Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico

By María L. Cruz-Torres

A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico.

The "shrimp ladies," locally known as changueras in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, sell seafood in open-air markets, forming an extralegal but key part of the economy built around this "pink gold.” Over time, they struggled to evolve from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, even as they continue to work at an open-air street market.

Pink Gold documents the shrimp traders' resilience and resourcefulness, from their early conflicts with the city, state, and federal authorities and forming a union, to carving out a physical space for a seafood market, and even engaging in conflicts with the Mexican military. Drawing from her two decades of fieldwork, María L. Cruz-Torres explores the inspiring narrative of this overlooked group of women involving grassroots politics, trans-border and familial networking, debt and informal economic practices, personal sacrifices, and simple courage. She argues that, amid intense economic competition, their success relies on group solidarity that creates interlocking networks of mutual trust, or confianza, that in turn enable them to cross social and political boundaries that would typically be closed to them. Ultimately, Pink Gold offers fresh insights into issues of gender and labor, urban public space, the street economy, commodities, and globalization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477328040

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The publication of this book was made possible by the generous support of the Louann Atkins Temple Women and Culture Endowment.

PINK GOLD

Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico

María L. Cruz-Torres

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2023

The Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Endowment is supported by Allison, Doug, Taylor, and Andy Bacon; Margaret, Lawrence, Will, John, and Annie Temple; Larry Temple; the Temple-Inland Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cruz-Torres, María Luz, 1961– author.

Title: Pink gold : women, shrimp, and work in Mexico / María L. Cruz-Torres.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023.| Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023016564 ISBN 978-1-4773-2801-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2802-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4773-2803-3 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2804-0 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Women merchants—Mexico—Social conditions. | Street vendors—Mexico—Social conditions. | Peddlers—Mexico—Social conditions. | Shrimp industry—Social aspects—Mexico. | Rural women—Mexico—Social conditions. | Sex role—Social aspects—Mexico. | Shrimp fisheries—Social aspects—Mexico.

Classification: LCC HF5459.M6 C789 2023 | DDC 381/.180972—dc23/eng/20230706

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023016564

doi:10.7560/328019

This book is dedicated to my late mother,

María L. Torres Velázquez.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. Amber Sunsets and Pink Gold

CHAPTER 1. Contested Grounds: Women Shrimp Traders and Street Economies

CHAPTER 2. On Becoming Changueras: Gendered Livelihoods and Contested Identities

CHAPTER 3. The Street of the Women Shrimp Traders: Learning the Tricks of the Trade in Space and Place

CHAPTER 4. Here We Are Like a Family: The Complexity of Social Relations

CHAPTER 5. The Culture and Economy of Pink Gold: The Meanings, Processes, and Values of Shrimp

CHAPTER 6. Sometimes We Work Just to Pay Our Debts: Informal Credit and Savings Systems

CHAPTER 7. From Outcasts to Icons: Women Shrimp Traders and Expressive Culture

CONCLUSION. Feminist Political Ecology, Ethnography, and Uncovering Lived Realities

Notes

References

Index

Preface

This all began with an article in El Sol del Pacífico, a local newspaper in Mazatlán, in August 1989. The headline, written in Spanish in large, bold letters, seemed to leap off the page and contrasted notably with the body of the article, written in much smaller print. It read, Changueras agredieron a inspectores de pesca (Changueras attacked fishing inspectors), which immediately drew my attention. I was then a graduate student interested in researching the initial development of shrimp aquaculture in Mexico and conducting fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in a small rural community in southern Sinaloa. At the time, I lived with a family who kindly adopted me and eased me into Mexican rural life. The family’s patriarch, Don Chico, was a founding member of the community and owned one of the largest houses there. He and his wife, Doña Trini, invited me to stay with them, as they had a spare bedroom.

While living there I developed a daily routine of visiting families at their homes in the morning and early afternoon to come to better know them. Once finished, I would return to the house and settle in a rocking chair on the front porch, alongside Don Chico and Doña Trini. I would share with them what I learned that day, and the three of us would reflect on the many processes and changes taking place not just in the community but also in the region overall.

During one of those sessions on a sultry afternoon as the heat and humidity reached unbearable levels, I noticed a newspaper on the chair. Upon unfolding it I immediately fixated on the article about the changueras in the local section. I had never heard the term changueras before, but from the rumors that abounded in the region about violent confrontations between marines from the Mexican navy, referred to simply as marinos in southern Sinaloa, and male shrimp poachers called changueros in the local lexicon, I deduced that the Spanish feminine term changueras meant that there were women poachers as well. Just to be sure, I asked Doña Trini what changueras meant. She paused for a moment and responded patiently that changueras were women shrimp vendors, some of whom were street peddlers, and others worked from home, at marketplaces in their hometowns, or in Mazatlán. They received the name changuera, Doña Trini later explained, because they often sold shrimp that was caught illegally, poached by the male changueros. In turn, the changueros got their name from chango, a small net they used for catching shrimp in the region’s lagoons and estuaries. In southern Sinaloa, I learned from Doña Trini, being a changuera or a changuero was a highly stigmatized and criminalized livelihood.

When I read the article my first thought was that the fishing industry in southern Sinaloa and Mexico more broadly had a gendered dimension yet to be explored or even acknowledged. This gendered dimension seemed to be buried deep in the muddy soil of the mangrove forests surrounding many of the region’s coastal communities. Gender, I later discovered, did indeed add another layer of complexity to the many conflicts that already plagued the fishing industry, often rooted in the power struggles over access to shrimp. The newspaper article described how a group of changueras from Mazatlán attacked two male fisheries inspectors who attempted to confiscate their shrimp (El Sol del Pacífico 1989). Apparently the women were selling shrimp on the street and felt threatened when the inspectors approached them. As soon as the women saw the inspectors, they rushed to hide their shrimp in neighboring houses and defended themselves by beating and throwing rocks at the inspectors, who fled. What initially struck me from the article were its contradictory portrayals of the inspectors and the women. The inspectors were depicted as victims, whereas the women were described as aggressive and fearless outlaws.

After reading this article, I was sure I wanted to know more about these women. Who were they? What was everyday life like for them? Why were they risking their lives? Why did they have to defend their livelihoods? Years later, when I returned to southern Sinaloa to conduct further fieldwork in the two rural communities where I had previously lived, I concentrated on better understanding the complexities of women’s economic roles in rural communities and their work in both subsistence and commercial agriculture. Initially I had to grapple with the difficulty of conceptualizing gender relations in rural Mexico. However, by the time I completed my fieldwork I was able to parse how these relations are negotiated and accommodated within rural households. Listening to women’s stories in rural Mexico and sharing in their daily activities, I became aware of how stereotypical much of the literature previously published on Mexican women was. The women I met were strong, in charge of their households, and active participants in the economic and social development of their communities. Nevertheless, many did also experience domestic violence in their homes, and others had to deal with alcoholic husbands or sons. But this did not define them. On the contrary, it was evident that they were mujeres de armas tomar, strong-minded women. So I suspected that changueras were also courageous women whose strength of character and tireless efforts made it possible for their families to get ahead.

I first witnessed this strength and resilience of southern Sinaloan changueras one afternoon while traveling by bus from a rural community to the town of Escuinapa. A group of uniformed men from the Mexican army signaled the driver to stop. They got on the bus and began searching beneath the seats. At first I thought they were searching for drugs or undocumented migrants, but one of them suddenly tore a shrimp bucket from a woman passenger’s hands. The woman, visibly upset, became defiant and asked the officer if they would please return it to her. When the officer refused, the woman opened her purse and removed a small bottle of black liquid. She then quickly poured it all over her shrimp and yelled at the officer, Si no es mío, tampoco va a ser de ustedes (If it can’t be mine, it won’t be yours either). Many of the other passengers expressed their solidarity with the woman and demanded of the soldiers what, if anything, they would gain by robbing the poor woman of her livelihood. I became paralyzed with fear and merely sat there, mute and unmoving. I did not know how to react. The officers eventually left and the bus continued its journey. I was relieved. Around me, however, the woman and the other passengers were complaining about and commenting on the incident, blaming the officers for not allowing the poor to work peacefully.

Throughout my fieldwork in the region, first as a graduate student and then as a young scholar, I heard and read many stories about changueras. I also met a few of them in the communities where I conducted my fieldwork. These stories, rumors, and tales of despair and resistance further piqued my curiosity and drove me to learn more about these women. The image of the woman with the shrimp bucket from the bus stuck in my mind, and in 2004 I returned to southern Sinaloa to pursue exploratory field research on the topic of gender and fisheries. Only then did I learn that the mother of my comadre, Doña Neida Delgado, was a changuera. I asked my comadre if we could visit her mother, and she took me directly to a street in the town of El Rosario, about thirty-nine miles south of Mazatlán, where she and other women were selling their shrimp. Neida, sitting in a plastic chair and surrounded by her shrimp tubs, had long impressed me, as far back as when I discovered she was the only person in the community who owned a car.

During a brief conversation, I shared with her my desire to learn more about the changueras’ work as shrimp traders. She cheerfully responded that if I was genuinely interested in getting to know them, I should start in Mazatlán because that is where most of changueras worked. I arrived in Mazatlán on a cloudy, humid Monday morning as the city was awakening from the weekend. The streets were already packed with cars, buses, and pedestrians, all hurriedly trying to get somewhere. I waved down a pulmonía (open-air taxi) and asked the driver to take me to the School of Marine Sciences at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa next to the Malecón, the thirteen-mile scenic waterfront promenade that runs along the Avenida del Mar and the Olas Altas neighborhood in Mazatlán.

I stopped to greet the professors I had met during my previous visits to the university and sought their advice about contacting women shrimp traders. One professor in particular was encouraging and did not think my idea of conducting research among changueras was at all absurd. He agreed that it was an unusual but meaningful topic that merited scholarly attention because, as he eloquently expressed it, The changueras are important contributors to Mazatlán’s cultural life. The professor then took me to meet changueras at their shrimp market.

That afternoon the market was seething with prospective customers browsing the various seafood stands, eyeing the wares, and comparing the prices and quality of the seafood. Women vendors yelled about their merchandise and prices, hoping to attract more customers. We parked next to a stand where a woman in a white hat and a white apron stood beside her shrimp tubs, bargaining with a female customer. The professor rolled down his window and yelled at the woman, Hola. ¿Cómo estás? (Hi, how are you?). The woman immediately recognized the professor and said, Hola. ¡Tanto tiempo! (Hi, it’s been a while!). They talked for a few minutes about their respective families, and then he introduced me. This is a colleague who wants to know more about the work of the changueras. I’m leaving her with you so you can converse for a while. Please take good care of her. The woman smiled and responded, ¡Claro que sí! (Of course I will!).

That was my introduction to the place that would become one of my principal research sites for the next fifteen years: a street shrimp market in a coastal city in northwestern Mexico. The woman, noticing my awkwardness, immediately introduced herself as Victoria Flores and told me she was from a small town in the municipality of Mazatlán. She then pulled out a white plastic chair, invited me to sit down next to her shrimp tubs, and offered to buy me a soda or a bottled water. After the awkwardness of this first meeting dissipated, she asked me what specifically I wanted to know and how she could help. Drinking from my bottle of water and feeling a bit shy, I shared with Victoria some of the basic, preliminary questions that I wanted to explore. How did work as shrimp traders fit within the overall range of informal economic activities available to women in southern Sinaloa? How were she and the other changueras able to successfully carve out a niche within the highly contested and very male-dominated fishing and seafood industries? How and why did they develop their own shrimp market on this street? What did it mean for them to be women shrimp traders? What did it mean for their families? Victoria was thoughtful and quiet for a while, but to my surprise and relief, she said, We have so many stories that you can fill a whole book with them.

Thus began my journey through the many challenges of conducting anthropological fieldwork in an urban context, in a Latin American city that is simultaneously traditional and modern. As the years went by, I learned to understand the city through the eyes of changueras, who never hesitated to share with me their opinions of the changes that have marked the city and to which they have been witnesses. I also learned to recognize and appreciate the voice of the streets, the sounds that characterize the city at different parts of the year and times of day. They taught me much about the fishing industry in southern Sinaloa more broadly and how changes in fishing regulations had impacted their lives and work as shrimp traders. By tracing their paths from the rural communities and small towns where they lived, I also followed the trail of shrimp, connecting people and fishing resources to a large city and tourist destination. Parallel to that, I followed my own path, from a tropical island—Puerto Rico, a place nicknamed La Perla del Caribe (the Pearl of the Caribbean) that I still call home, to Mazatlán, a coastal city in northwestern Mexico nicknamed La Perla del Pacífico (the Pearl of the Pacific).

I had been conducting fieldwork in the region for more than twenty-five years until 2019, when the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world, making travel risky and difficult. By then I had already completed the fieldwork for this book. But writing about the women shrimp traders, especially those whose work and lives I portray in this book, became terribly heart-wrenching as I frequently worried about their well-being and that of their families. I called by telephone and reached out to those I could and was sometimes greeted with the shocking news that some of the women became ill and that others died as the direct or indirect result of the pandemic. Completing this book is more than an academic endeavor; it is a promesa, one I made to these women, one that I knew I needed to fulfill. Thus, in this book I narrate, discuss, and analyze the unusual trajectory of unusual women as they began to forge their path as shrimp traders and later became icons of popular culture in southern Sinaloa. A central argument I put forth here is that gender and socioeconomic class shaped the manner by and through which women historically were able to carve out their unique livelihoods as shrimp traders in rural and urban contexts in northwestern Mexico. This book, a multisited ethnography, shows the many facets of the changueras’ resistance and struggles to create and secure a livelihood, one so strongly associated with shrimp, Mexico’s pink gold.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help, cooperation, and support of many people throughout the various stages of the fieldwork, analysis, and writing processes. First and most important, my sincere and deepest gratitude to all the women shrimp traders in southern Sinaloa who have shared their daily lives, stories, and memories with me since 2004, when I began conducting preliminary fieldwork for this book. Your kindness, patience, friendship, confianza, knowledge, and wittiness inspired and encouraged me to continue with this project during challenging circumstances. I feel very privileged, honored, and humbled to have met you and to get to know you and your families. I am forever indebted to you all. Muchísimas gracias con toda mi alma por compartir conmigo los buenos y los malos tiempos. As imperfect as it is, I dedicate this book to you, hoping that your work and struggles for social justice finally get the recognition you so rightfully deserve. This book is an attempt to capture your complex and complicated lives.

I would also like to recognize the many extraordinary and generous colleagues in Mexico who provided me with an intellectual niche. I’m thankful for your time, invaluable expertise, and insights you kindly provided. I thank you for hosting me in your academic units and for inviting me to present my work, coteach workshops, and coedit books. I am humbled to have met you and forever thankful for your steering me in the right direction when I felt lost. Thank you also for your friendship and for inviting me to your homes and introducing me to your families. I am especially grateful to Professors Ramón Morán, Gildardo Izaguirre, Sofía Santos, Cleofas Herrera, Laura Rivera, Francisco Tapia, Joel Borjóquez, Joel Ramírez, Jaime Renán, Myrna Candelaria, and Rebeca Sánchez, from the School of Marine Sciences.

My deepest gratitude also goes to my friends and colleagues in the School of Social Work at the University of Sinaloa in Mazatlán. I am particularly thankful to Professor Guadalupe Pardo, coordinator of the program of Social Work, Community, and Culture, and to the other members of the academic unit, including Florina Olivarría, Carmen González, Laura López, Martha García, Carmelita Grave, Patricia Gamboa, Xolyanetz Montero, and Nadia Peinado. Arturo Santamaría, Arturo Lizárraga, and Pedro Brito from the School of Social Studies also provided support and friendship. My research assistants were students at the University of Sinaloa in Mazatlán and provided much-needed help at various stages of the research and analysis processes. Muchas gracias to Fausto Vázquez, Jazmín Ramírez, and Elena Cruz.

My warmest thanks also go to my colleagues from the University of Sinaloa in Culiacán: Omar Mancera, Nayeli Burgueño, and Erika Montoya for their continued support throughout the years. Professor Magdalena Villarreal of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS-Noroeste) provided support and encouragement, and I am beyond grateful for her guidance and advice. Special thanks go to Guadalupe Jiménez, then manager of the Cámara Nacional de las Industrias Pesqueras y Acuícolas unit in Mazatlán for her support and for making it possible for me to visit various seafood processing plants in that city. I thank Julieta Montero for her poetry and support.

I began to plan this research and conducted preliminary fieldwork when I was a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at the University of California–Riverside, and I appreciate the support of Eugene Anderson, Tom Patterson, Christine Gailey, Juan Vicente Palerm, Juliet McMullen, and the late Wendy Ashmore. My dearest colleague, the late Michael Kearney, was always a source of inspiration, a friend, and a mentor who encouraged me to pay more attention to local politics. I also would like to thank Amalia Cabezas at UC-Riverside for all her support and friendship throughout all these years.

I would like to acknowledge the support of Angélica Afanador, Emir Estrada, Nilda Flores, and Mary Margaret Fonow at Arizona State University. Special thanks go to the ASU Institute for Humanities Research’s writing group led by Christopher Jones, and the writing retreat led by the Women Faculty of Color Caucus. At Yale University, my gratitude goes to Ana Ramos-Zayas for leading and inviting me to join her working group Race, Personhood, and Work. I thank her and the other participants for their encouragement and feedback.

For providing a scholarly space to think and write I thank the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico, the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC-Mexus), and the Center for Ideas and Society at UC-Riverside. The bulk of the fieldwork and research for this book was funded through various grants. My deepest gratitude goes to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for supporting my fieldwork and overall research through a Post-PhD Grant (Grant no. 7777) and a Community Engagement Grant (Grant no. EA G-2). My thanks to UC-Mexus for a postdoctoral research grant and to Arizona State University for its continuing financial support.

I am forever thankful to the University of Texas Press, especially Casey Kittrell for all his enthusiasm, patience, and support during the completion of this book. Immense gratitude also goes to Patricia Zavella and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments and feedback. For editorial assistance during the many drafts of this book I thank Jennifer Quincey, Conor Harris, Luis Plascencia, and Amy Sherman.

Finally, my most enduring thanks and love go to my husband and fellow anthropologist, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, and our daughter, Nayely, for their love, support, and encouragement. Thanks also to my late mother, my father, sisters, and nieces for their unconditional love and support.

Earlier versions of portions of chapters 1 and 2 appear, respectively, as Unruly Women and Invisible Workers: The Shrimp Traders of Mazatlán, Mexico, in Signs 37, no. 3 (2012): 610–617, and Contested Livelihoods: Gender, Fisheries and Resistance in Northwestern Mexico, in Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 207–228.

Introduction

Amber Sunsets and Pink Gold

This book is as much about the amazing women with whom I was privileged to conduct fieldwork as it is about the coastal context in which their struggles over many years took place to establish themselves as legitimate sellers of a valuable market commodity. On a Sunday afternoon in December 2018, just before sunset, people fill the Malecón, the scenic beachfront promenade along Avenida del Mar in Mazatlán. Most are mazatlecos (residents of Mazatlán) spending the evening with their families walking around and contemplating the ocean’s waves. In place of the unceasing traffic noise and sirens that beset the now-vanished day one hears the waves crashing against the rocky shore and sees them abruptly dissolving into foam. The Malecón reliably springs to life at sunset every Sunday, transforming from a noisy waterfront promenade into an inviting, family-friendly plaza where children play with colorful balloons or buy cotton candy, popcorn, or other snacks from the many street vendors who line the sidewalks.

A group of people seeking an adrenaline rush set their eyes on the clavadistas (cliff divers) atop a fifty-foot-high platform. The clavadistas await the right moment, when incoming waves add depth to the water, to perform their perfect swan dives. When the time comes, the audience becomes quiet, holding their breath, to watch the daring clavadistas disappear into the Pacific Ocean’s fierce waters. A few seconds later the divers emerge, alive and safe, to walk along the rocky shoreline. The audience claps, salutes, and embraces them as heroes. Some give them a few pesos because they understand that for the clavadistas, cliff diving is more than a sport; it is a livelihood that forms part of the portfolio of the street economies carried out in Mazatlán’s urban public spaces.

In another area of the Malecón young people hang out, laughing and talking loudly. Others are roller-skating or riding bicycles. A young couple, hiding behind one of the monuments that adorns the Malecón, kiss passionately. Young parents and grandparents walk by with baby strollers. Laughing children jump and run around freely, chasing each other or playing with bubble-making toys.

And then there are the tourists: blue-eyed, white-skinned (some sunburned), and speaking English, perhaps Americans or Canadians. They sit on the benches on top of the Malecón, contemplating the seascape and waiting for the sun to fall from the sky and disappear. With their cameras in hand, they seem to ponder how long it takes the sun to reach the horizon. Or perhaps they are wondering if this time they might see the emerald-green light produced when the sun touches the ocean. Either way, they all appear eager to capture the breathtaking scene of the sun painting the sky in shades of amber while it slowly melts into the ocean.

It seems that for a while, mazatlecos and tourists alike forget their day-to-day routines and merge into the scenery. The sunset marks the transition from day to evening and from work to leisure for most mazatlecos. The rhythm of daily life begins to slow, the church bell announces the evening Mass, and the restaurants along Avenida del Mar become frantic with families enjoying their cenas (late dinners) and catching up on the events of their lives.

This is also when the informal urban economy flourishes, since most of it, especially food, is based on street trading. Food carts are an integral but overlooked part of the urban cultural landscape and the local economy. Vendors, vacating the streets downtown, rush with their carts to get spots around the Malecón as bright, warm streetlights replace the sunlight. Approximately fifty food carts line up, bearing names such as Elotes Martín, Raspados Originales de Mazatlán, and Mariscos El Billete painted in big, colorful letters. There is something for everyone, and vendors display their food in creative ways to attract as many customers as possible, mazatlecos and tourists alike.

Grilled corn on the cob served on a stick, boiled corn on the cob coated with chili powder and lemon, and corn served in polystyrene cups topped with hot sauce are favorite street foods. These are also carefully displayed on grills and improvised tables and shelves. Tostitos (flavored tortilla chips) and baggies with bright orange and yellow pinwheels, called duros or churros, hang from the top of vendors’ carts. Whole yellow plantains, fried and browned, are piled on a portable cooking stove next to a stack of warm, fresh-made corn tortillas. At another cart, a woman in a red shirt makes and sells gorditas rellenas (stuffed thick corn tortillas) with a choice of fillings: strawberries, cajeta (caramel), or lecherita (condensed milk). Another cart has a big sign with pictures of its signature seafood dishes: campechanas (seafood cocktails), seafood served in a molcajete (a traditional Mexican mortar made of volcanic rock), shrimp, sierra (swordfish), and marlin ceviche.

The tantalizing scents emanating from the food carts fuse with the tang of sea air to create the unique smells that characterize the Malecón on Sunday evenings. The aroma of fried onions, garlic, and cilantro, combined with the smell of cinnamon and caramel, creates a comforting and lasting atmosphere, piquing appetites.

When the amber sunset fades, I sit on one of the benches to reflect on the many times I have witnessed life at sunset on the Malecón and how despite this familiarity, it remains one of my favorite scenes in Mazatlán. Throughout my many years of fieldwork in the region I have learned to understand and appreciate the rhythms of daily life in coastal Mexico and the central role that family plays in it. For most of the people I know, family seems to come first, even before their own well-being; they spend as much time as possible together, attend family events, and engage in relationships of exchange and reciprocity with family members. Observing those around me, and frankly feeling almost home, also made me reflect on how the Malecón has become the face of Mazatlán and transformed into an urban public space where mazatlecos and tourists come together to enjoy leisure time and eat seafood, buy crafts, and most certainly enjoy the sunsets. But the Malecón is more than just a space along the coast for transactions; it is where many rich aspects of Mazatlán’s cultural, social, economic, and political life are on full display.

Every February, thousands gather along the sidewalks to share in the public performance of the famous Mazatlán International Carnival, one of the oldest, most traditional, and important celebrations in Mexico. Every year, children from local schools parade along the Malecón in cars adorned with balloons as loud banda or reggaeton music blares in celebration of El Diá del Niño (Children’s Day). Any time of the year, local politicians march down the Malecón aiming to recruit votes for the next election. And in opposition to those same politicians, mazatlecos march to protest the waves of violence that cyclically plagues the city or, farther away, the tragic disappearance of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. In the building known as the Miramar Condominiums, El Chapo was captured and arrested in February 2014. It was also on the Malecón, in the aftermath of his arrest, that taxi drivers turned this globally publicized event into a commodity and began offering narco-tours of Mazatlán, highlighting the places frequented by other well-known drug lords (Univision.com 2014). The Miramar Condominiums, not surprisingly, became a favorite tourist attraction and one of the most popular photo spots in Mazatlán.

These varied histories, processes, and events of the Malecón assert it as a place of special significance for the production and interpretation of cultural memory and local history. It is also a highly contested public space where conflicts, resistance, negotiations, and accommodations are often enacted and engrained in people’s daily lived experiences. And although the Malecón is the best-known street in Mazatlán and the one most frequented by tourists, it is by no means the only site where political and cultural expression play out.

Into the Heart of the Matter

When night falls and glimpses of moonlight slip through the palms, the Malecón turns darker and colder. People begin to leave, perhaps thinking that it is getting late and that tomorrow brings school and work. I too decide to walk back to my apartment in the city’s historic center. In the heart of the city of Mazatlán, far from conventional tourist spots, is a street where politics, economics, culture, and gender merge. The street is formally known as Calle Aquiles Serdán but informally as la calle de las changueras, the street of the women shrimp traders. It owes its local nickname to the many women who make a living in the urban street economy by selling shrimp and other seafood daily at the open-air street market they organized in the 1980s. Here, the engine that drives the local formal and informal economies recharges; people can buy anything from food and medicines to flowers and shoes. Some Mazatlán tour companies even take visitors to what they call the street of the shrimp ladies. Avid tourists admire the shrimp traders at work, buy shrimp or scallops, or simply take pictures or videos of the green plastic tubs overflowing with shrimp and other seafood; they witness Mazatlán’s informal street economy in full motion. Tourists also glean the dynamics of the marketplace and the shrimp traders’ haggling, but most leave without learning about the crucial historical events that triggered the women’s participation in a traditionally male-dominated and heavily regulated industry. Tourists rarely come to understand that these people without history (Wolf 1982) are historical actors confronting local and global forces of capitalism.¹ It is only when one lives long enough in southern Sinaloa that one becomes aware of the history of the women shrimp traders and their battles to carve for themselves an economic and cultural space in an industry plagued by social, political, economic, and environmental problems. Many of these battles unfolded on this very street.

I pass by the shrimp market, and I am surprised to see a few women still working. As I come closer, I recognize Victoria Flores, the first changuera I met in Mazatlán, a founder of their union and their market. I ask, ¿Todavía estás aquí? (Are you still here?). She answers with her trademark smile, ¡Hasta el sol de hoy! (Until today’s sun!). Victoria is not only referring to how the women work from sunrise to sundown, no matter the weather conditions. Implicit in her statement is also their perseverance; they are still around, despite many attempts to prevent them from selling and trading shrimp or to forcefully relocate them to enclosed spaces. In the past, the changueras were persecuted and harassed by local authorities and often were considered obstacles to government-sponsored tourism development. Today they are active contributors to the local economy, a symbol of resistance and perseverance, and icons of the local popular culture in southern Sinaloa. Their paths were shaped by their own personal efforts and sacrifices, at times with the support of local politicians, labor unions, academics, and students.

These women’s lives and work, full of contradictions, successes, ironies, conflicts, and struggles, are the focus of this book. They offer an important and timely case study for understanding how local economies such as seafood trading emerge and are organized, who decides who can profit from them, and how and why people decide whether to participate in them. Women’s work as shrimp traders takes place within an economy that although deeply local has a strong global dimension. It also takes place in a country where many local industries transitioned from having a strong social emphasis to being privatized under the neoliberal policies of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In this book, then, I provide a close examination of women’s historical and contemporary participation in the local seafood industry through their livelihoods as shimp traders, their use of urban public space, their organization and collective action, their families, and the many social, political, and economic challenges they still face. I trace the rugged path blazed by a group of indomitable women from their beginnings as despised street peddlers to their formation as politically influential unionized workers and finally as icons of the local popular culture. These processes emerge within a specific place, the city of Mazatlán, one of the largest ports and most important tourist destinations in Mexico. In this now postneoliberal city, many make a living in the urban street economy, including street vendors such as the women shrimp traders. Mazatlán thus provides a compelling site for examining and understanding the socioeconomic and gender inequalities exacerbated by the implementation of neoliberal policies and by ongoing social, economic, and environmental changes linked to local, regional, transborder, and global processes and demands.

Therefore, this book also presents an integrated narrative of the emergence of a commodity, seafood, deeply embedded in local and global social relations that are in frequent conflict with each other. Seafood, especially shrimp, became a trademark of Mazatlán, and it informs social relations that emerge at each level of the commodity chain. In total, in this long-term ethnography I address the interconnections between gender and labor in the access to and marketing of seafood commodities in Mexico and the politics of resistance and survival in an industry traditionally perceived, studied, and understood as male-dominated. The lived realities of women shrimp traders, including their varying daily strategies, practices, and challenges, show how a group of women with limited economic resources and social capital engaged in collective action to assert economic and political rights to fishing resources and urban public space. Such assertions opened the possibility of improving their lives and those of their families.

While I conducted fieldwork for this book, people would often ask me, sometimes cynically, "But why las changueras? What is so special about these women?" After all, they exist only as a collective in the local imaginary. Few people know them as individuals. They have been criminalized, decried as unruly, distrustful, and vulgar, and stigmatized because of the work they do and the smell that attaches to their skin and clothing. So, why write a book about them? My reasons are related to how women shrimp traders fit within a larger schema and follow my interest in understanding women’s increased participation in informal economies in the Global South, the limited ethnographic research on women’s participation in seafood economies, the consumption of and demand for seafood, and the emergence of grassroots social movements among people defending their rights to decent livelihoods.

Although these trends guide the book’s trajectory, a central aim is to show the women’s many struggles (luchas) to assert their identities as women and workers in order to gain the respect and recognition of local authorities and their communities. In recounting narratives of agency, empowerment, celebration, and humor but also of gender and economic inequality, stigmatization, and marginalization I strive to show the complexity and dynamics of shrimp traders’ lived realities. To borrow fellow anthropologist Patricia Zavella’s term (2011, 2), the quotidian struggles of these women as they negotiate and contest, often succeeding and sometimes failing, reveal the multiple intersecting pressures and dynamics they encounter.

That quotidian reality encompasses tremendous struggles, such as when local authorities tried to strip the changueras of their shrimp in 1984. Students were eating in their university dorm’s dining hall when, alerted by the noise outside, they ran out the door, lunches unfinished, to help the changueras. They confronted the police and blocked them from taking the shrimp. The students and women defended themselves from the police with whatever they could find, rocks, bottles, sticks. Once the confrontation was over and the police had gone, the changueras organized a general meeting to discuss how they could demand that local authorities respect and honor their right to trade shrimp in public urban spaces.

At one level this amazing scenario is easily understood for what it was: an enormously risky undertaking by the women and their supporters to take on power and its agents to simply gain entry to an avenue for a better life. However, as an anthropologist I need a broader notion to be able to say something beyond the events described. Thus, my work is situated within three main bodies of scholarship: feminist political ecology; the social relations of commodities; and gender, work, and seafood. These provide me direction as I incorporate their insights into showing how, in less than forty years, struggling rural and urban women at the very edge of survival became public icons of achievement and admiration. Just as importantly, these concepts contribute to developing a more flexible and encompassing theoretical framework, untried in the literature on Mexican women in such circumstances. This expanded approach to feminist political ecology in turn allows me to better explain the diverse situations and experiences the women shrimp traders face daily in asserting their agency and their right to a decent livelihood and general well-being.

A Little Theoretical Sojourn

When, as a graduate student, I left the cozy confines of my dorm at Rutgers University to embark on fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in rural Mexico, I never could have predicted that I would spend a large portion of my life trying to understand the many ways in which people give meaning and benefit from the natural resources available within and outside their communities. That time was a turning point in Mexican history, when neoliberalism and globalization were beginning to dominate much of the Mexican political and economic landscapes, and the future for the people I shared my life with in 1989 and 1990 was uncertain. Two years later, after completing my doctoral dissertation and earning a PhD in anthropology, I returned to southern Sinaloa, this time to examine the historical and present struggles of rural people in securing viable and decent livelihoods in the midst of the social, political, economic, and environmental changes impacting the region.² This early work, framed within a political ecology approach, examined how people in rural communities utilized the available natural resources for subsistence and economic purposes and how state policies and local, regional, national, and global processes shaped their access to those resources (Cruz-Torres 2004).

In this early work, political ecology provided me with the analytical tools I needed at that time to understand the relationships between local communities and their valuable natural resources. More specifically, this political ecology approach enabled me to determine how the use and allocation of natural resources in southern Sinaloa are shaped by differential relationships of power within and outside rural communities (Cruz-Torres 2004, 11).

By also partially framing my previous work within a feminist political ecology approach, my analysis showed that women did not own the means of production and thus lacked any control in the decision-making process or voice in how these resources were used or the impact of their extraction upon the overall physical environment. The two main natural resources available in these communities were land and shrimp, but because local gender norms precluded women from either fishing or farming, since these were considered male occupations, women did not have a direct relation with these natural resources. Their main relation to these was through their informal work as wage workers in harvesting and processing agricultural and fishing commodities such as chilies, mangos, broom corn, and shrimp.

At the time I conducted my early research, feminist political ecology, still an emerging field, provided the conceptual lens for examining the role of gender in shaping access to and control over natural resources (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari 1996). This allowed me to somewhat explain women’s exclusion from the use and exploitation of fishing resources but not their incorporation into other stages of the commodity chain, such as processing and marketing, or their contribution to the commodification of shrimp. Additionally, because fishing in southern Sinaloa is predominantly a male-dominated industry, women’s participation in these other stages of the commodity chain was rarely recognized or afforded the importance it deserved. After I completed my initial work in the region I remained somewhat puzzled as to how the feminist political ecology approach, with its strong focus on the relation between gender and the environment, could assist me in understanding women’s roles in other stages of the commodity chain, beyond production, and without direct access to fishing resources.

This was problematically important for the present work on seafood trading. Although women shrimp traders in southern Sinaloa are very aware of how environmental issues such as climate change and pollution impact the overall local shrimp production, their main preoccupation is not environmental degradation or its impact on coastal ecosystems or on fishing resources. Instead, their main concern is to create a viable and decent livelihood based on the selling and marketing of shrimp. But their livelihood does not only fulfill an economic function. As other scholars have stated, there is a recognition that livelihood strategies do not merely refer to narrowly defined economic practices, but that they also involve transformative struggles through which women work to empower themselves by reshaping their identities, lives and relationships within households and communities (Oberhauser, Mandel, and Hapke 2004, 206).

And women shrimp traders struggled with many challenges as they crafted a new livelihood that in the long term enabled them to develop new relations with fishing resources, their families, and their communities. But most importantly, in the process of doing so they also constructed a new identity for themselves, that of women shrimp traders, which explicitly addressed their gendered connections to shrimp through their work and their position within the commodity chain. Theirs is a complex but pertinent case study that brings to light the many obstacles that women in the Global South encounter when claiming and asserting their rights to natural resources from which they are traditionally excluded.

To fully understand women’s incorporation into the shrimp commodity chain of northwestern Mexico requires concentrating the analysis on the links where this inception is more obvious, that is, in its processing and marketing. Thomas Park and James Greenberg (2020, 5) rightly assert, The political ecology of commodities needs to be examined in its wider context including the array of uses and markets for their component materials as well as the political and economic interests at play in every arena at each step along these commodity chains.

To that end, in this book I concentrate on the marketing step of the shrimp commodity chain and on women’s work as shrimp traders. Therefore, my main modest theoretical goals of this book are twofold: to continue to help unstick feminist political ecology from its more traditional focus and show its utility for stages of the commodity chain process not directly connected with environmental issues; and to contribute to the collective knowledge, through an empirical case study, of the challenges