The Santa Teresa-Cananea highway is both a major route out of Santa Teresa and a recurring landmark in accounts of the city’s killings of women. It passes through a landscape shaped by maquiladoras, poor neighborhoods, and expanding urban edges; in the narrative, bodies discovered along or near it make the road a point where ordinary movement, institutional neglect, and violence converge.

Setting and Urban Geography

The highway belongs to a city whose districts change sharply across short distances. Santa Teresa’s southern outskirts include rail lines, informal soccer fields, shacks, and a gully turned into a garbage dump, while industrial warehouses mark the horizon of the maquiladoras. The city’s poor neighborhoods and industrial parks press against one another as Santa Teresa expands, and two highways lead out of the city. The Santa Teresa-Cananea highway is one element of this larger network, linking the urban area to the industrial and residential margins where work and everyday travel take place.

The city’s geography is not static or neatly divided into center and periphery. Eastward, middle-class neighborhoods give way to slums and terrain shaped by hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of ranches; around industrial parks, slums grow at their edges. The highway’s significance emerges within this uneven landscape: it is a route through a city whose growth outpaces infrastructure and whose outskirts offer few clear boundaries between inhabited areas and exposed ground.

A Recurring Site in the Killings

In August 1995, Aurora Munoz Alvarez was found on the pavement of the highway. She had worked as a waitress in the city center. Witnesses had seen her enter a black car with two men she appeared to know, but the account does not establish what happened after that. Her boyfriend was detained and questioned, then released for lack of evidence; no further arrests followed. The case places the highway at the end of a chain of movement from the city into an exposed roadside setting, while leaving the crime unresolved.

Later that month, Jacqueline Rios, a drugstore saleswoman, was found beside the same highway. She had been shot, and the case remained unsolved. Her life included plans shared with her roommate: they studied English and hoped first to find better-paying work in California, then to travel. The contrast between those plans and the unresolved killing makes the highway more than a point on the city map: it recurs in a narrative where women’s individual futures are cut off and their cases fail to reach resolution.

The road appears again in September, when an unidentified woman was found nearby. She had a congenital dislocation of the right hip and injuries to her hands and neck. Despite publication of the distinctive detail about her hip, nobody came forward with information that could identify her. The account thus links the highway not only to repeated discoveries of bodies but also to the persistence of anonymity: a physical description enters public circulation without restoring the dead woman’s name or history.

Border, Industry, and Movement

The highway’s surroundings connect Santa Teresa to the larger systems that shape it. Workers travel between industrial parks and residential neighborhoods, while the city’s growth strains its infrastructure. One account traces the likely walk home of a sixteen-year-old maquiladora worker leaving a night shift: the industrial park’s roads lacked adequate lighting, paving, and drainage, and much of the surrounding neighborhood had no electricity. The account does not place her disappearance on the Santa Teresa-Cananea highway itself, but it clarifies the wider conditions of movement across the city’s industrial outskirts—long journeys, darkness, and inadequate public infrastructure.

The border intensifies this sense of connection and separation. At the American crossing, a former adobe-factory town is reduced to houses and appliance stores along a main street ending at the border post. Beyond the city, the fence between the United States and Mexico divides the two countries, even as commercial traffic and people move across it. The highway belongs to a border region where formal crossings, factory supply chains, labor migration, and the drug trade coexist, without the narrative suggesting that any one of these systems alone explains the killings.

Narrative Significance

The Santa Teresa-Cananea highway gathers together the novel’s opposed images of mobility and abandonment. It carries people through a city whose factories promise work and whose expansion is described as relentless, yet it also recurs in reports of women found dead and cases left unresolved. Along the road, a victim may be visible enough to be recorded in a police or medical account while remaining unidentified or without justice. Its importance lies in this gap: the road is a functioning part of the city’s infrastructure, but its repeated association with unresolved deaths reveals how little protection or recognition that infrastructure guarantees.