked adequate lighting, paving, and drainage; much of the northern part of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. The walk home, crossing the highway and continuing through residential streets, would have taken about fifty minutes. More than forty days after she disappeared, children found her body near a shack in Colonia Maytorena. The narrative lays out the journey and its infrastructural gaps, but does not establish where or how she was taken.

Border crossing and commercial networks

The border near Nogales is shown as a regulated passage as well as a corridor of economic exchange. On the American side, Fate passes through Adobe, a settlement of houses and appliance stores along a main street that ends near the border post. A customs officer asks whether he is entering Mexico to write about the killings; Fate says he is going to cover a boxing match. After advancing three hundred feet to the Mexican border, he must leave the car, open his suitcase, and show his papers and press identification before completing forms. The contrast between the two crossings and the tired Mexican officials makes the border tangible as an administrative checkpoint, even as traffic and work continue across it.

The cross-border economy is also visible in the account of the Uribe family’s business connections. Pedro Uribe owns more than one hundred cargo trucks transporting goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa; his trucks cross the border every half hour or hour. He also owns property in Phoenix and Tucson. These details situate the Nogales border corridor within a commercial network spanning factories and cities on both sides. The novel places that formal trade alongside the region’s other flows of people and illicit activity, without treating them as interchangeable.

Violence and the limits of the map

The road to Nogales repeatedly meets the desert margins where women’s bodies are discovered. In 1994, two Mexican truck drivers employed by a maquiladora found a woman’s body on a road off the Nogales highway, about three hundred yards from the highway itself. They stopped after one driver saw a flash in the desert and called to his companion over the radio. The discovery turns an ordinary work-related journey into an encounter with a crime scene, while the woman’s identity remains unavailable in the account.

Other cases reinforce the route’s connection to labor, distance, and exposure without making Nogales itself the site of a single, bounded event. Guadalupe Rojas was employed at a factory on the Nogales road; Margarita Lopez’s long, poorly lit walk began in an industrial park near the same highway; and the 1996 discovery of a ten-year-old girl’s body took place in a valley between the Casas Negras highway and its bottom. These locations are distinct, but their recurrence extends the novel’s geography of violence across roads, industrial edges, and desert terrain.

The place-name thus works as more than a destination. Nogales marks a direction of travel and a line of cross-border commerce, yet the roads leading toward it pass through a landscape where employment, urban expansion, weak infrastructure, and disappearances coexist. The novel offers no map that resolves these conditions; instead, it shows how routes that organize ordinary movement also become part of the setting in which women vanish and investigations fail to restore their names or histories.