Population Growth of Nogales, Sonora

 

Nogales, as we know, is a population center that spontaneously was born and has grown around the Encinas Pass, which is the natural communication between the Asuncion (to the South) and Santa Cruz (to the North) rivers. That is, between today's Sonora in Mexico, and Arizona in the USA.

View Santa Cruz Asuncion in a larger map

Beginning in 1887, this population center had 886 inhabitants, while in the Municipality there were 1,484. By 1895 the town had 1,296, while the Municipality there were 1,1810, and when the Mexican revolution began, we were almost 4,000 nogalenses.

After the revolution, the periodical Census were resumed, and their statistics give us the opportunity to orderly see the population growth of Nogales

 

(In the previous graph, you can interact by changing both axis, the size of the ball, activate trails to leave a track of the evolution, etc. Feel free to play with it)

• (If you put TIME in one axis, and POBLACION in the other)

You'll see that the financial crisis of the 1930's brought with it a diminishing of the population of Nogales: between 1930 and 1940, it fell by 183 inhabitants.

It is starting in the 1950's when the population begins to grow again, although after 1960, with the industrialization, occurs the largest immigration associated with the structural change in the Sonoran population in two dimensions:

• vertical (from the countryside to the city) and
• horizontal (from East to West, that is from the sierra to the coast).

 

• (You can also change an axis from POPULATION to TASA DE CRECIMIENTO or RATE OF GROWTH)

In this case,we can see that the greatest rate of growth happened between 1940 and 1950 (6.87%), during the Second World War. We, Nogalenses, have the perception that we had the largest population growth after the Industrialization program, after 1960. However, the numbers don't show that.

This, in turn, tells us that there must be an error in the Nogales population census figures for these latest decades.