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Show Exploring Mexico By Joseph II. Weston Just below the international border, bor-der, on the south side of Arizona, lies the Mexican state of Sonora, an area about the size of Missouri, Mis-souri, where profound social and economic changes are taking place. An entire population is lifting itself from a Spanish - type media-velism media-velism and an Indian -style stone age, directly into a super-modern pattern of industrial life. Keystone of the change is a revolution re-volution in basic agricultural practices. prac-tices. But this is also being closely followed by a re-building of business busi-ness methods on a grand scale and by a far-reaching social advancement ad-vancement program. Agricultural engineers and modern mod-ern farmers from Arizona, Utah, California, and the former cotton-producing cotton-producing states of the Old South Louisiana, Arkansas, Missippi are taking a prominent part in Sonora's rapid agricultural expansion. (the state capital, so able to con- tribute to the great number of professional men and women that are needed to lead Sonora's population pop-ulation into the place it is seeking in the modern world. A beautiful Franciscan church more than two centuries old, at Mures, which was taken over by a radical labor union group at the height of the revolution, has reverted re-verted to its original owners, and is once more the scene of fervid devotions, with hundreds of women wom-en and children filing through its high-arched nave all day, each bending to kiss the forehead or feet of a life-size statue of a saint, lying prone on a bier. However, i the labor group's big sign on the north exterior wall of the chapel can still be faintly distinguished through the one coat of light paint that has so far been applied over the sacrilegious lettering. Several American protest-ant protest-ant churches are making rapid growth in Sonora and other states in the northwestern part of Mexico. Mexi-co. For the most part, converts to Protestantism are made from am- Western businessmen have not been slow to awake to the almost fantastic opportunities in Sonora, although setting up in business there involves a complicated set of adjustments to Mexican law and business customs. Social advancements include an effective campaign to rid lowland areas of "paludismo," or malaria. mala-ria. Backed with United Nations funds and sparked by the Mexican Mexi-can federal government, which is aggressively developing all possible pos-sible means of progress, this anti-malaria anti-malaria campaign has two main branches. One is to perform the actual work of eliminating mosquito-breeding places, and the other oth-er is to educate the people to take care of themselves by using screens and proper medications when attacked by this debilitating disease. Religion is on the march. For many years, about 95 per cent of the people of Mexico were members of the Roman Catholic Church, which exercised a stultifying stulti-fying monopoly on nearly all social so-cial ideas, due to the fact that it (ong the lower, working classes, and from those who have been to the United States to serve as "branceros," or farm laborers, and who have returned to the homeland with North American ideas. The older, aristocratic families, fa-milies, which supply the lawyers, doctors and generals, for the most part, are strongly Catholic, and cling tenaciously to the oldest of social traditions. Outstanding among the protest-ant protest-ant churches that are growing in Sonora are the Southern Baptists, who have a well - organized network net-work of missions and churches in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja Calif., with a district headquarters in Hermosillo under the direction of the Rev. H. G. Walworth, a brilliant bril-liant minister who has dedicated his entire life to missionary work among Latin-Americans. Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints also are making excellent progress, prog-ress, in Sonora, and have an active ac-tive congregation at Cuidad Obre-gon. had no competition to stimulate it into the progressive action that often characterizes the same church in many other areas. When the present social revolution began be-gan in Mexico in 1910, the Catholic Catho-lic Church came under the condemnation con-demnation of the Mexican government. govern-ment. In recent years, this restraint re-straint has gradually lessened. As a result, the Catholic Church has made a powerful comeback in Mexico, and nowhere is this more evident than in Sonora. For three hundred years of Spanish Spa-nish domination, and the Mexican culture that resulted from it, the entire state of Sonora had no institution in-stitution of higher learning whatever. what-ever. During the past . 15 years, the state itself has established and expanded a modern university. The Catholic Church has also established est-ablished a university in Sonora, and its modern buildings are being be-ing now finished at Hermosillo, |