We Haven’t Got Any Time

“We Haven’t Got Any Time” names the pressure at the heart of Santa Teresa’s growth: factories, migration, money, and violence are arriving faster than the city can accommodate them. Chucho Flores’s line is not simply a complaint about pace; set beside the killings and the city’s uneven expansion, it becomes a measure of the gap between economic motion and the possibility of living safely and in peace.

The city in motion

Santa Teresa appears as a city of starkly different districts and incomplete transitions. To the west, unpaved streets run among houses assembled from scrap; downtown, neglected arcades and older buildings stand amid hurried workers, streetwalkers, and young men on street corners. The eastern neighborhoods have pruned trees, playgrounds, shopping centers, and the university, while farther north abandoned factories give way to bars, souvenir shops, small hotels, and poorer settlements. To the south, rail lines and makeshift soccer fields sit near shacks, highways, a gully used as a dump, and the industrial warehouses of the maquiladoras.

The city’s growth is visible not as a completed plan but as an expanding edge. Moving east, middle-class neighborhoods end and slums begin across a rough landscape of hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of ranches. Industrial parks are themselves being encircled by poor neighborhoods. At the northern boundary, the United States is marked by a fence beyond which lies the Arizona desert. Santa Teresa’s sprawl makes the phrase about time concrete: expansion continues, but the infrastructure has not kept pace.

Flores’s diagnosis

Speaking with Oscar Fate, Chucho Flores calls Santa Teresa a real city with factories and maquiladoras, low unemployment by Mexican standards, a cocaine cartel, and a steady flow of workers from other cities and Central America. He sets these alongside an urban infrastructure unable to support the pace of demographic growth, and a city containing both considerable wealth and poverty. Violence coexists with a desire to work in peace. The list is expansive, but its conclusion is stark: the missing resource is time.

Fate silently guesses that Flores means oil, but asks what the city lacks. Flores answers that it has no time. Fate then considers whether the place, at once a lost cemetery and a garbage dump in his thought, can become something like Detroit. That comparison holds aspiration and uncertainty together: industrial growth offers a model of what Santa Teresa might become, while the city’s present conditions make clear that growth alone does not guarantee a functioning urban life.

The phrase against the evidence

The surrounding landscape gives Flores’s statement a material setting. The city’s industrial horizon, its expanding poor districts, its overloaded infrastructure, and the border fence all belong to a region organized by movement: workers and goods cross national lines, while neighborhoods spread around factories and industrial parks. At the American border post, Fate is asked whether he has come to write about the killings; he says he has come to cover a Saturday fight. A few hundred feet later, at the Mexican crossing, he must leave the car, open his suitcase, and show his documents to exhausted officials. The border is both close and consequential, a short distance crossed through distinct systems of inspection.

Flores’s comparison of the killings to a brutal strike gives the phrase an additional edge. He asks whether people return to work after the deaths, and Fate listens without answering. The comparison makes violence sound like an interruption of labor, but the city’s larger conditions resist any clean separation between work and crisis: maquiladora production and worker migration exist alongside poverty, infrastructural limits, and killings. “We Haven’t Got Any Time” thus gathers the novel’s urban tensions into a brief expression—not a promise that the city will transform, but an account of how its growth and dangers outrun the time needed to respond.