Tepoztlán, Morelos, Mexico (Google Maps ⧉, OpenStreetMap ⧉)

"…when he was replaying the past, when he was a boy in Tepoztlán, in the south of Mexico, and his father caught an opossum in among the chickens…"

"He took the vows with Resurrección that day, and he was twenty years old, just back from nine months in El Norte, working the potato fields in Idaho and the citrus in Arizona, and he was like a god in Tepoztlán."

"América had been chattering away about Tepoztlán to take Cándido’s mind off the situation—she was remembering an incident from her childhood, a day when a September storm swept over the village and the hail fell like stones amid the standing corn and all the men rushed out into the streets firing their pistols and shotguns at the sky—but she stopped in midsentence when she heard the crunch of gravel and looked up into the lean shoulders and predatory snout of the patrón’s car."

"…if she’d stayed in Tepoztlán through all the gray days of her life she would have had enough to eat, as long as her father was alive and she jumped like a slave every time he snapped his fingers, but she would never have had anything more, not even a husband, because all the men in the village, all the decent ones, went North nine months a year."

"After Tepoztlán, Cuernavaca even, after the Tijuana dump and Venice and the leafy dolorous hell of the canyon, this was a vision of paradise."

"The sidewalks weren’t crowded, not in the way she’d expected, not like in the market in Cuernavaca or even Tepoztlán, but there was a steady flow of people going about their business as if it were the most natural thing in the world to live here."

"his mind back in Tepoztlán, the rocky cerros rising above the village in a glistening curtain of rain, the plants lush with it, fields high with corn and the winter dry season just setting in, the best time in all the year"

"…the sky was black, as black as the night sky in Tepoztlán during the rains…"

"But even before he lifted it and felt in the recess beneath it for his hoard, the money that would at least get them back to Tepoztlán, if nothing else, he knew what he would find: melted plastic, fused coins, U.S. Federal Reserve Notes converted to dust through the alchemy of the fire."