Sonora

Sonora is the northwestern Mexican state on the border with the United States that draws the novel’s attention from European literary circles to Santa Teresa, a city marked by rapid growth, maquiladoras, and the killings of women. Its importance is not merely geographic: the state’s border joins the movement of writers, workers, goods, and news to a crisis whose scale is difficult to establish and whose public visibility repeatedly fades.## Location and the journey north For Piero Morini, Sonora first enters the story through an article in Il Manifesto about killings there. The Italian reporter who wrote it had gone to Mexico to cover the Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas, at the country’s southern end, but then traveled north to report on events in Sonora. Morini imagines the long bus journey from Mexico City across the country and feels, briefly, an intense desire to travel with her. The imagined route makes the state both distant and newly compelling: news from an unfamiliar place can turn into a possible journey, though Morini’s impulse soon passes.

Sonora becomes an actual destination when Benno von Archimboldi, an elderly European writer traveling for the first time in Mexico, flies from Mexico City toward Hermosillo. His companion, El Cerdo, explains that Hermosillo is Sonora’s capital, in the northwest near the U.S. border. When asked what he intends to do there, the old man hesitates; El Cerdo is unsure whether he says he will learn something. The distinction between Hermosillo and Santa Teresa soon becomes clear: Archimboldi says Santa Teresa is his destination, while El Cerdo has visited Hermosillo but never the city across the borderlands that now draws the writer.## Santa Teresa: growth and uneven urban space The European critics arrive in Sonora the following morning. After calling the rector of the University of Santa Teresa, they rent a car and drive toward the border. The light strikes them as unusually intense, as though it came from the Pacific and bent the space around them; in it, travel seems to promise both appetite and endurance. Entering Santa Teresa from the south, they see a sprawling city that resembles a camp of people ready to move at a moment’s notice. They take rooms on the fourth floor of the Hotel Mexico, where the rooms’ small differences—the desert painting, facing mirrors, and damaged toilet—make the city’s unease enter the visitors’ temporary refuge.

Their drive through Santa Teresa reveals a city divided and still expanding. The western districts are poor, with unpaved streets and houses assembled from scrap; the old center has neglected arcades and plazas. To the east, middle- and upper-class neighborhoods have pruned trees, playgrounds, shopping centers, and the university. To the north are abandoned factories, bars, souvenir shops, and small hotels; farther out, poorer neighborhoods give way to vacant lots and isolated schools. In the south, rail lines pass slum soccer fields and shacks, a garbage-filled gully, and settlements described as having grown up impaired or incomplete. Industrial warehouses and the maquiladoras mark the horizon. The city’s boundaries do not hold: continuing east, the more orderly neighborhoods give way to slums, while hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of ranches interrupt the sprawl. To the north, a fence separates Mexico from the Arizona desert; industrial parks to the west are themselves being surrounded by settlements.

The critics are convinced that Santa Teresa is growing by the second. On its outskirts they see black vultures walking through barren fields, with none of the other birds present. At sunset, after drinking tequila and beer and eating tacos at a motel on the Santa Teresa–Caborca highway, they see a sky that the narration compares to a carnivorous flower. The scene places everyday hospitality and travel within a landscape whose growth, industrial edges, and signs of death resist being treated as a simple backdrop.## Border economy and competing accounts Sonora’s border is a working passage as well as a dividing line. Oscar Fate encounters this directly on the American side, in Adobe, a town whose houses and appliance stores line its main street toward a brightly lit empty lot and the border post. At the crossing, a customs officer asks whether Fate has come to write about the killings. Fate says he is there to cover a boxing match. After advancing three hundred feet to the Mexican border, he must leave his car, open his suitcase, show his papers, and fill out forms. The fence is visible from the customhouse; four birds sit on its far stretch with their heads tucked into their feathers. The crossing gives a measured physical form to the proximity of the two countries and to the separate procedures that govern passage.

Chucho Flores’s description of Santa Teresa links that border to the local economy and its pressures. He lists factories and maquiladoras, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, workers arriving from other cities, Central American immigrants, and infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. The city has money and poverty, violence and a desire for peace, but, as Chucho puts it, it has no time. His remark gives economic expansion a strained tempo: the city’s industries and population are growing faster than its ability to accommodate them. At a bar, he sketches women’s faces in a notebook while describing the murders as something that periodically becomes news, grows in public discussion, and then recedes as people return to work. The drawings are not smiling portraits; the episode links the laboring city’s ordinary schedule to the victims’ recurring but unstable visibility.

The same cross-border network appears in Klaus Haas’s press conference. Haas identifies the Uribes as Mexican and American, with homes in Santa Teresa and Phoenix. Pedro Uribe owns more than one hundred cargo trucks carrying goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every half hour or hour; he also owns property in Phoenix and Tucson. His brother Joaquin owns hotels in Sonora and Sinaloa and coffee shops in Santa Teresa. Haas connects the Uribe families and their sons to wealthy associates, local police, and narcos, and identifies Antonio and Daniel as the serial killers. This account makes transport and investment part of a wider network of power, while showing how information about that network reaches the press through a public disclosure by a detained suspect.## Violence, reporting, and public memory The first report that reaches Morini says that the dead in Sonora number well over one hundred. In Santa Teresa, the European critics hear a larger, locally circulating estimate: more than two hundred women have been killed since 1993 or 1994, perhaps two hundred and fifty or three hundred, and no one will ever know the exact total. The boy who gives them these figures speaks in French, though Espinoza doubts his fluency; his imperfect speech does not lessen the force of what he says. The difference between the early count and the later estimate is not resolved into a definitive total. Instead, the shifting numbers expose a crisis whose extent cannot be securely measured.

The figures also have a public life. When Fate asks Chucho what people were discussing, Chucho explains that the number of killings rises, becomes news again, and prompts conversation; then the attention melts away and people return to work. He compares the murders to a brutal strike, a metaphor that makes violence seem to interrupt the city’s working routine even as that routine resumes. The recurrence is not only in the killings but in the cycle of notice and forgetting: each renewed report gives the crisis visibility without ensuring sustained attention.

News about the killings also competes with assignments, budgets, and editorial judgment. Fate’s editor rejects his proposed investigation or says there is no budget, instructing him to finish his sports assignment and return immediately. Fate calls from the Sonora Resort and argues that his proposed story would examine the killings, the possibility that one or two people committed them, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s growth. His editor insists that he is there to cover a boxing match; Fate answers that the murders matter more. The exchange turns Sonora into a test of what a distant publication will consider reportable, and of the distance between a reporter’s encounter with a crisis and an editor’s allocation of attention.

In January 1996, the press conference called by Klaus Haas gives that struggle a further turn. Haas asks how murders can continue if the killer is behind bars, then points to identical knots on ropes used in two cases and to the fact that one victim had had direct contact with him through her interest in computers. The audience is smaller than at his earlier press appearance, but the reporters can work without disturbance. A novice crime reporter reads the case file on the flight to Hermosillo, while Sergio Gonzalez, whose earlier stories are in the file, remains in Mexico City to write about new Mexican and Latin American fiction. At another January press conference, Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace address the degrading treatment of victims’ relatives and display letters to the state governor and the attorney general. Neither letter receives a reply. Their local branch grows from three people to twenty, even as its appeal to officials goes unanswered. These episodes set press attention, organized protest, official silence, and the continued circulation of case information alongside one another.## Narrative significance Sonora gathers several scales of movement into one setting. Morini imagines a reporter’s long trip north; Archimboldi actually travels from Mexico City toward Santa Teresa; Fate crosses the U.S.–Mexico border for an assignment that he tries to change; and goods from maquiladoras pass through the border on trucks owned by the Uribe family. The state’s location makes these movements visible, but it does not make the system around them transparent. Border forms and fences coexist with commercial traffic, while the city’s industrial expansion proceeds alongside a crisis whose death toll is uncertain.

The novel’s accounts of Sonora are also structured by limits on knowledge. People offer successive estimates of the women killed, journalists struggle for time and funding, and the interval of public attention closes before the underlying violence is resolved. Even the extensive urban survey by the visiting critics cannot transform the city into a single coherent picture: neighborhoods, highways, factories, vacant lots, and the desert continually widen its edges. Sonora is thus not merely the location of the Santa Teresa murders but a narrative space where geography, economic movement, and mediated knowledge meet—and where the scale of what is happening exceeds the stability of the figures and explanations brought to bear on it.