Tucson is the American staging point and prospective refuge in Oscar Fate’s journey through the borderlands. Its airport, highways, and proximity to the crossing give the city practical importance, while Fate’s repeated plans to return there expose the uncertainty of his assignment and his growing entanglement with events in Santa Teresa.

Setting and Routes

Fate begins one southbound journey at the Tucson airport, where he rents a car, buys a road map, and drives into the Arizona desert. Along the highway he passes an orange stand tended by two Mexican children before stopping at Cochise’s Corner, beside a gas station. Inside the restaurant, he notices the two Camaro drivers and a gathering of customers whose different backgrounds sharpen his awareness of himself as the only Black person present. Tucson is thus not simply a point on the map: it is the place from which Fate enters a landscape where racial difference, national borders, and unfamiliar social encounters become part of his passage.

The route south eventually brings Fate to Adobe, a former adobe-factory town whose houses and appliance stores line a long main street. At its end, a brightly lit empty lot leads directly to the American border post. There, a customs officer sees Fate’s press identification and asks whether he has come to write about the killings. Fate says he is going to cover Saturday’s fight instead. The exchange makes the border a point where his professional purpose is questioned even as he insists on the assignment he has been given.

Tucson as an Intended Exit

After arriving in Santa Teresa, Fate thinks ahead to leaving Mexico. He plans to finish covering the fight, drive back to Tucson, and try to catch a red-eye flight to New York. He also decides he will not keep an appointment with Guadalupe Roncal to interview a suspected serial killer, reasoning that there is little point in conducting an interview if he cannot write about it. The plan makes Tucson a route out of both the assignment and the unresolved investigation.

That intention becomes less secure as Fate accepts an invitation to dinner with the people he has met in Santa Teresa. Rather than drive away alone, he follows their cars through the city, despite wondering whether the circuitous journey is meant to wear him down. He imagines an alternative: go to Tucson’s airport, find a cybercafe, write his story, and fly to New York, where life might regain the consistency of reality. But he does not take that route. Tucson remains an available exit, while Fate’s decision to stay with the group delays his departure and draws him further into the night’s events.

Narrative Function

Tucson links the American road narrative to the Mexican setting without resolving the tension between them. Fate can leave Santa Teresa by returning north, yet each projected departure competes with a new commitment: first the fight, then the interview he considers abandoning, and finally the dinner he chooses to attend. The city’s recurring role as a destination gives his movement a visible direction, but not a settled outcome. It marks the boundary between the work Fate says he is doing and the violence he keeps encountering beyond the assignment.