During the 60s and 70s of the 20th century many socially engaged architects experimented, with varying degrees of success, a type of work called citizen participation or community architecture. The Mexican architect Fernando Rodriguez-Concha was one of them. The peculiar social situation his country was facing in the 50s prompted his civic engagement-his deep sense of the public realm or his view of the political nature of architecture-which began in the university classroom and was subsequently expressed in various fields of his work as an architect: technical support to small local cooperatives, commitment to independent teaching in higher education, rehabilitation of degraded urban neighborhoods, religious architecture, etc. This article aims to show how his ethical and social commitment materialized through the construction of several community projects. Among them two Catholic churches in Puebla, his hometown, Huexotitla and Las Animas, stand out. These are two churches which, due to their original construction solutions-derived from both his successful collaboration with engineers and users and the architect's formal intuition-and for their own clear plastic force have become paradigmatic examples of Mexican religious architecture in the second half of the 20th century.
