The town in which “A rake’s Progress”, concordantly with both the requirements set by the Mexican tradition from which the main storyline threads stem out and having to be in the United States, is located in New Mexico, specifically in a flat and dry northern area in the San José district. New Mexico, like Arizona and Texas were part of the territory seized by the U.S. during the war against Mexico between 1846 and 1848 under president James K. Polk. The town will be fifteen miles south of “El Huerfanito” mountain a hundred miles North-West of Albuquerque and roughly three-hundred miles from Roswell where they still suspect an alien spaceship or probe crashed in 1947. The game takes place in 1953 and we’ve attempted a careful and plausible re-creation of a village which had a remote native history whose matrix is still readable underneath its structure like a palimpsest.

Origin - Native north-mexican tribe settlement.
Circa 1800 – Last native buildings are destroyed, only one remains intact and is hosting, in 1953, the police office facing the square.
Circa 1850 – The remains of the temple over what might have been a pyramid in the center of the settlement are substituted, in a common case of cultural syncretism, by the local church “Santa Maria de Los Remedios” which ideally replaces a temple dedicated to either Tlaloc (or his northern equivalent) or Chalchiuhtlicue. Construction of the first balloon-frame buildings, now replaced by modern ones, like those on the eastern side of the square (the square itself follows the typical distribution of native settlement and the shape is maintained to suggest a continuity between the two different spacial stratiegies).
Early 1900 – Typical American bulidings start setting in. The bar (renovated after 1950), the town hall, and the Majority of the buildings on Arroyo Road (heading towards the creek) which witness a certain expansion due to population growth. The same growth must have motivated the small community of Washington to start the construction of the opera house, made entirely out of bricks and wood.
Circa 1940 – Renovation of the baloon frame building facing the main square and construction of York Street (directed N-S). Instead of maintaing the same agglomerating typology that organized Arroyo Road, York Street tries to refer more closely to a roomy and laid back urban disposition & design which were typical of the peripheral areas of bigger cities in that period.
In this time span Chucho’s office was erected as well.
1950 – Under president Truman, a new road is opened which is supposed to connect the end of York Street to the square, but the population failed to increase as expected and so did the funds. Truman Road, at the time where our adventure takes place, remains incomplete and barely reaches Chucho’s office. The bar was renovated and a couple of houses on York Street were built.