Sonora is the northern Mexican setting that gives Santa Teresa its borderland geography and institutional context. Across the evidence, the state appears not as a remote backdrop but as a network of border crossings, industrial parks, poorly served neighborhoods, police jurisdictions, and media connections through which labor and commerce move while women’s disappearances and deaths remain inadequately investigated.

Borderland geography and urban growth

Santa Teresa’s urban extent is described as seemingly endless and rapidly expanding. Its neighborhoods shift from western districts of unpaved streets and improvised housing to an older, neglected center, more affluent eastern areas, and northern and southern outskirts marked by abandoned industrial buildings, shantytowns, rail lines, and vacant land. Industrial parks stand amid the surrounding sprawl; beyond the city, a fence marks the United States–Mexico border, with the Arizona desert visible on the other side. The city’s layout therefore makes the boundary at once conspicuous and permeable: highways and commercial routes connect places that official borders divide.

The border is encountered in practical detail when Oscar Fate drives back into Mexico. At the American post in the settlement called Adobe, an officer asks whether he has come to write about the killings; Fate says he is covering a boxing match. A short distance farther on, Mexican officials require him to leave the car, open his suitcase, and present his papers. The exhausted officers, the forms, and the high dividing fence place ordinary passage beside the unresolved violence that has drawn attention to the region.

The city’s growth is tied to an economy that exceeds its infrastructure. Chucho Flores describes Santa Teresa as having factories, maquiladoras, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, and a continuing arrival of workers from elsewhere in Mexico and Central America, while its infrastructure cannot keep pace with demographic growth. He contrasts money and poverty, violence and the desire to work in peace, and says that the city lacks time. The account’s emphasis on industrial expansion alongside inadequate services makes the built environment part of the crisis rather than a neutral setting.

Work, movement, and exposure

The maquiladora economy shapes women’s everyday movement through the outskirts. Margarita Lopez Santos, a sixteen-year-old worker at K&T in the El Progreso industrial park, finished a night shift at five in the morning and began the walk home. The route crossed dark streets and the Nogales highway toward her neighborhood; the available evidence stresses that public lighting was insufficient, many nearby homes lacked electricity, and roads lacked adequate paving and drainage. More than forty days after her disappearance, children found her body in Colonia Maytorena. Her route is recounted in relation to the conditions of work and travel that made the journey difficult to trace, not as evidence that her choices caused what happened.

The city’s industrial and residential districts are repeatedly separated by vacant lots, highways, ravines, and neglected land. In March 1996, a ten-year-old girl was found in a valley beside the Casas Negras highway, and another girl’s body was discovered nearby days later. In July, another unidentified girl was found near the Cananea highway. These settings recur in a narrative where movement between work, home, and the city’s edges intersects with the failure to identify victims or establish what happened to them.

The state’s landscape also bears the marks of urban and industrial waste. South of Santa Teresa, a gully had become a garbage dump; around the industrial parks, shantytowns and barren fields spread into the outskirts. Near one park, inadequate drainage meant that waste accumulated in a low-lying neighboring area. Such details give physical form to the uneven costs of growth: industrial production and expanding settlement coexist with deficient lighting, roads, drainage, and public services.

Deaths, records, and unresolved cases

The novel’s account of the killings is organized through bodies found in particular places and the uneven process of making them identifiable. In January 1993, children discovered Esperanza Gomez Saldana in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. Police and medical officials established that she had been killed, but her case also begins a broader problem of counting: the narrative notes that other deaths may have preceded those recorded in 1993, including victims never found or never entered onto a list. The first recorded case thus marks an administrative beginning, not necessarily the beginning of the violence.

That distinction between what can be documented and what remains unknown recurs in later cases. A woman found in a school field in 1993 was never identified; officials could estimate her age and assess possible causes of death, but no name emerged. Margarita Lopez’s disappearance was reported by her mother, yet the initial response included speculation that the teenager might have left with a man. When her body was later found, the medical examiner could not determine the cause of death. The accounts preserve these gaps rather than resolving them: identification, cause, and even the circumstances of disappearance remain uncertain in ways that limit investigation and public recognition.

Police procedures and medical findings produce fragments of knowledge, but those fragments do not reliably lead to accountability. In one 1996 case, an examiner’s conclusions about an unidentified victim were filed and then lost. Another young victim’s description was circulated to police stations across the country, while the assigned investigation was soon closed. In a separate case, inspectors questioned coworkers and searched for a boyfriend who did not exist, but failed to examine the scene or document tracks. The recurring pattern is not simply that evidence is scarce; it is that institutional follow-through is inconsistent, so the official record can preserve some details while leaving the central questions open.

Public testimony and cross-border networks

Sonora’s response to the killings extends beyond the police. In July, after two women were found dead, the Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace began protesting; the group had its headquarters in Hermosillo and only three members in Santa Teresa. In April, activists appeared on Reinaldo’s television program with Florita Almada, who introduced them before they addressed impunity, police laxity and corruption, and the rising number of dead women. They appealed to the state governor to address what they called an unsustainable situation. The station’s head threatened Reinaldo over the broadcast, showing how public discussion could itself meet institutional resistance.

The killings also become a subject of media speculation about snuff films. At the end of 1996, Mexican media reported or hinted that films of real murders were being made in the north and that Santa Teresa was their supposed center. In a conversation with two reporters, former Mexico City police chief General Humberto Paredes said he had never seen such films and was unsure they existed. The exchange does not confirm the rumor; instead, it stages a conflict between reports, official experience, and the difficulty of establishing what is happening. A journalist argues that the alleged industry is a symptom of corruption and the drug trade, placing the rumor within a wider account of money and impunity without resolving its factual status.

The state’s border connections also include commerce, wealth, and criminal influence. In a discussion with reporters, Klaus Haas identifies the family and business ties of the Uribes: Pedro Uribe owns more than one hundred cargo trucks carrying goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border, while relatives hold property and businesses in Arizona and other Mexican states. Haas also links the Uribe sons to wealthy associates, Santa Teresa police, and drug traffickers, and identifies them as the serial killers. This account binds the formal circulation of manufactured goods to cross-border wealth and local criminal networks, though it does not make the region’s many killings reducible to one explanation.

Narrative significance

Sonora’s significance lies in the contrast between the region’s intense circulation and the victims’ frequent disappearance from public knowledge. Workers move between maquiladoras, neighborhoods, and border routes; goods cross into the United States; reporters and officials carry accounts between cities. Yet victims may remain unnamed, investigations may be abandoned, and public testimony may provoke pressure rather than action. The borderland is therefore both a system of connection and a landscape in which responsibility can become difficult to locate.

The novel makes that contradiction visible through concrete places: an unlit route from a night shift, a body found in a vacant lot, a highway-side valley, a fence between two countries, and industrial districts expanding faster than the infrastructure around them. Sonora’s geography does not explain the violence by itself. It shows the material and institutional conditions through which women’s movement, labor, disappearance, investigation, and public memory are repeatedly shaped.