LGBTQ+ Youth Feel They Are Being Forced Out of Nogales

One evening near Nogales, Arizona, Idaly Banuelos stood with her father at a Gloria Trevi show across the border in Sonora. The stage lights dimmed, and a group of drag performers appeared, glitter catching in the spotlight.

Banuelos, still a child, turned to her dad with wide-eyed curiosity. “Are they men or women?” she asked.

It was her first glimpse of drag, her first sense that gender expression could stretch beyond the rules she had been taught in catechism class back home. In Nogales, where tradition and religion shape almost every corner of daily life, it was a moment that cracked open the possibility of something different.

For Banuelos and many other queer youth raised in this small desert city, those glimpses mattered. They came rarely and often from outside Nogales, a place that can feel as isolating as it is tight-knit.

A town rooted in tradition

Nogales is a border city that blends Mexican American culture with agriculture, history, and faith. It is small enough that “everyone knows everyone,” as locals like to say, yet large enough to be considered a city. To grow up here is to live under the gaze of family, friends, neighbors, and the church.

With a majority Hispanic population, religion is everywhere. Catholicism and Christianity guide community life, from baptisms before babies can chew their first bites of food to Sunday sermons and catechism classes. Children learn about Jesus, the Bible and cultural events such as Día de los Reyes and Semana Santa.

The milestones of Catholic life — baptism, communion, confirmation — arrive in steady succession, so ingrained that for most children, catechism feels less like a religious rite and more like another after-school hangout. But the lessons sink in nonetheless.

Among them: being queer is a sin.

In Nogales, queerness is not taught, celebrated or even discussed in most homes. Instead, it shows up as the punchline to a joke, the subject of insults on school playgrounds or whispers in church pews. For LGBTQ+ youth, the first real exposure to queerness often comes through TV shows, internet searches or rare moments of discovery beyond town lines.

Banuelos began questioning her sexuality in middle school, but she didn’t have the words to name her feelings. She worried about being outed against her will or facing rejection from family.

She knows how lucky she was: her mother loved and supported her, no matter what: not something every queer person in Nogales can relate to.

Still, homophobia was everywhere. She remembers students ridiculing members of the Gender and Sexuality Awareness Club in high school. She remembers how easily the word “gay” was tossed as an insult.

For Banuelos, the COVID pandemic became a turning point. Isolated from the routines of Nogales, she began exploring her identity more deeply. Moving away for college gave her the freedom to find a community that embraced her (something she had never experienced at home.)

She saw it happen to others, too: “Multiple people leave Nogales and later come to discover or embrace their queer identity,” she said. It reinforced what she already felt: that many hide or suppress their sexuality while living here.

Religion’s shadow

The weight of Catholic teaching lingered. “That’s not a fear I’ve gotten over until recently, like in the last year,” Banuelos said, describing the church’s message that being gay meant eternal damnation.

“It wasn’t just the church teaching its students how to have a connection with God, they were teaching you how you should view the world — which damaged my perception of it,” she said.

The message, she added, was clear: “If you don’t follow these exact things, you’re going to hell. And it’s just really scary and a lot of pressure to put on young kids.”

Eventually, separating from Catholicism allowed Banuelos to shed some of that fear. It wasn’t until she met her girlfriend that she felt free enough to say, “I would risk going to hell to experience love.”

Not everyone carried the same burden of faith.

Michelle Granados grew up in Nogales, too, and attended church and catechism as a child. But she never believed in what she was being taught.

“When I would go to catechism, it was so unserious for me. I was just there because I was forced to go, but it wasn’t like I was really taking it in,” she said.

Religion didn’t shape her understanding of her sexuality. Instead, she worried about what her parents might think, whether her family would accept her, whether she’d be able to have children like a straight couple.

Even with those fears, Granados loved Nogales for its sense of community and shared immigrant roots. Compared to how immigrants are treated in other parts of the country, she felt grateful to grow up there. But in queer spaces, that same community often vanished.

By her senior year of high school, Granados was in her first same-sex relationship. She didn’t expect backlash. Pop culture seemed to suggest her classmates would accept it.

She was wrong.

As whispers spread, Granados felt stripped of her privacy. Students made inappropriate comments about what she and her partner did at sleepovers. At parties, they followed the couple to see if they’d kiss.

“I felt like I was 15 again, like a freshman walking into a classroom with upperclassmen. I felt different and like everyone knew my business,” she said.

It wasn’t scrutiny that straight couples faced, Granados added. And for many students, seeing a queer relationship firsthand was more jarring than watching it play out on a TV screen.

“I felt like I had no privacy anymore. Here I am trying to explore a relationship where it’s already hard on both of us from our families and we can’t even come to a friend’s party and be ourselves away from the scrutiny eyes because they’re here too,” she said.

Silence at home, slurs at school

Miguel Soto’s story runs parallel. Like Banuelos and Granados, he began thinking about his sexuality in middle school. But the hostility around him — slurs from classmates, remarks from family — made it clear he could not be openly queer.

“It was definitely a ‘hide it’ type of thing,” Soto said.

Unlike most kids in Nogales, Soto never went through catechism. He was baptized, but that was it. People were often shocked to learn it. Still, he wasn’t free from what he called “Catholic guilt.” The cultural weight of religion hung over him even without weekly classes.

“People in Nogales are just uneducated and that leads to ignorance,” Soto said. “So, it’s kind of this endless cycle of uneducated people in the town, and those who don’t leave stay there and perpetuate the same cycle.”

The pandemic offered Soto something unexpected: time to reflect and a platform to express himself. He started a TikTok account and quickly built a following of 20,000. For once, he didn’t have to hide.

One day, he posted a video announcing he was bisexual. He didn’t expect people from Nogales to see it. They did.

But nothing changed, he said. He stayed true to himself and let people think whatever they wanted.

Signs of change

For all the challenges Banuelos, Granados and Soto faced, they see glimmers of hope for the next generation.

“My little sister’s generation was completely different,” Banuelos said. “She was able to make a huge queer friend group, which I would have never imagined to have in high school.”

Still, LGBTQ+ visibility remains scarce in Nogales — in media, in government, in daily life. And many who identify as queer don’t stay.

“A big part of it is because if you are queer you’re probably not going to stay in Nogales — you’re probably going to move away and try to expand somewhere else,” Banuelos said.

Leaving, though, doesn’t mean abandoning the town. For some, it’s the first step in imagining what Nogales could become.

Leaving Nogales doesn’t mean giving up on it, it might just be the first step toward changing it.