How the U.S-Mexico border divides these two LDS congregations — in more ways than one

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Ajo, Ariz. • Although separated by only an hour’s drive, the Latter-day Saint communities of Ajo, Arizona, and Sonoyta, Mexico, are worlds apart.

Located on either side of a busy checkpoint frequented by beach-bound U.S. tourists, the two congregations are each other’s closest Latter-day Saint outposts. But ask members of either enclave about the other, and blank stares ensue.

“I’ve never been down there,” Shaye Rohn, a convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has lived her whole life in Ajo, said of the Sonoyta branch, or congregation. “In fact, I never even think about it. I don’t feel any connection to it.”

In contrast, church members in Ajo regularly drive an hour and a half to two hours to meet with Latter-day Saints in Maricopa or Phoenix.

As for their Sonoyta counterparts, few have ever ventured north of the border. For many, their interactions with U.S. Latter-day Saints have been limited to a few toy donations they received and helped distribute — before a church higher-up shut down the operation.

‘The war came and everything went downhill’

On a cool Sunday morning in February, members of the Sonoyta branch greeted one another outside the church with warm embraces.

The whitewashed meetinghouse was small, maybe a thousand square feet in all, and tucked back from a pockmarked road, where Jeeps, brimming with heavily armed federal troops, patrolled. Next door, a restaurant advertising hot dogs had yet to open for the day.

Inside, worshippers filtered past walls bare, save for a portrait of church President Russell M. Nelson, flanked by his two counselors, Dallin H. Oaks and Henry B. Eyring. Chatter filled a makeshift chapel as old and young took their seats on folded chairs before beginning the Sabbath service with a hymn.

It hadn’t been two months since “the war” that paused Sunday meetings and youth activities, and many seats remained empty.

The fighting, rumored to have been the result of a territorial dispute between two regional drug cartels, had lasted about a week and claimed the 19-year-old son of one of the flock’s most devout members. The victim’s sister had refused to leave the house since.

She wasn’t alone.

Branch President Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, the lay leader of the small congregation in the town of 13,000, explained that attendance had taken a hit since the rash of violence in late December.

“Before, things were going great,” he said, speaking Spanish, as did all the Sonoyta Latter-day Saints, through an interpreter. Members knocked on doors with the missionaries, young people gathered for volleyball, and seminary classes enjoyed regular attendance — despite their 5:30 a.m. start time.

“Then the war came and everything went downhill,” the single father of three teenage girls — “mis princesas” — lamented. “That’s why we’re struggling right now. We can’t go out much.”

Rodríguez, a tall and talkative man with a voice that could fill a lecture hall, acknowledged other, more structural challenges to bolstering the Sonoyta branch, which lately had been averaging between 30 and 40 weekly attendees. U.S. immigration policies have strangled the economy, for starters, and the American businesses that entice workers to the region rarely stick around for long.

And then there was the meetinghouse. Cramped and short on amenities (a hot-tub-turned-baptismal-font occupied half the building’s sole classroom), it was hardly the space for attracting and growing a community.

“They have promised us a chapel if we can average 80 people attending each Sunday,” Rodríguez said. But he didn’t see that happening anytime soon, barring a seismic shift in the overwhelmingly Catholic town’s economy.

Other branch members chimed in, agreeing on the need for a new meetinghouse and pointing to a kind of chicken-and-egg dilemma: How could they build their congregation without the right building?

“I really think the other people of Sonoyta would be more interested in getting to know more about the church,” offered 14-year-old Carlos Daniel Salazar Lopez, “if it were a real chapel with a steeple and everything.”

What about Latter-day Saint migrants attempting to cross the border? Do they ever attend church?

Not really, the members explained.

“There have been those who ask for help,” Rodríguez said, “but the economy here makes it difficult” for anyone who might want to stay.

The leader is one of the few to have lived north of the border. When asked about his interactions with U.S. Latter-day Saints, he demurred, explaining he “had issues,” with some of the white leaders, but didn’t elaborate.

‘Pretty much a white bread ward’

Roughly 40 miles away, Shaye Rohn, the 71-year-old Latter-day Saint convert, sat at her kitchen table, rubbing her elbows with soft hands sprinkled with age spots.

Rohn, who lost her sight as a child, is old enough to remember when Ajo was a “bustling” community of 10,000. That was back in the 1970s when a copper mine was still open for business and kids gathered in the plaza after school to fill up on snow cones.

Those days are gone. The mine closed in the mid-80s after the price of copper tanked, and the desert town never recovered. The population plunged and then seesawed before settling in at fewer than 3,000 souls. Of those, according to the 2020 census, half identified as white and non-Hispanic, and the other half a mix of white and non-white Hispanic, Native American and multiracial.

A few streets over from Rohn’s place, Julianne and Buddy Koozer sat side by side in the bishop’s office of a traditional Latter-day Saint meetinghouse — one as likely to be seen in American Fork as in Ajo — with their hands resting on a well-polished conference table.

Julianne was born in Ajo in 1992 and has lived there most of her life. “I grew up when Ajo was kind of a ghost town,” said the mother of six with one on the way. “And it still feels that way somewhat.”

Amid this vacuum of civic life, the church became something of a community center, the youth activities drawing kids of all religious backgrounds.

“We would do volleyball nights and mutual,” she said, referring to the regular weekday evening activities for high school-age boys and girls. “And it was fun because there’s not much to do in Ajo, so it was easy to invite friends along.”

As bishop, Buddy, originally from Mesa, alternated between boyish charm and Boy Scout earnestness while talking about his small but faithful flock.

Retirees, Border Patrol agents and their families constitute the backbone of the ward (a congregation larger than a branch), which averages 60 worshippers on any given Sunday. While that number has been stable for some years, Buddy fears that might not always be the case.

Morale is at rock bottom among Border Patrol ward members, who, he said, feel less free to detain immigrants than when Donald Trump was in the Oval Office.

“They want to feel valued,” Buddy said, “and that they’re helping.”

The Salt Lake Tribune requested multiple interviews with Border Patrol agents in the ward. None agreed. But Buddy, who works for the solar industry, said they tell him stories of colleagues hanging up their badges, unhappy with the orders they’ve been given under President Joe Biden.

As a global institution, the Salt Lake City-headquartered church of 17 million members has struck a generally pro-immigration tone. Top leaders have repeatedly given their blessing to the Utah Compact, which calls for treating immigrants humanely, keeping families together and focusing any deportation on criminals.

In 2018, in the first public policy stance taken under Nelson as the church’s prophet-president, leaders called on the U.S. Congress to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, known as “Dreamers,” from deportation. Three years later, they encouraged members in the faith’s official handbook for local lay leaders to welcome immigrants and refugees.

When asked if the church’s statements and policies represent a sore spot to Border Patrol ward members, Buddy shook his head.

“Honestly,” he said, “it really doesn’t come up — just the fact that they’re tired and they’re burnt out.”

Despite the daily crossings in the area, he and Julianne noted that migrants aren’t found seated in the chapel’s pews.

The Koozers attributed this not to the presence of Border Patrol in the ward, but the fact that Ajo is only a way station — not a destination — for those looking to make their home in the United States.

“We see the white buses go through at least three or four times every day, transporting the people, hundreds of people,” Julianne said. “But they don’t ever come here.”

There are a handful of Spanish speakers on Ajo Ward’s rolls, as well as some being taught by missionaries, but those worshippers typically attend church in Sonoyta, he explained. The Sonoyta branch president confirmed this, explaining they are more “comfortable” in the Mexican congregation.

“We are actively trying to get people to come,” Buddy said, “but most who are interested or investigating seriously, they just end up going back to the branch there.”

He attributed this to the language barrier, noting that the ward has just acquired headphones for translation.

“But as far as converts and the missionary work here,” Julianne mused, “I’ve always wondered why aren’t we baptizing more Mexicans.”

The ward’s boundaries include the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American tribe whose ancestral lands encompass much of the Sonoran Desert. Three or four ward members occasionally make the trek from the nation for Sunday services, but Buddy said the distance can be a challenge.

“They’re so awesome. I mean, there are, like, visionary members that are being shown the Book of Mormon in dreams,” he said. “But there are so many barriers — having a car, the distance.”

Aubrey Harper, the president of Ajo’s Relief Society, the church’s organization for women, said she tries to make the 90-minute drive round trip on poorly maintained roads to visit a woman from the ward who lives on the reservation.

“I love her to death,” Harper, who does mission support for the Border Patrol, said, “but it’s just hard.” Meanwhile, health challenges make it difficult for the Native woman to travel to Ajo.

Rohn sat back in her kitchen chair and paused when asked about the ward’s racial blend.

“It’s pretty much a white bread ward,” she concluded. “I hadn’t even thought about it, but I guess it is.”

Strength in (fewer) numbers

Despite the challenges, the Ajo and Sonoyta congregants — like sagebrush pushing their roots ever deeper, shedding all but their most necessary parts to survive times of drought — have held on. The result: People who know everything there is to know about everyone in their own congregations — and care for one another anyway.

“We’re small in numbers,” Rohn said, her voice heavy with pride, “but mighty in spirit.”

After a stroke a year ago, the mother of two grown sons says the women of the Ajo Relief Society became her “cheering section,” celebrating milestones with her like the first time she managed to pull her hair into a ponytail.

On one particularly dark morning, she called up another longtime ward member, widower Ray Spitzer, who came and listened while she “ranted and raved,” then took her on a walk.

“We just went up and down the sidewalk here is all, but it made me feel better,” she said. “And he did that more than once.”

Across the border in Sonoyta — located in a separate Latter-day Saint stake, or regional cluster of congregations — the branch had been busy tending to the funeral arrangements and burial of their fallen member.

“They visited me when my son was missing,” Beatrice Elena Fontes Garcia, the 19-year-old’s mother, said. “They all came to give me their support then and when the wake was taking place.”

This “unity,” she said, sets the congregation apart from previous ones she’s attended.

“We’re there for others,” she said, “when they need it most.”

Their message to Utah

When asked what he would tell church leaders and members in Utah if given the chance, Buddy Koozer didn’t hesitate.

“Real estate is really cheap here,” he quipped, “if anyone is looking to move.”

Rohn also didn’t have to think for long.

“Just know,” she said, sitting taller in her kitchen chair, “the gospel is alive and well and true down here in this little community.”

Sonoyta members, for their part, were unanimous: More than anything, they long for a proper building with a gym where kids can mingle safely and a chapel with padded pews. They know the odds are against them, but they hold out hope all the same.

In the meantime, the two congregations will keep doing what they do best: preparing lessons, attending meetings, comforting the afflicted and in all ways showing up, a border — and worlds — away.