Religion and Spirituality

One of the consequences of the recent population growth of Nogales lies in the exhaustion of the spiritual established formulas, as well as the disminution of the specific weight of traditional religious structures.

Until the 1960's, the Catholic Church dominated the social live of the Municipality, although even then the first cracks appeared, showing it's loss of strength. This decay is not particular only to Nogales, but also throughout Iberoamerica.

Associated with the population growth, as well as the social and technological modernization, we also have the rise in importance of the Protestant Churches, which, according to Jean Pierre Bastian, in Iberoamerica obey the logic of "Milenarisms and messianism,... which proliferate in the context of the dismantling of traditional societies." This is a Protestantism without any dogmatic requirements, totally submited to inspiration, to the instant of God. It is a Protestantism that makes Jean Meyer ask himself: "Wouldn't it be closer to a Catholicism without Priests to which belong a section of the population?"

The first indication of the local decay of the Catholic Church happens in 1964, when the Monument to Juarez is finished. It was built in the local High School by the Spanish Sculptor Alfredo Just, who had participated in the Spanish Civil War, and saw fourteen members of his immediate family being killed by the Franquistas.

The local church opposes the monument, with the argument that it is indecent because a nude human male accompanies the Juarez figure. However they cannot block it's develation.

And even later, associated with the population growth that the Maquiladoras bring with them, other Churches appear locally, bringing with them different answers to the traditional socioeconomic formulas.

According to a study of Pentecostal Protestantism in Nogales, undertaken by Maria Hilda Garcia Perez in 1992, over 75% of their religious centers were located in Colonias of extreme, high of moderated poverty. Those located in neighborhoods of moderate poverty (over half of the total) also had as a common factor that were established an average of some 46 years earlier, and were located in strategic locations which allowed them to serve several neighborhoods.

Besides this, 70% of the heads of families who lived in neighborhoods with Pentecostal centers, hadn't been born in Nogales, and most of them didn't have a high income.

This, while the average number of members of each center was 40. And finally, only one of the leaders of these centers was a national of another country, while the rest were Mexicans