SAN NICOLAS IXMIQUILPAN, Mexico — In the rural hamlet of San Nicolas, there are people who use a bulldozer and a backhoe as instruments of God.
Angry Catholics used the backhoe to cut off Nicolasa Vargas' water after she and her farmworker husband were conspicuously absent from the fiesta honoring the village's patron saint, St. Nicolas of Tolentino, whose cherubic statue smiles down from a perch in the town's whitewashed chapel.
Guillermo Cano, a mild-mannered municipal employee, wouldn't help pay for music at the fiesta. Nor would he eat the tamales or drink the alcohol. All that was against his religion, he said. When he and other Pentecostal Christians bought land for a new temple, local Catholic leaders blocked the road to the property with the bulldozer.
"We told the evangelicals that they won't be holding any more meetings here" in San Nicolas, said Genaro Gutierrez, a high school teacher and one of a group of community-appointed "delegates" who run many local affairs. "They take advantage to recruit more followers."
For Gutierrez, every evangelical in San Nicolas is another loose thread in the social fabric. He believes all people here have an obligation to help out in the fiestas for St. Nicolas and a dozen other events for Catholic icons such as the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The dispute over religion and ritual is hardly confined to this community of 8,000 people living amid cabbage fields and towering cactuses just outside the city of Ixmiquilpan in the Mezquital Valley north of Mexico City. From central Mexican villages like San Nicolas to the southern region of Chiapas, the steady growth of evangelical congregations has produced an angry backlash, with some Catholic lay leaders using their control of local communal assemblies to enforce religious traditions.
According to census figures, one in six residents in Ixmiquilpan and its surrounding villages practices a Protestant faith. The number has increased dramatically in the last decade, mirroring a national trend. Nine in 10 Mexicans are Catholic, but the number of non-Catholics has increased in every census since 1970.
Freedom of religion is guaranteed by Mexico's 1917 constitution, itself the product of a revolution that sought, among other things, to limit the power of the Roman Catholic Church.
