The Nogales highway is a central road in the landscape around Santa Teresa, joining industrial parks and residential districts to the city’s northern approaches and the United States border. Its significance lies in the traffic it carries and in the uneasy proximity it establishes between work, migration, commerce, and the investigation of women’s disappearances and deaths.

Route and Urban Setting

The highway appears as one of the routes leading out of Santa Teresa, a city whose built environment ranges from crowded, improvised neighborhoods to industrial warehouses on the horizon. South of the city, roads and rail lines pass slum soccer fields and shacks; elsewhere, industrial parks sit amid expanding settlements. The novel presents the city as growing rapidly, with its districts and outskirts extending into a fragmented landscape rather than ending at a clear boundary.

The road’s surroundings are marked by uneven infrastructure. Near the El Progreso industrial park, roads beyond the connection to the highway lack adequate lighting, paving, and drainage. Waste from the park collects in Colonia Las Rositas, where it forms a muddy expanse that dries pale in the sun. These details place the highway within a wider system in which industrial production and urban growth advance faster than basic services.

Work and Cross-Border Movement

The Nogales highway serves workers whose routines are structured by factory shifts and long journeys through poorly lit areas. Margarita Lopez Santos worked the night shift at K&T, in the El Progreso industrial park near the highway. She left work at about five-thirty in the morning and began the walk toward her home in Colonia San Bartolome, crossing the highway and then continuing through Colonia Guadalupe Victoria. The route made her journey part of the daily movement between factories and residential neighborhoods, while darkness and inadequate lighting left that movement exposed.

The highway also belongs to a cross-border economy. On the American side, Fate passes through Adobe, a town arranged along a long main street that ends at the border post. After crossing the United States checkpoint, he drives a short distance to the Mexican border, where officials examine his documents and car papers. The nearby fence, with the desert beyond it, makes the border visible as both a physical barrier and a point of passage.

The movement of goods is equally important. Pedro Uribe’s more than one hundred cargo trucks transport products from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border, passing through frequently; his family also has property and businesses on both sides of the region. This account connects the highway and border crossing to an extensive commercial network, while the novel’s broader portrait of Santa Teresa sets that commerce beside drug trafficking, migration, poverty, and strained infrastructure.

Disappearances and Violence Along the Road

The highway recurs in accounts of women found in nearby industrial and desert spaces. The first dead woman of 1994 was discovered in the desert on a road branching off the Nogales highway. Two truck drivers employed by a maquiladora stopped after one saw a flash in the desert; the object catching the light was a belt buckle on the woman’s body. Their ordinary work journey had brought them to a scene that became part of the accumulating record of killings.

Lucy Anne Sander was found in a ditch running alongside the highway, a few yards beyond gas tanks near the border fence. Workers discovered her and alerted the police. Her friend Erica Delmore later identified her at the morgue after receiving the news from the American consulate. The location ties the highway not only to discovery but also to the practical difficulty of response: the border, local police, and consular officials all enter the aftermath, without being able to say who was responsible.

Other cases place the highway within a wider pattern of vulnerable routes and poorly observed outskirts. Paula Garcia Zapatero’s body was found near the Nogales highway, while a ten-year-old girl was discovered in a valley between the highway and the Casas Negras highway. These locations are not presented as isolated points on a map. They belong to a city where industrial zones, roads, vacant land, and residential districts meet without reliable lighting or adequate public infrastructure.

Narrative Significance

The Nogales highway is a connective artery, but connection in Santa Teresa does not guarantee safety or effective oversight. It carries workers to factories, goods toward the border, and travelers between countries; it also borders the spaces where women vanish and bodies are discovered. The contrast between routine mobility and unresolved violence gives the road its narrative force: it is part of the city’s everyday functioning and, at the same time, one of the lines along which that functioning fails to protect its residents.