Colonia Hipódromo is an exclusive Tijuana neighborhood whose homes, private gatherings, and social networks become essential to the Barrera brothers’ rise in the city. For Adán and Raúl, moving there is more than a change of address: it is the start of a deliberate effort to make their presence difficult for Tijuana’s established families to dislodge. The neighborhood later reappears as the point from which Raúl takes Lucía away under guard, exposing the danger beneath the brothers’ cultivated respectability.

Setting and Arrival

Tío devised the brothers’ strategy for entering Tijuana society gradually and without alerting Güero Méndez. Rather than openly challenge the existing power structure, Adán and Raúl were to become woven into it, so that removing them would threaten the broader social fabric. The plan began with the children of established families, on the expectation that their influential parents would protect them. Colonia Hipódromo gave the brothers a place from which to put that strategy into practice.

They bought expensive homes in the neighborhood, making their presence conspicuous through repetition as much as display. In another account of their arrival, Adán and Raúl rent a large white mansion on a hill in Colonia Hipódromo, a striking new addition to a life plan that had not made room for the brothers. The neighborhood is presented as part of a carefully bounded world of family connections, inherited advantage, and business opportunity: young people educated across the border are expected to return, enter their fathers’ businesses, and profit from the connections they have made on both sides.

Building a Social Foothold

Raúl’s approach to that world is public and flamboyant. He appears wherever the young elite gather: paying the bill at clubs, practicing karate katas on the beach, betting heavily at the races, and sending Dom Pérignon through a disco. At one club, Fabián Martínez and his friends initially take Raúl’s theatrical entrance as a joke. His full-length mink coat, bright green cowboy boots, and black cowboy hat make him look out of place to them; then he orders thirty bottles of champagne. The performance turns spectacle into access.

The brothers’ presence soon extends beyond any single gathering. Young sons of bankers, lawyers, doctors, and government officials begin to cluster around Raúl, parking their cars beside an enormous old oak tree and talking with him. The tree becomes known simply as El Arbol, a meeting point for those who belong to, or aspire to belong to, Tijuana’s privileged social circle. The change in its name marks the consolidation of a new social habit: the brothers are no longer merely visiting the city’s elite spaces but helping to define where their younger members gather.

Respectability as a Strategy

Adán works a different layer of the city’s social order. Lucía helps him acquire the appearance and habits expected among established adults, taking him to a good tailor and buying conservative, expensive suits and understated clothes. She introduces him to private power clubs, French restaurants in the Río district, and private parties in homes across Colonia Hipódromo, Chapultepec, and Río. The contrast with Raúl is deliberate in effect, even when Adán cannot make his brother adopt the same restraint: Raúl remains conspicuously dressed in his Sinaloan narco-cowboy style, including a full-length mink coat.

Their public life also takes on a religious and civic shape. Adán and Lucía attend Mass every Sunday, give generously to the collection and church funds, invite Father Esteban Rivera to dinner, host backyard barbecues, and become godparents to an increasing number of young couples starting families. Adán presents himself as a quiet businessman whose restaurant venture grows from one establishment to two and then five; Lucía is seen as the young businessman’s wife. The routines make their household legible within the neighborhood’s respectable conventions, while also extending their connections through church, friendship, and family ceremony.

Lucía participates in the expected life of a young wife, going to the gym, having lunch with other wives, and shopping in San Diego at Fashion Valley and Horton Plaza. She understands this social activity as part of her duty to her husband’s business, but keeps it bounded as a duty. The other wives interpret her preference for home and church as devotion to their child. Colonia Hipódromo thus contains both the public performance of belonging and the private limits Lucía places on her role in it.

From Home Ground to Point of Departure

Later, during a period when events have become dangerous, Raúl picks Lucía up in Colonia Hipódromo and tells her that all hell has broken loose. She distrusts him but has no choice about going with him. He apologizes as he explains that, for her protection, she must be blindfolded. The neighborhood that had served as the Barreras’ base for cultivating trust and visibility is now the place where Lucía is removed from her familiar surroundings and denied knowledge of where she is being taken.

Her impressions of the journey sharpen the contrast between that urban home ground and the secrecy that follows. She knows they have driven south out of Tijuana and along the comparatively smooth Ensenada Highway; later the road grows rough, and the vehicle climbs over rocky ground in four-wheel drive. She smells the ocean before they reach their destination. By the time she is led inside and the blindfold is removed, it is dark. Colonia Hipódromo therefore frames two different uses of place in the story: first, as the social territory the brothers patiently enter and reshape; later, as the last known point in Lucía’s forced passage away from the city.