Cerro Estrella is a low, irregular rise at the edge of Santa Teresa, where the city’s uneven expansion meets open country. A woman’s unidentified body is found on its eastern slope, and the hill later becomes a vantage point from which Albert Kessler surveys the surrounding neighborhoods. Its importance lies in this double role: it is both a specific site of an unsolved killing and part of a wider landscape shaped by neglect, garbage, and the city’s relentless growth.

Setting and Surroundings

The hills give their name to Colonia Estrella, which spreads around them unevenly, as if the terrain resisted easy growth. The eastern side faces mostly open country. From the hill, Santa Teresa appears divided between an anarchic sprawl of houses with zinc and cardboard roofs to the west and a highway leading toward mountains and desert to the east. Beyond the city lies a broad, apparently empty plain; the view makes the urban edge seem less like a boundary than a transition into an immense, sparsely inhabited landscape.

Cerro Estrella belongs to a city whose parts do not settle into a stable pattern. Middle-class neighborhoods give way to slums; hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and remnants of old ranches interrupt the eastward sprawl. Industrial parks are themselves encircled by poor neighborhoods, while maquiladora warehouses mark the distant horizon. In this geography, the hill is not isolated from Santa Teresa’s social structure: it rises within a patchwork of settlements, roads, and open ground that makes the city difficult to apprehend as a whole.

The Unidentified Woman

At the end of May, the body of an unidentified woman was found on the eastern side of Cerro Estrella. The medical examiner concluded that she had been stabbed and raped; she appeared to be about twenty-five or twenty-six, with fair skin and light-colored hair. She wore jeans, a blue shirt, and Nike sneakers, and carried no identification. Her clothes were intact, and the only visible mark described on her face was a faint bruise near her right ear. The three Santa Teresa newspapers published photographs, but no one came forward to identify her. The account gives her physical description and the circumstances of her discovery, yet leaves her name and history unrecovered.

Neglect, Investigation, and the City’s Edge

Four days after the body was discovered, police chief Pedro Negrete went alone to the site. He examined the place where she had been found, then climbed toward the top of the hill, passing supermarket bags scattered among volcanic rocks. He recalled his son’s explanation that plastic bags might take hundreds or even thousands of years to decompose, but here the landscape seemed to consume them quickly. The contrast joins the victim’s unresolved identity to a broader scene of waste and deterioration: even what should persist appears to vanish in the city’s outskirts.

At the summit, children ran down toward Colonia Estrella as evening fell. Negrete looked west across an improvised sprawl of zinc- and cardboard-roofed houses, and east toward the highway, mountains, desert, and first stars. To the north, he saw only a monotonous plain, seeming to continue beyond the limits of life as he understood them. When five dogs approached, he drew his gun and shot one; the others scattered in different ways. He then walked back down to the place where the woman had been found, stopped to smoke, and continued to his car. The episode does not resolve the killing. Instead, the chief’s brief return ends with a changed perspective: from the hill, he thinks, everything looks different.

The site later becomes a point from which the American detective Albert Kessler tries to read Santa Teresa’s geography. He and local inspectors stop in Colonia Maytorena, walk to an outdoor patio, and look toward Cerro Estrella. From there, Kessler sees the settlement as a pattern of black, brown, and red lines: refuse, precariously placed homes, and rusted metal. The hill and its surrounding neighborhoods are not merely scenery for the investigation; they make visible how urban life, industrial expansion, and discarded material occupy the same terrain.

Kessler’s Survey of the City’s Edge

Kessler’s later visit to the Cerro Estrella area broadens the hill’s role from a crime scene into a vantage point for investigating Santa Teresa’s fragmented geography. He travels through Colonia Estrella and Colonia Hidalgo, explores the Pueblo Azul highway, and passes empty ranches standing beside the roads. Near the border, Colonia Mexico’s bars, restaurants, and hotels sit along a main street filled with the constant passage of trucks and cars toward the crossing. From there, his party turns south along Avenida General Sepulveda and the Cananea highway, entering La Vistosa, where police seldom ventured. Inspectors explain that gangs controlling the drug trade held sway in these neighborhoods; Kessler registers the contrast between their account of abundant cocaine and the poverty visible around him.

A City Expanding Beyond Its Frame

Cerro Estrella’s significance also emerges from the wider geography of Santa Teresa, a city its visitors find seemingly endless. To the west, unpaved streets pass through houses assembled from scrap; the neglected center gathers arcaded plazas and old buildings, while the east contains middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, playgrounds, shopping centers, and the university. Northward lie abandoned factories, sheds, bars, souvenir shops, and small hotels; southward are rail lines, soccer fields surrounded by shacks, highways, and a garbage-filled gully. Farther out, neighborhoods seem to have grown in damaged or incomplete form, while industrial warehouses mark the maquiladora horizon. The hill’s rough terrain belongs to this same urban pattern, where development and deprivation meet without a clean boundary.

The city’s growth is not simply outward but uneven and recursive. Continuing east, the middle-class neighborhoods eventually give way to slums, a reversal of the western pattern, while hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of old ranches break up the settlement. Industrial parks, too, are encircled by slums. North of the city, a fence separates Mexico from the United States, with the Arizona desert visible beyond it. These contrasts place Cerro Estrella within a border landscape shaped by infrastructure and its absence: highways and factories channel movement, while poor settlements and open ground spread around them.

The Hill in the Border Landscape

The city’s northern edge makes the border itself part of Cerro Estrella’s wider setting. During one drive, the visitors reached the fence separating the United States from Mexico and looked across toward the Arizona desert; elsewhere, Santa Teresa’s two highways led outward past rail lines, shantytown soccer fields, a garbage-filled gully, and industrial warehouses. Cerro Estrella’s surroundings belong to this connected but uneven terrain, where national boundaries and transport routes coexist with neighborhoods that lack basic infrastructure. The hill does not stand outside the city’s systems of movement and growth: it occupies a landscape in which factories, roads, settlements, and open desert press against one another.