I’m liking Nuevo Laredo as a city, don’t get me wrong. But part of its charm is its occasionally throbbing volume, its slight undertone of chaos, a certain smoky grit, and a texture that sometimes means you just stepped on a melted mango-chile candy. So I jumped at a recent invitation to spend the weekend inhaling the fresh air of a small fishing village. A facebook-esque string of social contacts – I love nice people connecting you to other nice people – led me to Hector, who works for a Mexican environmental NGO advising shrimp-fishing cooperatives along the gulf coast of Tamaulipas. After getting to know me through a couple three line emails, he invited me to check out the cooperatives and, why not go fishing while you’re down here?
I took an early morning bus that traced the Rio Grande as it passed through little border towns – Miguel Aleman, Ciudad Mier – on its way east to Reynosa and then Matamoros, my destination. The night before I had slept the sleep of someone afraid of getting up late, so I dozed off and on for the first couple hours of the trip. I was awoken by the television in the bus, which displayed the opening credits to a movie, all in Hebrew characters. Looking around me at the scrubby landscape and the desert dust, I had one of those “where-am-I?” moments.
The opening scene of the movie featured three Hasidic Jews closely inspecting a ritual citron fruit, arguing over whether this citron was, in fact, the finest specimen of citron they had ever encountered. I couldn’t see the screen well enough to, umm, gauge the quality of the fruit, but I could understand their exchange since they were speaking in perfect Mexican Spanish. And it’s funny, even though the film was in Jerusalem, everyone spoke perfect Mexican Spanish! I started to doze off again as two Israeli ex-cons started to get involved in the Citron plot, shouting, of course, in Mexico City street slang.
Someone recently made the (flimsy) argument to me that Mexicans do not speak English well because most of the films are dubbed into Spanish. I guess there won’t be much Hebrew learning, either.
Matamoros looked and felt a lot like Nuevo Laredo, but more spread out, a little bit more green, its intense heat relieved occasionally by merciful gulf winds. The bus station had the same hustle and bustle, filled with people going north and far south, with duct-taped gift boxes and duffel bags with misspelled American sports brand decals. Hector found me, greeted me, and immediately asked what happened to my hand. I told him that had I punched out George Bush. This has proven to be the most popular response to questions about my cast, and, as I explained in my last post, could occasionally be unexpectedly useful. Hector did not seem that amused. I made a mental note about the importance of contextuality.
Within minutes we were in the countryside. It’s easy to get into the middle of nowhere when you’re leaving these border towns, since they were built in the middle of nowhere. Soon we are driving through the matorral espinoso, a semi-desertous ecosystem where the spiny look of the plants says “don’t touch me”. The landscape blurring by was streaked with beautiful purple-flowering cenizo bushes, taking the edge off its dry harshness. The other flashes of color came from the reddish tuna – the fruit known as “prickly pear” in English – growing in abundance out of the ubiquitous nopal cacti.
I will not take the almost irresistible imaginative detour offered by the Dali-esque image of tuna growing out of cacti in the desert (on the way to a fishing trip, no less). I will advise you, though, not to pass up an opportunity to try a prickly pear margarita, as long as it is advertised as such and not as a tuna margarita, which would be a colossal marketing blunder that we should not honor with our beverage choices.
Ahem, I digress. Since the North American land mass sharply narrows in Texas and Mexico, this terrain near the Gulf is where the bottleneck begins, Hector told me, and is essential as a habitat for migratory birds. (Apparently the matorral espinoso on both sides of the border is a Mecca for birdwatchers.) Much of the land had been cleared to farm sorghum, a grain used for animal feed. Part of the work of Hector’s organization was to try to convince landowners not to further clear their land for farming.
Our destination was one of the small fishing villages that lined a body of water called the Laguna Madre. The “Mother Lagoon” ran several hundred miles up the coast of Tamaulipas, separated from the gulf by a relatively thin strip of land, and sometimes just a sandbar. The shallow, calm lagoon apparently offered perfect conditions for shrimp, which was the main catch of these fishermen.
The fishermen kept unusual hours, Hector told me as we bounced down the unpaved road. They set out in their boats around six or seven in the evening and return between three and five in the morning. Their nets are set up to form a long chute that leads to a trap. They spent much of the night pulling the shrimp out of the trap and, from what they told me, a lot of time waiting.
Most of the population of the Laguna came from Veracruz, the state directly to the south that also hugs the Gulf of Mexico. According to Hector, many of the fishing grounds in their native Veracruz have been overfished. The earliest migrants to the Laguna sent back word of the plentiful fishing grounds in the Laguna. Apparently the original, non-migrant inhabitants of this area mostly lived from farming, whereas the jarochos – the nickname for natives of Veracruz –were expert fishermen.
The leader of one of the fishing cooperatives migrated from Veracruz with his family about 30 years ago, when he was only a few years old. He has been a member of the cooperative since he was a teenager, and just assumed leadership of the cooperative a few months ago. One of the main tasks of the cooperative was to get the products to market. The biggest, most dependable market with the best prices was in Mexico City. This meant that most cooperatives regularly traveled the fifteen hour plus route to Mexico City with a truck full of fish, shrimp, and a lot of ice.
The leaders often coordinate logistical details like this or spend their time contributing their own catch to the cooperative. Just like in any organization, everyday demands often crowded out long-term strategizing. Part of Hector’s role was to counsel these leaders to spend more their time on improving the cooperatives as organizations and streamline their strategies in order to reduce their costs and get more profit out of their catch.
Introducing more sustainable trap posts was one of the strategies that Hector was developing in collaboration with the cooperatives. The shrimp traps are identifiable in the water by the posts that are driven into the mud and serve to support the traps. The wooden posts were costly, corroded in less than a year in the saltwater, and were cut from a forest somewhere. The proposed alternative was a post made out of recycled plastic that would initially be more expensive, but would last for years and not incur the same future costs for the fishermen or for the environment. Hector was working out the details of a pilot project to test out this alternative strategy.
Shrimp traps on the Laguna Madre
I asked Hector if he thought there was a threat of overfishing the Laguna. He said that the productivity of the catch had gradually gone down over the years, but it was hard to tell where this pattern would lead. The government and other entities had done studies, but the results did not always reach or were not always accepted by the fishermen. In an age–old pattern, those most intimately affected by information are sometimes the ones with least access to it.
We contemplated these questions as we sat on the shore eating salty dried shrimp – shrimp caught in the Laguna and spread out to dry in the sun. Hector’s nine year old son and his fourteen year old nephew practiced casting into the water as Hector untangled the fishing lines we would use early the next morning. Children from the village came to play by the water, leading a small goat, and dogs sniffed around at the shrimp shells. I sat there happy to be quenching my salty shrimp-induced thirst with a cold Tecate.
The fishing part of the story
We woke up very early the next day and made our way to the house of Adán, the fisherman who would take us out on his boat. He himself had just returned from the graveyard shift trapping shrimp, but graciously betrayed no signs of fatigue. Hector and the boys each had his fishing rod at the ready. A failed test run of trying to cast my own rod convinced me that there was little hope in trying to fish with only one working hand. (Actually, casting was fine; it was reeling back in that was the problem.) The “One-armed Fisherman” sounded great as the name of a microbrew or a WWF wrestling move, but in practice did not seem like an effective technique. I resolved that I would play the role of official expedition photographer – the one-armed photographer sounded more feasible.
Hector Jr. and Beto ready to cast their lines
We anchored in the middle of the Laguna, the rising sun serving as the backdrop to the glassy stillness of the water. It occurred to me that I didn’t really care what I did for the next four hours. I was pretty content to hang out, watch the live shrimp (the bait) do their translucent dance across the boat floor, and remember how overrated thinking can be.
Hector’s son, Hector Jr., was super excited to go fishing. It was only the second time he had been fishing in his life and the first time had yielded no catch. It turned out that I would have plenty to photograph – Hector Jr. caught enough fish to earn a bit role in a Hemingway novel, and theatrically relished each catch by enthusiastically shouting “Otro!” – another one! His dad was clearly proud.
The Young Man and the Sea
After a while, the others began to catch fish, throwing back the small ones. The fish were mostly trout and two other kinds whose names I have forgotten, one of them a bluish gray fish that made a low croaking sound. Hector Jr. even caught a manta ray, which thrashed around its stinging tail as Adán struggled to release it from the hook.
Hector with prehistoric manta ray
I love getting the opportunity to be in circumstances that are unlike my own, to hang out with a father and son and nephew, to use a soda bottle to catch fish I don’t know the names of, and to learn about a way of life that is unfamiliar to me. There is something about this dynamic of the unfamiliar – pardon the fishing metaphor – that can unhook one’s expectations of how people approach life. I tell myself that these little doses of benevolent alienation from my usual thought patterns help to keep my mind open.
The movie on the bus on the way back told the story of a Mormon missionary who saves the people of a Tongan island from natural disaster and internal strife, all the while keeping his necktie properly knotted and speaking perfect Mexican Spanish.
This is not, for the record, the kind of benevolent alienation that I´m talking about.
Brendan's kivablog 