Away from the monumental churches surrounding the historic centre, the Parroquia de San Antonio de Padua belongs to a different side of San Miguel de Allende. Located in the traditional neighbourhood of San Antonio, it is less a great architectural landmark than a church closely connected with the everyday religious and social life of its community.

The church is dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century Portuguese Franciscan friar who became one of the most widely venerated saints in the Catholic world. Traditionally invoked in connection with the poor and with finding things that have been lost, Saint Anthony developed an especially strong popular following in Mexico. His feast day on 13 June remains an important occasion for the neighbourhood.

The present church developed gradually rather than as a single monumental project. Its relatively simple façade, bell towers and central entrance give it a scale very different from the elaborate Baroque façade of San Francisco or the soaring Neo-Gothic towers of the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel. Its architecture is more modest and directly related to the surrounding residential streets.

This difference is important. San Miguel de Allende is now internationally known for the architecture of its historic centre, but churches such as San Antonio remind us that religious buildings were also neighbourhood institutions. They were places where baptisms, marriages, funerals, feast days and ordinary Sunday worship connected generations of families to the same community.

The church acquired greater institutional importance when it was elevated to the status of a parish in 1978. Yet its significance to the neighbourhood extends well beyond its formal ecclesiastical status. The annual celebrations of Saint Anthony have made the church the religious centre of one of San Miguel's most distinctive popular traditions.

The best known of these is the Desfile de los Locos — the Parade of the Crazies. Held in connection with the festivities of Saint Anthony, the celebration fills the streets with thousands of participants wearing extravagant costumes and masks. What began as a local religious and community tradition has grown into one of the most colourful public events in San Miguel de Allende.

The name Los Locos is appropriate to the visual character of the procession. Participants transform themselves into an extraordinary range of figures: politicians, celebrities, cartoon characters, monsters, men dressed as women and characters drawn from popular culture. Music, dancing and humour turn the streets into a moving theatre.

Yet behind the apparent chaos lies a religious origin. The celebration developed in connection with the feast of Saint Anthony and the agricultural communities surrounding San Miguel. Over time, devotional practice, procession, satire and carnival became intertwined. The result is a tradition in which the sacred and the playful occupy the same streets.

This relationship between church and neighbourhood is what makes San Antonio particularly interesting to me. The building itself does not compete architecturally with the great monuments of the historic centre. Its importance becomes clearer when it is understood together with the people and traditions surrounding it.

For a photographer, this also changes the way the church can be approached. At the Parroquia or San Francisco, architecture naturally dominates many of the photographs. San Antonio invites another kind of observation: the relationship between the building, the street and the community that continues to use it.

Together, the six churches I photographed in San Miguel de Allende reveal very different aspects of the city's religious history. The Parroquia represents the extraordinary vision of Zeferino Gutiérrez; San Rafael preserves the memory of the old parish; the Oratorio combines Baroque architecture, education and Oratorian history; Las Monjas grew from the personal religious vocation of Josefa Lina de la Canal; San Francisco displays the richness of late colonial Baroque; and San Antonio brings the story back to the neighbourhood and its living traditions.

San Antonio may not dominate the skyline of San Miguel de Allende, but during the festivities of Saint Anthony the neighbourhood itself becomes its monument. The church, the streets and the people together form a religious and cultural landscape that architecture alone could never explain.