Colima is a transitional setting in Maria Elena Dominguez’s story, marking her movement from an orphanage in Oaxaca into juvenile detention and then onward to El Asilo Seguro outside Hermosillo. The book gives little description of the city itself; its significance lies in the institutional route traced through it and in the memories of hardship that Maria Elena carries from one facility to the next.

A Stop in Maria Elena’s Institutional Journey

After her father was killed in Chiapas and her mother and older brother were taken away, Maria Elena was placed in a Franciscan-run orphanage near Matías Romero. She did not consider herself an orphan and tried to run away twice, but each time she was found and returned. On her third attempt, she was caught and sent to a juvenile detention center in Colima. The account identifies Colima as the location of that placement, but does not describe the center’s conditions or explain why she was sent there.

Her stay there was followed by another unexplained transfer. Maria Elena and two other girls, Madelina and Lucia, were taken north by bus with a guard and in shackles to El Asilo Seguro, a facility outside Hermosillo. Colima therefore sits within a sequence of forced institutional relocations rather than appearing as a destination she chose or a place where she could establish a home.

The Route North and the Girls’ Shared Experience

At El Asilo Seguro, Maria Elena and her companions faced an unsafe environment in which supervision was poor and boys and girls were housed together. To avoid attention from threatening inmates, the three girls stayed together, spoke only to one another, and tried to make themselves inconspicuous. These conditions belong to the account of El Asilo Seguro, not to the unnamed detention center in Colima; the narrative distinguishes the sites even as Maria Elena’s transfers connect them.

Colima also matters through Madelina’s earlier departure. A year before Maria Elena’s own journey north, her friend from Colima had been adopted out and sent toward the United States. The girls regarded the north as a promised future, and Maria Elena later wondered whether she might find Madelina again. The possibility gave her journey a fragile, hopeful dimension, though it did not mean she knew what awaited her.

Memory and Narrative Significance

After Maria Elena is taken from the bus station in Nogales by the doctor who had treated children at El Asilo Seguro, she looks back on her hopes of finding a safe family and on the prospect of reuniting with Madelina. In captivity, those hopes collapse: she concludes that Madelina, too, had not been sent to the welcoming home she imagined. Her memories of Colima and El Asilo Seguro become part of a contrast between the dangers she had already endured and the worse abuse that followed.

The novel’s use of Colima is deliberately limited: it is a named point on Maria Elena’s path, while the institution there remains undescribed. That narrow focus keeps attention on her successive displacement and on the false promise attached to being sent north, rather than presenting Colima as a fully developed setting in its own right.