Multizone-West

Multizone-West is a maquiladora in Santa Teresa, part of a multinational company that manufactures televisions. Its place in the novel is not simply that of an industrial employer: the factory stands within a rapidly expanding border city where export production, poorly served neighborhoods, and violence against women occupy the same landscape. The organization enters the narrative most directly when its manager reports a woman’s body discovered in a dump beside the industrial complex.

Business and Setting

The plant is situated among Santa Teresa’s maquiladoras, whose industrial parks mark the city’s outward growth. From the city’s southern outskirts, industrial warehouses form part of a horizon of maquiladora production; elsewhere, industrial parks are being encircled by slums. Chucho Flores describes the city as having factories, maquiladoras, low unemployment, a constant influx of workers, and an urban infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. Multizone-West’s setting therefore links formal manufacturing and employment to a city whose housing and services are expanding unevenly.

The wider geography also has a cross-border dimension. On the American side, Adobe is described as a settlement of houses and appliance stores along a main street leading to the border post. At the Mexican crossing, Fate must show his passport, car papers, and press identification and complete forms. Elsewhere, Klaus Haas tells reporters that the Uribe family’s trucks transport goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border at frequent intervals. These details place Santa Teresa’s factory economy within a circulation of goods and people that crosses national boundaries, although the novel does not specify Multizone-West’s own shipping arrangements.

The Plant and Its Workforce

The dump where the first dead woman of May is found lies beside a complex containing four maquiladoras that assemble household appliances. New silver-painted electrical towers supply the plants. Nearby, shacks extend toward the train tracks and the edge of Colonia La Preciada; workers arrive by bus from different neighborhoods, then walk along dirt roads to factory gates, where guards check their passes. Only one of the four plants has a cafeteria. At the others, workers eat beside their machines or in small groups until a siren signals the end of lunch. Most of the workers are women.

The account distinguishes the broader industrial complex from Multizone-West itself: the four plants assemble household appliances, while Multizone-West is identified as a subsidiary of a multinational television manufacturer. This distinction matters because the setting is shared among factories with different products, while workers’ daily routines and the surrounding infrastructure are presented as part of a common industrial landscape.

Other cases make the conditions around factory work more specific without establishing that the women worked at Multizone-West. Margarita Lopez worked the night shift at K&T and left at about 5:30 in the morning; the poorly lit roads and inadequate paving and drainage shaped the route home that investigators tried to reconstruct. Lucy Anne Sander and Erica Delmore worked at a crafts factory in Arizona, not at a Santa Teresa maquiladora, but their border crossing and night in the city extend the novel’s attention to work and movement across the region. These separate accounts situate factory employment within vulnerable commutes and transborder movement without attributing the victims’ experiences to Multizone-West.

The Body Beside the Industrial Complex

A plant manager at Multizone-West calls the authorities after a dead woman is found in the dump where refuse from both the slum dwellers and the maquiladoras has accumulated. Three executives from the plant—two Mexican and one American—are waiting when police arrive. One of the Mexican executives says they hope the body will be removed promptly. The executives accompany an officer into the dump, where the American examines the woman’s neck with a pen. The policeman cautions him against touching her; the American replies that he only wants to see the marks. The executives then look at their watches and ask about the ambulance.

The scene also depicts an exchange that compromises the official response: one executive hands money to a policeman, who puts it in his uniform pocket and assures him that the matter will be handled. The narrative gives no basis for saying that Multizone-West as a corporation ordered or authorized the payment. It does, however, place company executives beside the discovery and shows one of them paying an officer while the police are attending to the body.

The woman spends the night in a refrigerated compartment at the Santa Teresa hospital. The autopsy establishes that she was pregnant, and that she had been raped and strangled. She is never identified. The account presents her presumed status as a migrant from a central or southern state as an assumption, not a confirmed identity: no one reports her missing, and no companion is found. Her anonymity makes the dump more than an industrial backdrop. It is a point where waste from the factories and surrounding settlement converges with a body that the city cannot name.

Recurrence and Significance

Multizone-West appears again in the account of Felicidad Jimenez Jimenez, a fifty-year-old employee of the plant who is killed at home by her son. Her death is explicitly distinguished from the cases in which women are found in dumps, vacant lots, or the desert: she is discovered in her own home. The novel thus connects her employment to the same factory named in the earlier scene while resisting the idea that every killing follows one location or pattern.

Taken together, these appearances give Multizone-West a sharply limited but consequential role. It is an employer within an industry that depends on a predominantly female workforce, a plant whose manager initiates a report of a death beside the industrial zone, and the workplace of another woman whose killing occurs in a different setting. The novel does not identify the factory or its employees as responsible for the murders. Instead, it places industrial production, inadequate urban infrastructure, official compromise, and the repeated failure to identify victims in the same civic frame, making the factory part of the setting through which Santa Teresa’s violence becomes visible.