Sonora is the northern Mexican state that contains Santa Teresa, the setting of the novel’s expanding record of violence against women. It is more than a regional label: the state’s industrial growth, international border, uneven urban infrastructure, and overlapping systems of commerce and policing shape the conditions in which people move, work, disappear, and are counted. The narrative places official accounts of prosperity beside the killings, making the state’s modernizing promise inseparable from the exclusions and failures that accompany it.

A Border State and Its Urban Landscape

Santa Teresa is portrayed as a city whose expansion has outrun the systems meant to support it. From its outskirts, the European critics see rail lines, makeshift soccer fields, highways, a garbage-filled gully, poor neighborhoods, and, on the horizon, industrial warehouses associated with the maquiladoras. The city seems to continue without limit: farther east, middle-class districts give way to slums among hills, dry riverbeds, and the remains of old ranches; to the north, a fence marks the boundary with the United States and the Arizona desert. Industrial parks themselves are being encircled by slums. This geography does not divide neatly into a prosperous center and a remote periphery. Worksites, settlements, open ground, and routes of departure press against one another, leaving the city both connected and difficult to govern.

A television report makes the border’s economic and human contrasts visible at once. Reporter Dick Medina speaks from the desert, with a highway behind him and Arizona in the distance, before the broadcast turns to assembly plants and reports that unemployment is almost nonexistent along that stretch of the border. The report’s setting links employment to cross-border industrial production, while its account of women killed in Santa Teresa—including unclaimed bodies placed in the cemetery’s common grave—shows what the prosperity narrative leaves out. The state is presented through these adjacent images rather than through a single comprehensive explanation: factory work and repeated deaths occupy the same border landscape.

The boundary is also encountered as an administrative checkpoint. Fate crosses from the American side of the border toward Mexico, where he must leave his car, open his suitcase, present his vehicle papers, passport, and press identification, and fill out forms. The exhausted Mexican officials and the long fence visible from the customs house make the border at once a physical barrier and a routine apparatus of inspection. Yet movement through it remains part of the same connected regional life that carries workers, merchandise, reporters, and visitors across national lines.

Industry, Migration, and Uneven Development

A local account of Santa Teresa names the contradictions directly. Chucho Flores describes a large city with factories and maquiladoras, very low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, a steady stream of workers from other cities, Central American immigrants, and infrastructure unable to sustain the pace of demographic growth. Money and poverty, bureaucracy and imagination, violence and the wish to work in peace coexist in his description. The city’s prosperity is therefore not a settled condition: it depends on a continuing influx of people and industrial activity while its roads and services fail to keep pace.

The physical organization of the industrial periphery gives that contradiction particular force. In one account, roads leaving an industrial park are inadequately lit, paved, and drained, apart from the route to the Nogales highway. Waste from the park collects in Colonia Las Rositas, where it forms a muddy expanse that dries pale in the sun. Margarita Lopez leaves work at 5:30 and makes her way along the park’s dark streets. A truck selling coffee, soft drinks, and sandwiches serves workers arriving for or leaving their shifts, most of them women. The scene places ordinary labor and daily movement within an environment shaped by weak infrastructure and industrial waste; the dangers are not reducible to an individual decision about where to walk.

Cross-border commerce also connects Sonora’s factories to transport networks and property on the American side. Klaus Haas describes Pedro Uribe as the owner of more than one hundred cargo trucks carrying merchandise from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every hour or half hour, as well as property in Phoenix and Tucson. He describes Pedro’s brother, Joaquin Uribe, as owning hotels in Sonora and Sinaloa and a chain of coffee shops in Santa Teresa. The account conveys how industrial production, transport, hospitality, and border-crossing capital are interwoven across jurisdictions. It also underscores the scale of circulation in the same region where the fate of individual women may go unrecorded or unresolved.

The Killings and the Making of a Record

The chronology of women’s killings is anchored in Sonora. The narrative identifies January 1993 as the point from which the deaths began to be counted, naming thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana as the first victim on the list. But the list is explicitly incomplete: the account allows that women and girls may have died in 1992 without being found or identified, or may have been buried in unmarked desert graves. The beginning of a record is thus not necessarily the beginning of the violence. Counting establishes a public chronology while exposing how much may have escaped notice.

The state’s industrial geography recurs in the circumstances surrounding victims. Margarita Lopez’s route home begins at a maquiladora and crosses poorly lit streets near the industrial park. Other bodies are found in the city’s vacant lots and outer reaches. In March 1996, a girl of about ten is discovered in a valley between the Casas Negras highway and the valley floor; six policemen respond, including Lalo Cura. No one comes to claim her body. Her case belongs to a month in which five more bodies will be found, turning one remote discovery into part of a sustained wave. Highways, industrial zones, vacant ground, and valleys are not interchangeable settings, but together they show how the city’s expanding edges become part of the geography of disappearance.

Sonora’s authorities respond to the killings through both public assurances and outside expertise. In 1993, the narrative identifies the state governor and Santa Teresa’s mayor by their party affiliations and describes them ironically as upright officials prepared for unpleasantness. By the end of July, state and local authorities invite Albert Kessler, a former FBI agent, to Santa Teresa. The mayor publicly rejects the suggestion that his hiring acknowledges police failure, presenting the visit instead as a fifteen-hour professional training course for selected officers. He cites the city’s industrial importance as well as its grim record of serial killings as reasons for choosing it over Hermosillo. The official framing recognizes the scale of the problem while working to contain what the intervention means: training is announced, but the deeper question of institutional failure remains unresolved.

Public Visibility and Narrative Significance

The novel sets formal claims of development beside evidence of abandoned or inadequate public provision. Santa Teresa is a center of manufacturing and employment, but its growth strains infrastructure; its goods and capital cross the border at regular intervals, while women’s deaths enter public knowledge unevenly. A local speaker can describe the city’s prosperity and violence in the same breath, and a television report can move from factory employment to victims whose bodies are left unclaimed. These juxtapositions keep the state from resolving into either a simple story of economic opportunity or a simple backdrop for crime.

Sonora also marks the limits of what can be known. The count begins at a specific point, but the text immediately gestures toward uncounted deaths before it. A child found in a valley has no claimant; women killed in the state may enter a common grave. The institutions that name the region, patrol its roads, train its officers, and facilitate its commerce do not thereby make every life visible. In this way, Sonora’s border is both a conduit of movement and a line of jurisdiction, while its growing city is both an industrial destination and a landscape in which disappearance can be difficult to trace. The state’s significance lies in that unresolved coexistence: modern circulation continues, but recognition and accountability do not keep pace.