Against the Grain by Richard Manning

Author:Richard Manning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

Paredoncito is a fishing village just coming awake on a sunny morning in January. Kids head toward school while women sweep the dirt streets and chickens scratch and peck. We stop and speak with Bernal Guadalupe, a fisherman in this village since 1970. He catches the estuary’s native shrimp, crab, and fish and sells them, on a good day, for enough to buy a day’s worth of gas for his boat and food for his house. A year before our visit, Paredoncito fomented a significant event, and Guadalupe wants to show us the scene, so he climbs into our beat-up Suburban and we bounce the back roads for a couple of kilometers to a broad, flat stretch of bermed shrimp ponds. This was to be a shrimp farm, but it lies dry and abandoned. Guadalupe and his wife, Marialena Garcia, take us to the discharge canal to show us why. They describe the day when all the people in the village and several neighboring fishing villages marched to the canal and filled it in, digging with shovels and their hands.

He tells us the villagers had heard that the shrimp farm would harm the native fishery. He’s right; shrimp farming kills wild shrimp. So they stopped the farm. Such matters are taken seriously in the Yaqui, where there has already been one murder stemming from confrontations between fishers and shrimp farmers. The protest brought police. Then Mexico’s Secretary of State came. The villages had tried to stop the farm through more formal action, but that had failed to get the government’s attention. The dig-in did, though, and the government pulled the farm’s permit.

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