Liina-Maija Quist IN ÁLVARO’S HOUSE: FISHER LEADERS, FAMILY LIFE AND THE ETHNOGRAPHER AT MEXICO’S OIL FRONTIER
abstract In this essay, I examine the practice of ethnographic knowledge-production through my fieldwork encounter with Álvaro, a political leader of fishers in Mexico’s oil-producing state, Tabasco. Exercising ethnographic reflexivity, I analyze how my relations with Álvaro and his family in a context of conflict between fishers and the oil industry shaped my analytical lens on the politics of resource access. The essay focuses on ambiguity as an overriding characteristic of the research encounter, and suggests that paralleling ambiguities in my analysing of Álvaro during fieldwork and in my own, gendered and racialized positionality within the family were formative for my perspective on fisher – oil industry politics. Furthermore, the analysis shows how my knowledge about the ‘field’ was made in the intersection of my and the family’s mutual efforts to draw each other into our categories of thinking, Álvaro’s reflection about his role in politics, and the wider historical and political economic context shaping the relations between the fishers and the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico. This analysis draws attention to the importance of ethnography in showing the complexity and situatedness of politics of resource access.
Key words: ambiguity, ethnography, fishers, gender, oil, politics, reflexivity
Introduction: Fisher of Fisheries… But I don’t like to open up politics and family life1 like this. That’s why they’re scared of me… I don’t know why the government is the But to find those unmapped destinations way it is. I don’t know, but I don’t want I would have to abandon the purposes that them to shape [manage] everybody… first drove me down that road, and learn to Liina, don’t ask me any more questions. ask directions from those who lived along (Field notes from discussion with Álvaro it. (Michael Jackson 2012: 11) Vázquez in 2011)
I’ve always defended my place. Others Álvaro Vázquez2 was a respected oldtimer look for their own interests… I was a in fishers’ cooperatives and in the sea fishers’ representative in the federal Federation political leadership in Tabasco, Mexico’s
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oil-producing state. He had grown up during embark on fieldwork in a fisher family and the height of the government-introduced familiarize myself with fishers’ organizations. cooperative movement and the corporativist However, a secretariat official had suggested politics of authoritarian Mexico. My fieldwork that for reasons of security, I live with one of took place in 2011–2012 and concerned the fisher leaders rather than a rank-and-file a prolonged conflict over offshore areas between fisher. He had then come up with the idea of my fishers and the oil industry at a time when staying in Álvaro’s household. At the meeting Mexico’s resource politics were undergoing to discuss my fieldwork with Álvaro and four a profound shift towards privatization. While other fisher leaders, the secretariat official I was trying to learn about fisher leaders’ and actively promoted the agenda of a fisher leader fishers’ politics vis-á-vis the oil industry, Álvaro hosting my fieldwork, telling the leaders that by and his family opened their home to me for three welcoming me, they would be returning a favour months. Álvaro’s role in the conflict was troubled, to the government for its ‘important support for because he operated as a mediator between the the fisher community’. There was an ease in the demands of thousands of internally-divided way the five fisher leaders slid into a filial role as fishers and the co-optation pressures of the oil the official addressed them paternalistically. As industry. In this setup, entering the family’s I expressed my hopes for fieldwork to the fisher intimate sphere to examine Álvaro’s role in the leaders, it was Álvaro who reacted immediately, tense political situation underscored the difficult inviting me to live with his family without compatibility of my researcher / ‘daughterly’ hesitation. role in the family in ways that confounded me. My six-month PhD fieldwork in 2011 In this essay, I analyze my navigation within and 2012 involved actors—sea fishers and the ambiguity of immersion in both resource government and oil industry representatives politics and family life and within a tension in particular—immersed in a prolonged between my preconceptions and my findings. controversy over Tabasco’s coastal and offshore Exercising ethnographic reflexivity, I also show areas. I was especially interested in how fishers how my attempts at making sense of Álvaro’s, to were making sense of, and reacting politically to, me, ambiguous political position corresponded radical restrictions on their access to traditional with my own ambiguous place in the family. I fishing grounds at a time when the oil industry further show how my analytical insights about was both under major restructuration and our relationship shaped my perspective onto expanding extraction to new areas. Since resource politics in Tabasco. the early 2000s, intensified exploration and My first meeting with Álvaro took extraction of hydrocarbons in the Gulf of place at a government secretariat in charge Mexico had caused continued tensions between of mediating the relations between Tabasco’s the oil industry and the fishers. At the same agrarian communities and the para-statal oil time, the Mexican government had opened company, Petróleos Mexicanos3 (Pemex), and the energy sector to global investment and gave me an idea of the control the government given transnational companies access to oil had in the resource conflict. I had recently exploration and drilling via subcontracts with begun fieldwork and, still inexperienced in Pemex, until recently a para-statal company. Mexico and the politics of fisheries and oil The major controversy between the fishers and at the Gulf-of-Mexico coast, I was hoping to the oil industry concerned the establishment of
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an offshore zone of exclusion in 2003, which debate regarding the oil industry’s privatization had been reserved for the exclusive use of was fierce. At the same time, along the coastline national and foreign oil industry actors. During of Tabasco, foreign companies were busy fieldwork, I learned that after initial protests, exploring new reserves of oil. the fishers’ efforts to oppose the restrictions Having moved in with Álvaro’s family, I saw had fragmented and diminished, and the fishers’ that the secrecy and suspicion that characterized leadership, including Álvaro, had decided, rather, the actors I studied also pervaded my relations to engage in what the leaders called ‘pacific with Álvaro, complicating my efforts to negotiation’ with the oil industry. In retrospect, understand how politics operated among the I have come to see that the difficulties of doing fishers and oil industry and government actors. fieldwork in Álvaro’s family amidst the latent ‘Álvaro keeps a distance with me which has so conflict were formative for my perspective far made me careful with the questions I ask on resource politics. In reflecting on this, him,’ I wrote in my diary in the early days of I must inevitably downplay the warmth and my stay. It was from the beginning obvious that friendliness with which we related to each other it was in his nature to try to influence what during most of my stay in Álvaro’s house. kind of information I was to obtain. Álvaro was In Tabasco, a key task for me was to reserved in his dealings with me, and careful to understand the politics of resource access by point out that he operated within the framework learning how state power operated in Mexico of the law, which he knew profoundly. While and, a related matter, what oil—which had had I was aware that secrecy was an inevitable part of a fundamental role in shaping the relations the political dynamics of the extractive industry, between the state and people in Mexico—meant I was nevertheless unaccustomed to dealing to Tabascan fisher leaders and fishers. Since the with it on a daily basis for months, within the expropriation of the oil industry from foreign intimacy of family life, and had not considered ownership by president Lázaro Cárdenas this difficulty beforehand. My entering as an in 1938, the nation’s oil had worked both as alien to ‘snoop’ around Álvaro’s lot had quickly a powerful popular symbol in political claims created an atmosphere where suspicion and for sharing wealth, and as a strategic resource familial relations of care coexisted in a strange in sustaining the political elite (Breglia 2013; and vulnerable status quo. Zalik 2012). Despite the corruption involved In this essay, exercising ethnographic in the relations between the state and the oil reflexivity, I focus on the ‘how’ of ethnograph- industry, the recent years’ political campaigns ically studying the politics of resource access. against the privatization of the oil industry More specifically, I analyze the tension between show the continued popularity of the idea of my pre-expectations and findings to examine the nation’s oil. Furthermore, the Mexicans’ oil how ways of seeing and categorizing, mediated nationalism was of a specific kind, given the by gender, race and culture, including academic political economic context wherein Mexico’s culture, figure in the interpretation of politics, close economic relations with the United the operation of which is partially hidden to States reconfigured the livelihoods and lives the ethnographer. In doing this, I bring together of millions of Mexicans. During my fieldwork, reflexive analyses of researcher–interlocutor which coincided with Mexico’s presidential relations (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007; and congressional election campaigns of 2012, Coleman 2009; Kondo 1986; Landes 1986),
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anthropological discussion on representing of ‘resistance’ among the local fishers. Instead, political agency (Anand 2011; Madhok 2013; I encountered Álvaro, who sought to influence Ortner 1995), and perspectives onto agrarian my fieldwork, in part by highlighting the and resource politics in Mexico (Gledhill 2002; genderedness of our relations. Recognizing 2008; Nuijten 2004). The essay shows how the shortcomings of an initial fixation on the Álvaro and I, each in our own way, dealt with disappointment that my expectations had not the tensions that our expectations towards, and been met allowed me to struggle harder to difficulty of making sense of, each other raised understand the framework of power in which in the intimacy of family life in the context of the fisher leaders operated. It also drew my the resource frontier. In discussing the Gulf of attention to the structure of incentives where Mexico as a frontier, I want to highlight the I myself was placed, and indicated a link offshore, following Watts (2015), as not only between my culturally-mediated expectations a territory at the margins of the state where and those in anthropology regarding the ‘often invisible, yet violent struggles over character of subaltern politics. strategic resources and authority’ take place, In correspondingly analysing my attempts but also as ‘a particular space—at once political, to deal with the expectations that Álvaro and economic, cultural, and social—in which the his family had of me, I draw on Landes’ (1986) conditions for a new phase of (extractive) and Kondo’s (1986) insights into the analytical accumulation are being put in place’ (Watts processes of female ethnographers who 2012: 445). This highlights the particular examine patriarchal societies. I suggest that my moment in the connections between the perspective onto the relations between fishers intensification of Mexico’s resource politics and and the oil industry was shaped in important wider, transnational networks of capital. ways by Álvaro’s family members’ attempts to In reflecting on the process of fieldwork, deal with my ambiguous gender role as a female I draw on earlier work by Borneman and researcher and my whiteness and foreignness by Hammoudi (2009) and Cerwonka and placing me in meaningful cultural roles in the Malkki (2007) concerning the construction family. Despite my initial attempts to fit in with of ethnographic knowledge through the the family and accept Álvaro’s authoritative ethnographer’s personal engagement with guidance of my fieldwork, I eventually interlocutors, and how the research encounter, increasingly sought the company of other shaped by the backgrounds of the ethnographer people, including foreign oil workers, outside of and the interlocutor and the broader context the family’s immediate networks. This process of the study, leads to insights into, and was emotionally taxing for both the family and transformation of, the premises underlying me and at the same time, or partly because, it the ethnographer’s analytical strategies. Here, revealed multiple dimensions of the distance my focus is on particular tensions in my and between us. The following sections show how Álvaro’s mutual relationship, which were born we sought to deal with living together. out of the disappointments I felt when reality The next section introduces the context did not correspond with my expectations which of Tabasco’s resource conflict and the fisher related, above all, to my ability to encounter leaders. Subsequent sections three to five an active organization with a radical political examine two key ambiguities that shaped my leadership; that is, to discover sites and practices fieldwork. Section three provides a study of
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the tensions between Álvaro’s tactics when the time of year. Many of the unlicensed fishers operating as my interlocutor and my analytical are ex-cooperative members, half of whom now preconceptions pertaining to the existence work under more or less casual arrangements of a fishers’ organization or movement with for the wealthier permisionarios while the a radical political leadership. These elements rest are informal, independent fishers.5 The came together in how I examined Álvaro as an proletarianization of the fishing communities, ambiguous leader in my early fieldwork. The the competition over restricted space, and the fourth section shows how the gendered and large number of unlicensed fishers who have racialized aspects of the interactions between limited political rights, inevitably fragments me and various interlocutors in- and outside their political agendas. Consequently, relations Álvaro’s house also shaped my analytical lens on between licensed and unlicensed fishers are resource politics. In the fifth section, I attempt conflictive. Furthermore, the decreasing viability a reflexive analysis of my relationship with of fishing since the early 2000s has motivated Álvaro, and show how it helped me identify fishers’ migration to urban areas and to the various structural incentives (Shapiro 2005) that United States. shaped the agendas of the leaders, fishers, and Pemex, which is the eleventh largest also myself. The point of this is to suggest how oil company in the world and the third my reflexive analysis has allowed for a deeper largest exporter of crude oil to the United understanding of the multiple political projects States (United States Energy Information among the leaders and, thus, for insights into Administration 2013), has an active presence the rationalities of power in Tabasco and in the everyday life of the fishing communities. Mexico. The sixth part concludes the essay and Pemex initiated the development of Tabascan shows how ambiguity worked as my key lens on offshore oil reserves in 1977–1980 (Quist the role of mediation in the politics of resource and Nygren 2015: 46). With the ramping-up conflict. of oil production, coastal populations began to recognize the wide-scale impacts of the Studying fisher leaders’ oil industry on their environment. Today, the politics in coastal giant Sonda de Campeche (Campeche Sound) Tabasco complex in the Gulf of Mexico accounts for 51 percent of Mexico’s oil production (ibid.). It The social groups in coastal Tabasco that Álvaro involves over 200 oil-production platforms and and the political leadership of sea fishers seek to roughly 160 foreign companies that operate represent are very heterogeneous. Communities there as suppliers. involved in fishing are differentiated by The historical role of oil in mediating the livelihoods, social status and political position. relations between the people and the state in There are at least 7,000 sea fishers,4 half of Mexico is reflected in the contemporary relations whom are unlicensed (pescadores libres) while between Tabasco’s coastal populations and the the other half consists of approximately 2,700 state and the oil industry. The symbolically cooperative fishers and 800 license-holding powerful idea of oil as the nation’s resource, entrepreneurs (permisionários) who usually do belonging to all Mexicans, has fuelled peasant not fish themselves. In addition, many people mobilizations for social benefits since the 1938 move between fishing and farming according to expropriation of the oil industry from foreign
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ownership (Gledhill 2002: 45). To restabilize Enrique Peña Nieto’s (PRI) administration. This its hegemony in the 1970s, the Partido took place soon after the PRI returned to power, Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) ‘statisized’ having re-gained the presidency from the right- the economy by extending concessions to the wing Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), which peasant sector through its political networks had ruled the country during two successive and state clientelism, funded by Mexico’s oil terms from 2000 until 2012, after the PRI’s revenues (ibid.). In Tabasco and elsewhere, oil prior 70-year era. The expansion of operations revenues have had a central role in mobilizations in coastal areas with the participation of foreign against the social and environmental impacts of subcontractors is likely to increase the oil oil (Breglia 2013). In 1976–1983, small farmers, industry’s influence on the living conditions of fishers and trade unions organized a large- fishing communities considerably in the future. scale political movement, called Pacto Ribereño, In 2011–2012, the fishers’ leadership against the oil industry. However, Pemex and consisted of 12 middle-aged men, most of the government have sought to control both the whom had a decades-long history in the fishers’ Pacto Ribereño and more recent mobilizations organizations of mediating relations with the by employing economic compensation, legal oil industry, and were involved in the fishing measures, and political repression, including business either as cooperative leaders or private imprisonment for political leaders (Guzmán entrepreneurs. During my stay in Tabasco, the Ríos 2009). fishers’ struggle against the recent restrictions Since 1992, the Mexican government has on movement near the oil installations was opened the energy sector to global investment in a latent phase. Instead of engaging in and given foreign companies access to oil open conflict, the fishers’ leaders focused on exploration and drilling under subcontracts employing the restricted mechanisms of the law with Pemex (Martínez Laguna 2004). In to defend their access to the Gulf while the oil Tabasco, the increase of foreign subcontractors industry’s tactic has appeared to be to shape the has taken place since the early 2000s. In 2003, conflict into one over economic compensation the government imposed security restrictions on through the continuation of clientelist traffic near oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico relations within its social responsibility in a 15,907 km2 marine zone of exclusion, and compensation schemes. Furthermore, established under the federal legislation ‘Acuerdo complaints of environmental and social harm, Secretarial No. 117’ (Diario Oficial 2003). This compensation demands, and the oil industry’s bans all but oil industry operatives within the corporate social responsibility activities were zone. While the agreement was justified on the all managed by a state secretariat; from the grounds of its contribution to the prevention fishers’ perspective, this diffused culpability of terrorism and to security enhancement, and the division of responsibilities between one of its aims seems to have been to avoid the state and the oil industry. At the same offshore social confrontation, thus ensuring time, fragmented groups of fishers organized undisturbed oil production (Quist and Nygren protests both onshore and at sea, demanding 2015). Recent legal reforms to privatize the oil fairer resource access and firmer adherence to industry (Diario Oficial de la Federación 2014a; agreements concerning compensation. In 2011– 2014b) despite opposition by a large proportion 2012, fishers’ frustrations regarding the leaders’ of Mexicans, were introduced under President forms of ‘pacific’ negotiation and thus lack of
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aggressive pressure towards the oil industry my perception. A crucial aspect of this was were part of quotidian tensions in the coastal paying attention to how the three of us sought communities. to categorize each other. Changes in environmental legislation Ethnographic analyses by Anand (2011) at the federal level in 2012 may provide new and Madhok (2013) about political agency in opportunities for Tabasco’s coastal communities two different ‘oppressive contexts’ (Madhok to stake collective claims against the oil 2013) in India provide a frame for examining industry. The Ley de Acciones Colectivas (Law my difficulty in interpreting and representing on Collective Actions), which enables groups Álvaro’s place in the political setup that was of at least thirty persons to raise class-action enfolding me. The nuanced differences between claims for environmental harms caused by the these two authors in focusing either on the oil industry, has already made it possible for constrains (Madhok 2013) or on the complexity a group of fishers and small-scale farmers and possibilities (Anand 2011) of agency made from the interior of Tabasco to use the law as me further examine analytical perspective as a basis for suing Pemex, its subsidiaries and the a question of epistemological choice-making. involved government institutes for damages However, during early fieldwork, my difficulty caused to the environment and local livelihoods in conceptualizing the fishers’ and their leaders’ (Asociacion Ecologica Santo Tomas 2013; relations with the oil industry resembled more Inter Press Service 2013). If fishers are able to what Ortner (1995) points to as leading to meet the burden of demonstrating oil-derived ‘ethnographic thinness’ in studies of resistance: environmental harms and verify that those my own commitment to social change, mediated harms are the cause of reduced fish catches, the through the values of my culture made it hard case could bolster their efforts to regain their for me to accept that Álvaro was in many rights to the sea space and livelihoods as sea ways an effect of the operation of power at the fishers. oil frontier. In this situation, it was tempting to think of Álvaro’s agency in terms of either Ethnography and the succeeding or failing in radically defying the search for the subject state-industry politics through persistent and of resistance clearly-formulated political claims. Hence, at the same time as I needed Having moved to live with his family, the Álvaro to represent resistance, Álvaro and his course of my fieldwork became influenced by family sought to make sense of my intentions my relationships with Álvaro and the seven and to fit me into their categories. As Kondo family-members of the Vázquez household, (1986) points out in her analysis, attempts like especially Álvaro’s youngest child, 24-year old these are part and parcel of the negotiation Sofia. Whereas Álvaro took care of familiarizing of power between the ethnographer and the me with the practice and local politics of fishing, interlocutor. For me, the study of a resource Sofia was the most eager of the Vázquezes to get conflict, the fragmented factions of which I was to know me as a person. In retrospect, reflecting as yet unable to identify and access in the fisher on my intense involvement with both father and communities, increased my dependence on daughter made me pause to analyze how my Álvaro in terms of how I framed and interpreted preconceptions and my positionality influenced the data I collected. However, as I show below,
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Álvaro’s influence on my thinking was not from the family’s perspective. Álvaro’s wife straightforward but grew out of tensions with Doña Elena, their daughter Sofia and the other my own disposition to assess Álvaro according women of the household never asked me about to particular categorizations. Mostly, I was my work but instead focused their comments trying to grasp on whose ‘side’ Álvaro stood as on my womanhood through discussions about a leader; was he merely trying to benefit from appearance, sexuality, reproduction and family. his mediator position or did he have a political All of this highlighted the tensions between agenda in defence of Tabasco’s fishers? my roles as a woman and as a researcher During my first month, Álvaro actively of masculine spheres. The ambiguity of my introduced me to certain important places femininity in the eyes of the family’s women and people. He occupied a long-time position further increased the difficulty of fieldwork; it as a cooperative leader, and had a number of was not only the fact that I had no access to both protégés and rival leaders in the coastal Álvaro’s dealings with the oil industry but also fisher communities. Well aware of some fishers’ the difficulty of being seen both as a female and accusations of corruption against him and other a researcher that made fitting in hard. It was leaders, Álvaro occasionally made an effort to here, in the crossroads of encountering Álvaro emphasize to me that he had ‘nothing to hide’. and the family as foreign, white, a researcher However, I realized he was not in the position to and a woman, where my analytical lens on the invite me to various political meetings between politics of resource access began to gain focus. fishers and the oil industry, which interested Coleman (2009) and Uusihakala (2016) me. Being left out, especially during the first have analyzed the ethical and analytical weeks of fieldwork, highlighted my impression difficulties they have faced as ethnographers that there was a realm of negotiations between when interlocutors whose behaviour they have the fishers and the oil industry which remained been tempted to judge morally have actively invisible to me. It also exacerbated my perplexity sought to challenge their thinking. The tensions about Álvaro’s agency; whether he was, in fact, involved in these relations reveal crucial aspects fish or fowl. of both the research subject and the authors’ My first weeks with Álvaro thus demon own thinking. However, what interests me in strated Álvaro’s difficult position between the these relationships and my own case is also oil industry and his constituents. However, it their dynamic processuality. Within the three also brought out a concern he seemed to have months of fieldwork with Álvaro, thanks to his of my being in his house. Considering that persistence, my initial will to judge gradually Álvaro’s interpretations of my intentions and changed into a desire to hear. of my foreignness may have been far from The first thing Álvaro did was to familiarize straightforward, and taking into account the me with the legislative framework for fisheries, history of complicated relations between and to take me to interview people who Mexicans and Americans, I think it is possible belonged to his group of leaders. Ten days after that one of his judgements about me was that my arrival in the family, he made me acquainted I was some sort of gringa.6 with two cooperative fishers who introduced At the same time, I became increasingly me to the internal division and frustration over aware in my relations with Sofia and the rest of differentiated access to the sea, and to political the family how ambiguous as a woman I was subjectivity in the coastal communities. During
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our conversations, however, the fishers vented more palpable. Juan was visibly surprised and their frustration about the situation on Álvaro’s uncomfortable about our arrival. I asked him person. general questions about the economic situation Francisco was the first of these inter- of fishers after the establishment of the zona viewees. No sooner had I asked him about the de exclusión. Soon, the interview turned into restrictions on fishing in the Gulf, than he a tense discussion between Juan and Álvaro. began to press Álvaro about money and fishing Juan, anxious, asked Álvaro about gasoline, nets that his fisher cooperative was supposed to saying, ‘We were supposed to receive gasoline have received from the governmental secretariat from Explora7 every three months but we as compensation for oil explorations. Álvaro haven’t received anything the whole year.’ Then seemed very uncomfortable, and quickly the he said that pescadores libres need to have some atmosphere became tense. alternative, and to ‘calm down’, as ‘this is going to continue’. Juan complained to Álvaro that the Francisco: ‘I didn’t like how they managed Secretary in charge of mediations with the oil the fishing nets. I had asked for nets for industry never wants to receive him, meanwhile seven boats.’ explaining to me that ‘it isn’t convenient for the government that there is political organization’ Álvaro: ‘Pemex gave a negative reply ... it among pescadores libres. Álvaro was again very washed its hands … to me they gave 10.’ uncomfortable, and vaguely promised to try and contact a politician he knew, and asked Juan A very tense exchange of words ensued. I listened not to ‘compromise’ him. As communication for a while and then asked what the discussion between the two men grew even tenser, Álvaro was about. Álvaro explained to me that the suddenly decided to go home, saying people secretariat had offered a helping hand to sea- were expecting him. fishers by donating fishing nets to cooperatives, On the way home from these strange while Pemex had refused to give nets to anyone. ‘interviews’, both of which had ended abruptly, In other words, instead of Pemex compensating Álvaro asked me what I had thought of them. the fishers for harm it had caused their fishing Astonished by the turn of events and the activities, a common procedure in the oil threatening atmosphere, I was unable to say industry, nets had been donated (‘regaló’) by the much. I was too apprehensive to ask Álvaro why secretariat. Álvaro said that for some reason exactly the fishers had seemed both angry and the nets had been distributed unevenly, some afraid; Álvaro’s dealings with me in the first cooperatives getting as many as 20 nets, others days of fieldwork had made me sense that my just a few, and he himself 10. Francisco’s look curiosity tended to raise his suspicions. Later was incredulous and really angry. I asked why I saw that by taking me to people who accused this unevenness and Álvaro could not explain. him of failure and embezzlement, he had been Instead, he asked me to go to the other side of openly showing me the dynamics of the context the yard and check out the fishers packing iced where he, as a leader, was trying to deal with fish onto a truck going to Mexico City. Then he the divide-and-rule tactics of the oil industry. ended the interview abruptly. Much later, I saw this had also been his test In an interview with another fisher, Juan, for me, one which I had not quite passed. My right after Francisco’s, the tension was even attention, even though I did not discuss it with
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Álvaro, had not been on Álvaro’s complicated I went and what I came to know. After six position, but on my own fear and anxiety about weeks of living in the family, Freddy, a fisher the tenseness of the communications, and on who belonged to the federation headed by my disappointment in Álvaro’s failure to stand Álvaro, told me about an event where Pemex, up for the cooperative and unlicensed fishers Explora, and the secretariat had given out whom I thought he had the ethical, if not motors to coastal fishers, Álvaro’s federation legal, obligation to represent. This, and Álvaro’s included, as compensation for Explora’s studies secrecy—which I did not understand at the that were hampering offshore fishing. Freddy time may have been more a basic suspicion of wanted me to think that Álvaro had actively my intentions, or something he was pressurised kept me from knowing about the meeting but into—persuaded me to see him as a failing leader. I later understood that I had no way of knowing The interviews, however, also usefully turned whether that had actually been the case. Then, my attention to the hierarchies and conflicts of two weeks later, as I returned home from a the fisher communities, to the diffuse division week-long trip to Ciudad de México, I saw I had of responsibilities between the paraestatal and arrived in the middle of what was going to be the secretariat, and to how these and the oil a meeting between 20 fishers and two officials industry’s complex politics of exclusion worked from the secretariat in the Vázquez living room: among and against the fishers. I also began to see there was much more heterogeneity in the Although I have told Álvaro about the agendas of different fishers and leaders than time of my arrival, I realize my coming I had initially envisaged. is a s urprise to everyone. There are Although at the time I did not see that approximately 13 people in the living Álvaro had been testing me, I soon began to room; everybody is waiting for the rest feel increasingly uncomfortable about asking of the fishers to arrive from nightfishing him about his relations with the oil industry. robalo [bass]. I am told that people from the I felt I had no right to be nosy, and found myself secretariat are coming too, on the business feeling ashamed of my spy-like curiosity. Álvaro of empleo emergente, which is temporary had given me a glimpse of how power worked work, typically in road maintenance or at the resource frontier, but had then closed other infrastructural work, provided to the ‘curtain’, leaving me wondering whether fishers by the oil industry during low I had failed to gain his trust, or whether it was seasons in fishing. After half an hour the the politically more powerful actors behind men from the secretariat arrive. They are the scenes who threatened my further access. two, and they’re clearly not happy to see However, the interviews also underscored the me among the fishers. Álvaro mumbles double role I had in the family: at the same time something to them about not having as apparent political contradictions seemed to known about my coming. The men sit by block my access to certain issues, paradoxically, a table where they spread their papers and as a woman I was already inside the sphere of the begin to call the fishers by name to sign intimate as a kind of sister, a role which was a paper. They take a photo of each fisher emphasized especially in my relations with Sofia. and check their identity card; this is a way It was soon obvious to me, however, that to make sure that the empleo emergente it was impossible for Álvaro to influence where does not go to wrong persons. The entire
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operation is very serious, and the officials trying to figure him out possibly increased his display an arrogance towards the fishers suspicions. while they make no contact whatsoever to In analyzing the politics of oil and fisheries me. When the photos and the signatures from Álvaro’s house, I saw that the ambiguity are over, the fishers leave and Doña Elena I observed in Álvaro as a leader paralleled my invites the secretariat men to the kitchen own experience of ambiguity in the family. At for lunch. Nobody says anything to me; the same time as I tried to grasp whether Álvaro I’m invisible, and not welcome in the men’s was completely co-opted by the oil industry company. I go to my room, keeping the or was also actively defending the fishers’ door open but I’m not able to hear what livelihood, I also felt that my own positionality they are talking about. (Fieldnotes 2011) as a foreign researcher-woman in the family was full of irreconcilable ambiguity. While these These glimpses into interactions between the ambiguities involved two different issues, they fishers, the oil industry and the government were not unrelated; both linked to attempts convinced me that my presence in them was not by me on the one hand, and by Álvaro’s family welcomed by the oil industry. I consequently on the other, to affect the dynamics of the changed my fieldwork strategies to expand my research encounter (Kondo 1986). Moreover, study to fishers and leaders beyond Álvaro’s they became my angle onto both my own circle and began to avoid telling him where preconceptions regarding fieldwork, and to the I was going. Álvaro, respectively, continued rationalities of power of which Álvaro was part. to be suspicious of my activities, something Examined from this perspective, I later saw reflected in his inquiries to me about whether that my initial frustration with Álvaro’s tactics I had already ‘reported to Finland’ about my of controlling my fieldwork were linked to my findings, and his apparent relief when I said own search for ‘resistance’, which was partly I had not, saying that ‘with time I would gain a result of the influence of research literature access to everything I needed to understand’. and of the ethos of my training, which focused Once he also jokingly suggested I was a spy. on social movements. However, a coherent While at the time I was frustrated by these movement did not exist, and even trying to suspicions regarding my intentions in studying identify an unambiguous social group of fishers Álvaro, I was unable to see all the possible was difficult because of the social, political reasons that may have fuelled them. Of course, and economic heterogeneity of the coastal the entire setup of my stay in his family was communities. Furthermore, the fisher leaders highly exceptional and perhaps gave reason to were not in charge of a radical political agenda suspect my alliance with state actors. However, in defence of fishers’ livelihoods; rather their my being a foreigner, with features and habits actions resembled more those of the syndicates that resembled those of the white oil workers or local politicians. In other words, instead of who walked the streets of coastal Tabasco and corresponding to my interlinked, culturally- extracted Mexico’s resources for the increasing mediated scientific and personal expectations of benefit of others, may have meant more to ‘good’ subaltern leaders, the behaviour of Álvaro Álvaro that I at the time understood. On top of and his peers pushed me to re-evaluate my that, the fact that I was myself also occupied in conceptual apparatus.
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I suggest that the disappointments I had secrecy and power games, which forced me to in dealing with the tensions between examine the origins of my preconceptions for expectations and findings are revealing about fieldwork and findings. the wider structures (Shapiro 2005) that Studies on the operation of state power shape ethnographers’ expectations towards in Mexico’s agrarian and resource politics by interlocutors. My initial search for the existence Gledhill (2002; 2015) and Nuijten (2004), of some kind of resistance among fishers provide a framework for placing the field and more radical political agency in Álvaro encounter in the wider political and economic were also motivated by my liberal democratic context. Nuijten (2004) argues that the non- cultural background and the structure of resolution of agrarian conflicts in Mexico incentives in the academy. As I write above, the through the combination of state violence and implications of the latter show in the tendency, reproduction of people’s hopes of access to in anthropology and also in disciplines such as justice is characteristic of the operation of power. development studies, to think of the political Furthermore, in his recent work, Gledhill (2015) agency of those often described as subaltern suggests that control over oil is increasingly in binary terms, of resistance / compliance, or linked to the ways state power operates ‘behind through social movements (Bebbington and masks’ through the elite’s strategies to re-impose Abramovaj 2008; Carruthers 2008; Nash 2004), authority by incorporating criminal actors into instead of examining the complexity of agency governance, co-opting others and criminalizing and political projects (Anand 2011; Golub social movements. As for the fisher leaders’ and 2014; Madhok 2013). This contradiction in fishers’ politics, in addition to the role of the anthropology is linked to a tension between idea of oil as a shared resource and a source the discipline’s relativist will to understand the of national pride in influencing popular and world and anthropology’s universalist liberal sanctioned narratives about rights to resources, ideals about changing it. For me, developing an fishers’ criminalization and the non-resolution understanding of the ambiguous and multiple of the conflict complicated their claim-making politics of different groups of fishers and fisher over access to what they, in essence, considered leaders thereby required me during my first fishers’ territory. weeks of fieldwork to overcome the tendency to focus on ‘resistance’ and instead ‘ask directions The face of protection from those who lived along’ the way, to return to Jackson’s quotation in the epigraph (2012: 11). In her essay about fieldwork in Brazil, Ruth Álvaro’s persistence in getting me to see Landes (1986: 138) speaks about how learning his contradictory positionality was instructive her place in the community was ‘one’s only in terms of working my way through this vantage point for penetrating the culture’ and initial disappointment. Its consequence was a gaining a perspective onto the issues she studied. gradual transformation in the way I observed For Landes, this primarily meant that her lens and thought about the ‘field’ and about myself became one of a highly gendered and sexualized as an ethnographer. Comprehending the fishers’ actor, immersed in masculine networks of heterogeneity and their perspectives onto the patronage. Correspondingly, Kondo (1986), working of power would not have been possible herself Japanese American, shows how her without my having also become part of the assuming a daughterly role in a Japanese family
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produced a profound crisis of self, which led to that she interpreted it as my becoming more an understanding about the Japanese conception like her instead of the skinny researcher, too of the relationship between the self and the immersed in reading and writing, that I was in social world. In my fieldwork, while Álvaro her eyes. Sofia often made remarks about my defied my attempts to categorize him, from the appearance, eagerly instructing me in the proper family’s point of view I also avoided pigeon- ways to emphasize my femininity and sexuality holing. Having arrived in Tabasco without the by becoming ‘fuller’. For me, however, Sofia’s properties of a Mexican, social, adult female encouragements to become a Tabascan woman (husband and children), it was easiest for the and thereby culturally meaningful for her were family to ascribe to me a kind of daughterly unsettling because they seemed to express role although, in reality, as noted earlier, I was resentment that the gap between us consisted of of course a white alien from a higher social fundamental race and class differentials. stratum whose work in men’s spheres examining Furthermore, there was an aspect of control politically sensitive issues was not ordinary in Sofia’s gendered and sexualized objectification woman’s work. Consequently, family members, of me which corresponded with the fishers’ and especially Sofia, seemed intent on offsetting and their leaders’ attempts at impacting the my complex positionality, alienness and our class dynamics of the research encounter through differentials by highlighting my gender. Their subtly sexualized behaviour. These efforts also very subtle, everyday attempts to emplace me made me an object in these encounters, shaping in their context by referencing my womanhood the power dynamics of the research. However, resonated with the gendered aspects of my whereas the sexualized aspect of my gender was interaction with Álvaro and the fishers and also highlighted in the encounters outside of home, shaped my view of how power worked within inside, my gender was far more ambiguous the coastal communities. and confusing to me, allowing the family to Sofia was a teacher by profession. During categorize me both as a ‘daughter’ and a woman. the relatively short period of three months, we This ambiguity especially came together in found a common language in which to talk the power dynamics between me and Álvaro, about issues, especially those relating to being a enabling the coexistence of a sexualized aspect woman and gaining a livelihood. I participated and a more familial dynamic. in Sofia’s efforts to make a living, which extended I understood this for the first time five beyond her daily job to less formal, home- weeks into fieldwork, when I had grown stressed based businesses in vending vegetables, fruit about Álvaro’s suspicions of me and about my and shoes. Sofia also devoted much of her free own continuous efforts to categorize him and time to a teenagers’ dance and drumming group, had begun spending more time with people which she saw as having the social function of outside the home. By then, the Vázquez kitchen keeping the young out of drugs and the drug had become the place where I often spent time trade. Having danced myself since childhood, talking with Álvaro, mostly listening to his I began to follow Sofia’s group’s rehearsals and various stories. In the weeks when I began to performances to various parts of Tabasco and distance myself from his networks of fishers, he other parts of Mexico. Sofia was curious about told me two stories that deviated from his usual ethnography’s method of living with people as style and had a supernatural dimension. Twice a way to do research, and my impression was he shared a story about his grandmother who
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had been a witch, able at will to turn herself as references to ‘the Third’. According to him, into an animal. As a young man, when arriving in fieldwork situations where interpersonal home from a party at night, he had sometimes relations and their relevant context are under bumped into the grandmother when she had negotiation, interaction may make reference turned herself into a pig. Another out-of- to a Third, an authoritative figure, a totem or the-ordinary story that he told me took place a father who is outside of the interaction and when my fieldwork stress had become nearly serves the meta-pragmatic function of defining overwhelming. The message of the story was the encounter, its relevant context and how so strange to me that, anxious as I already was the communication is to be taken. Álvaro’s about our relations, I avoided asking him why references to the secrets of longevity and to his he told it. The story went this way: In the past, grandmother as a witch were both gendered people lived to be 115 to 120 years old. This and sexualized, the former openly so and the was because in those days people ate more fruit. latter more subtly. Following Crapanzano’s More curiously, he added, they also made love thought, and considering Kondo’s (1986) only once in eight days, wearing red bandages analysis, Álvaro’s stories, especially the one around their foreheads and taking the entire about longevity, could perhaps be interpreted night. When the sex was over, Álvaro said, as the context for my and Álvaro’s research people did not shower but sat together to eat encounter, highlighting Álvaro’s authority and chicken. my womanhood at a moment when I sought to I still am not sure why Álvaro wanted me evade his efforts to shape my fieldwork. to hear the stories, although I have two different In response to my perceived control and interpretations of them. They could have been objectification, then, I expanded fieldwork to his way of communicating about how radically people outside of Álvaro’s sphere of influence. he thought life’s fundamentals, spirituality and At the same time as this was a conscious sexuality, had changed during his lifetime. In research strategy, in some ways it also resembled the stories, the control over these fundamentals the crisis Kondo (1986) describes, as I felt rested in the communities themselves. Álvaro unable to fit the categories that were there for often communicated corresponding experiences me. Six weeks into fieldwork, I began to suggest of change and/or loss, ranging from a personal to Álvaro my plans of involving pescadores libres experience of losing control of the body in my study. Understanding better their place through increased consumption of imported, in resource politics, I explained, was a necessary industrialized food to the dissolving of social part of my research; in response, Álvaro mostly networks of mutual support and solidarity. From expressed concern about my safety. Every time this perspective, what went on in the politics of I mentioned my plans to him, he would warn me resource access was part of a much larger and that wandering alone into the unlicensed fishers’ long-term change whereby the government had living quarters at the town’s outskirts could come to exert control over issues previously be dangerous and suggest that I go with his under the communities’ authority. I have come nephew. When I asked other people, however, to think that perhaps he was making a claim to I was told that the area did not pose a risk for that control. me, and ten weeks into fieldwork I went ahead, At the same time, the stories could be heard riding on the back of the scooter of a female as what Crapanzano (2012: 558–559) discusses acquaintance I had met at a town café.
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During interviews with the pescadores ‘understood’ that I would eventually go beyond libres, however, I came across a situation which his networks. At that moment my feeling heightened the impression that I was unable to was one of sudden fright and anger about his judge the extent of government control at the reaction to my crossing a line I had refused to oil frontier. I was interviewing the wife of an accept. Terribly uncomfortable, I responded unlicensed fisher when a car drove into the yard vaguely that the unlicensed fishers had concerns and two men got out, asking the woman for her similar to those of other fishers and refused to ID. All three of them were extremely serious, continue the conversation. Álvaro calmed down, and I seemed to be entirely invisible to the left my desk and went to watch TV. We never men, who took the ID, bought a bag of shrimp returned to the issue of the interviews. from the woman’s stall and left. I was terrified. The tensions that surfaced during the I asked the woman what had just happened and kitchen table discussions and after the she said that the men would return and bring interviews with unlicensed fishers took place the ID back with a pig for her. Later I learned in the intersection of the roles into which this transaction of relinquishing one’s ID in I and Álvaro’s family tried to fit each other. return for a pig was an old PRI vote-buying They revealed to me how much was at stake for tactic (the elections were the following year) of Álvaro in his wish that I respect the boundaries making people believe they were able to follow he tried to set for me. They also exposed my how people voted by taking copies of the IDs of naïveté over our familial roles and my hope that those who had promised their votes to the party. by knowing me as a family-member, which I of Yet why did the men not seem to stop at course never really was, Álvaro could somehow any other house? Why did they not pay any be sympathetic to my project, no matter where attention to me even though seeing a gringa it took me. But then, why would he, considering on her own in a tiny fisher community far from his jokes about my being a potential spy. In downtown should have caught their attention? retrospect, how much, in any case, did he actually Like the secretariat officials at Álvaro’s house, want to ‘control’ me, and how much was it just these men did not appear to notice me. Was in his nature to be suspicious, or alternatively, to I only growing increasingly suspicious about the succumb to pressures from other quarters? government’s following me at the same time The efforts by the Vázquezes to shape the that I had decided to overstep the boundaries contours of me and my project, and my own that Álvaro had tried to impose? I never told initial efforts to play along, made me aware of Álvaro about the men; neither did I report the distance between us, which in turn shaped anything to my notebook about how terrified my perspective onto the politics of fisheries I had been. The incident fused into a general and oil. Seeing how, despite trying to fit into feeling resembling paranoia that I experienced the family, I was unable to ‘become’ a Tabascan in those weeks. woman or assuage Álvaro’s suspicions about my Back at home, I did tell Álvaro about intentions, I began to spend more time with my interviews, however, and he countered me other townspeople and foreign oil workers aggressively. ‘What did they cry to you about?’ I had come to know. While my decision to invest he asked with a tone that mocked the fishers’ in these other networks bore some similarities concerns. I was shocked I had underestimated to Kondo’s (1986) fieldwork, an obvious the situation and let myself believe that Álvaro difference was Tabasco’s political context where
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tensions between different actors surfaced in Rationalities of power the every day. The women of Álvaro’s family at home and at the sea had so far been a kind of an escape from the masculine and often confrontational spaces, and Less visible politics I now similarly sought the company of female acquaintances and foreign men working for The fear, secrecy and silence characteristic Explora, who represented social relations that of conflict and post conflict contexts draw I felt were free from patronage. Yet this made me the ethnographer’s attention to cues for realize that the protection of Álvaro, the family understanding beyond words (Geros 2008; and other fisher families had actually provided Taussig 2011). With Álvaro’s house as my me with a sense of comfort and security; but window to the fishers’ situation, I realized having lost my patience with Álvaro’s ‘guidance’ the politics of access to Doña Elena’s kitchen of my fieldwork and by not following the rules had metaphorically begun to resemble la zona of the networks based on male authority, I had restringida (this was how fishers often called lost my claim to a woman’s place. In these new, the zone of exclusion). I had noticed that the ephemeral relationships with people outside of kitchen, located at the furthest end of the house, Álvaro’s circles, I found myself looking for the was the space where only family, close friends same kind of protection; not finding it, I felt and other Very Important People were allowed, vulnerable. the way the zone of exclusion only gave access The Vázquez women met my increased to the oil industry. Less familiar people who absence from home by correspondingly sought Álvaro’s advice—and there were many excluding me from some of their familial for him to attend to—were dealt with on the activities and conversations. Because the porch while some were invited inside to the change in their behaviour was subtle, I did not living room. As my room was adjacent to the feel comfortable bringing it up and was thus living room, in the space in between the porch unsure of possible reasons for it. It seemed and the kitchen, I got to observe the social to me as if the women were communicating geography of the relations between Álvaro and perplexity, disapproval and disappointment his protégés and patrons. in my refusal to try harder. While it was easy There was some resemblance between the for me to explain both to myself and to them positions Álvaro occupied in the house and that I was busy working with fishers and oil with regard to the offshore. While the unequal workers, the women possibly interpreted my spatial politics of the house and the offshore in behaviour very differently. For them it perhaps some ways served Álvaro’s interests, he could meant a reluctance to engage in the household not exert ultimate control over who was allowed duties and discussions they shared, lack of in. From the door of my room, I saw how Doña appreciation for their concern for my security Ana opened the kitchen door for the secretariat when moving around by myself, and suspicious men as mandatory guests. Correspondingly, relations with foreign, white men who for Álvaro helped keep the oil industry in and the them possibly represented the invasion of their fishers out of the zone of exclusion by exercising territory and patrimony, despite the fact that his mediatory powers and avoiding open protest. existing resentments about gringos were seldom However, while the government sought to expressed. use Álvaro to maintain the useful hierarchies
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between those fishers with access to livelihoods In retrospect, the difficulty I had assuming and political representation and those without, a culturally acceptable role within the patronage Álvaro also actively looked for ways to escape networks in the context of political struggle control, assisting fishers to defy the constraining cast light on how Tabascans sought protection. rules of compensation programs. I am pressed I saw that there were differences in how fishers to wonder—at home, had Álvaro perhaps sought guidance on social and political issues also been flouting the repressive politics by and economic opportunities from fisher leaders. organizing a meeting with the secretariat Some fishers belonging to Álvaro’s federation representatives on a day when I, a potentially invested in patronage relations with him alone, unwanted set of eyes and ears, from the oil while others dealt more flexibly with various industry’s perspective, was scheduled to appear, ‘competing’ patrons. These relations between surprising the representatives? fishers and their leaders corresponded to some Being excluded from many of the political degree with the fisher leaders’ relations with state negotiations between the fishers’ leadership and actors: some leaders were ‘loyal’ to politicians the oil industry, especially at the beginning of and government people that belonged to one fieldwork, gave me an important entry point particular party whereas many others either into the rationality of the leaders’ actions vis-á- kept changing their political affiliation or tried vis the state and the oil industry. My attention to network with people from various parties was on the tensions among the different groups at the same time, a tactic which made some of fishers, entrepreneurs and political leaders, leaders earn the nickname cameleón. This search on the secrecy involved, and on the importance for protection from multiple sources becomes that leaders placed on seeking protection from understandable in the wider framework of the governmental institutions and political parties. Mexicans’ disillusionment with the PRI since its Together, these issues showed me how the final years of unbroken rule in the 1990s, and leaders’ ideas of the state drew on the residue of how it has led people to turn from earlier social corporativism and government control, linked networks to the search for ‘any patrons who with the legacy of the authoritarian past and might offer a helping hand’ (Gledhill 2002: 54). the strongly symbolic importance of the para- Correspondingly, my attention was also statal company in national politics and as well as on how patrons displayed a variable degree of the popular idea of oil as a patrimonial resource care and protection towards their protégées. (Breglia 2013; Quist and Rinne forthcoming; Fisher leaders and fishing entrepreneurs Zalik 2012). Concomitantly, the fishers’ worked either with fishers who belonged to contemporary disconnect from NGOs and from their cooperative or employed unlicensed movements of local, national or international fishers who were practically dependent on scale at the same time as their political tactics them for access to a fishing license. Many of expanded into a range of legal and extra- the patrons kept the fishers up-to-date about legal practices appeared to be the product of the operations of the government and the oil restrictive legislation, revealing how the coastal industry, and sought to assist the fishers to get communities were pushed to operate in ways the best out of various support programmes and through organizations that were politically offered. However, labour relations between the less visible. license-holding entrepreneurs and unlicensed
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fishers often involved debt, which kept many and in following the event itself was one of fishers bound to their patrons. Furthermore, my few chances to show Álvaro how serious curiously, although the reparations granted by I was about my work of trying to understand the oil industry formally involved only licensed the fishers’ situation. While it seemed to me that fishers, some license-holders distributed some he noticed my efforts, it was during our drive of the gasoline they received from Pemex to to the very same forum on legislation that he ‘their’ unlicensed fishers, thereby gaining some told me not to ask him ‘any more questions’ (the leverage over them. Generally speaking, however, essay’s opening quote), reminding me that the the strict division between formal and informal barrier between us actually depended on much fishers—accentuated by the discontinuation of more than my enthusiasm and trustworthiness. granting new fishing licenses and related acts of Likewise, in the political meetings that political and economic exclusion—essentially I finally attended towards the end of fieldwork, highlighted the power differentials and related faithful to his caution Álvaro remained quiet, frictions among the fisher folk. withdrawing into the background of the discussions. No attempts by me to reassure Access and understanding Álvaro about my interests could have broken the wall of silence. Having gained distance from the intimacy of Having gained access to these meetings, the Vázquez family and our mutual attempts I realized that if I had stayed within Álvaro’s to fit each other into certain categories, it was close circles it would never have happened. easier for me to show Álvaro that he had no Álvaro seemed more concerned about my reason to be concerned about my intentions. activities than some of the others, perhaps Ten weeks into fieldwork, having obtained because he did not trust my intentions as a access to other leaders of Álvaro’s faction, they gringa, or perhaps because the oil industry had allowed me to attend their meetings. This was pressured him to monitor my fieldwork. This a major breakthrough in my work. The leaders is something I will never know for sure. In let me follow them a few times when they retrospect, it is apparent that my attempts to met among themselves, with their constituent categorize Álvaro reflected not only how I had fishers, and with oil industry and state actors. learned to think but also reflected my place When I hesitantly discussed my upcoming within the structures of incentives where writing participation with Álvaro, who was also going about ‘resistance’ is rewarded. By the same token, to be present, he said that I could of course go: Álvaro’s operations as a mediator revealed the ‘I have nothing to hide,’ he told me, although context of power and incentives within which visibly uncomfortable. he was located, which were strictly delimited. One of the meetings was a forum where Within the conflict over space, it was difficult the content of Tabasco’s upcoming law on for the fisher leaders to network with other aquaculture and fishing was discussed. Before actors such as campesinos or oil industry workers the forum, Álvaro and a group of leaders as they had before, because securing offshore involved me in a meeting where we went access was not in anybody else’s interests. through the proposed legislative text and Fishing was also becoming less tempting with thought of ways to improve it from the fishers’ the wave of urbanisation among young adults. perspective. Participating in reviewing the text Furthermore, the fisher leaders could not defend
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the unlicensed fishers’ formalization because it Álvaro, going through an analysis of the politics threatened their licensed constituents’ agendas. of resource access that I had written for him However, the analytical move of placing to assess, I realized that while I no longer the fieldwork encounter in its historical and needed to ponder whether he was fish or fowl, political-economic context led me to appreciate the question of my identity was perhaps still the continued popular resonance among unresolved for him. Tabascans of the idea of post-revolutionary In this essay, drawing on reflexive analysis Mexico’s oil as patrimony and wealth to be of my relations with the Vázquez family, I have shared. The fisher leaders were in an easier examined how my insights about the politics position to demand access to compensations of fisheries and oil have developed in tandem from la paraestatal than to completely oppose its with my place within the family (Kondo 1986; operations, despite the fact that they considered Landes 1986). That place, and the dynamics the Gulf of Mexico waters their territory. of the research encounter were shaped at the Moreover, in the situation where fishing was intersection of my own background, Álvaro largely criminalized and opposition to the oil and his family’s expectations towards me, and industry had recently been violently repressed, the temporal and political economic context of fishers operated beyond formal political arenas. the resource conflict among fishers and the oil At a time prior to la Reforma Energética and industry. The resource frontier, in which during the opening of the shares from oil extraction to fieldwork in 2011–2012 the operators were the foreign, private companies, Álvaro’s mediatory Mexican parastatal company and its foreign tactics reflected the power that ideas of people’s subcontractors, was becoming a territory where oil continued to have in Mexico at the same privatization was increasingly linked to Mexico’s time as they reflected his knowledge of law, elites’ strategies to re-impose state authority politics and multiple ways of evading control to (Gledhill 2015; Watts 2012). defend access to the sea (Scott 1985). In showing the fundamentally inter subjective and personal character of knowledge Conclusion production, I have wanted to draw attention to how knowledge about conflicts is often born Time shifts the perspectives we gain through through fragile relationships, of trial and error ethnographic reflexivity, though the process in the context of secrecy and silence, and as never reaches a final epiphany. Furthermore, something that happens through the subjective the reflection seldom involves space for the experience and creation by the ethnographer. interlocutors’ post-fieldwork thoughts, thereby The interactions through which the knowledge underlining the ethnographer’s ownership of is produced involve more often than not the text (Kondo 1986). I returned to Tabasco a confused ethnographer and a defensive for three more months in 2012, but this time interlocutor, situated within asymmetrical I mostly lived in the state capital, Villahermosa, relations of power. As several ethnographers and with unlicensed fishers at the coast. (Coleman 2009; Collins and Gallinat 2010) I visited the Vázquez family early on during the have shown, fieldwork and the involved power second trip to find that the tensions between us games between the ethnographer and the had dissipated and in their place was reserved interlocutor do not take place in an emotional warmth. Yet, sitting in the living room with vacuum, and as Malkki (2007: 173–174) writes,
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‘the participant observer is not a fly,’ an invisible embodied without exaggerating or downplaying observer, but an active, albeit often controversial the structure of power (Anand 2011; Madhok participant in the lives of interlocutors. Here 2013) where he operated or veiling the I have tried to show how my expectations of contradiction between the fishers’ leadership’s Álvaro, my ambiguous roles in the family and official objectives and the amendments Álvaro’s careful techniques of instructing me they made in order to remain the fishers’ were decisive for my learning to see how fisher representatives. In examining a significant leaders made sense of the rationalities of power part of my fieldwork in Tabasco by exercising in Tabasco. reflexivity, I have wanted to draw attention That I could not accept Álvaro’s authori- to ethnography’s importance in showing the tative guidance of fieldwork, which ran against complexity and situatedness of politics of my culturally-bound identity as a woman and a resource access. researcher, my expectations of a ‘good’ subaltern Introducing me to cooperative fishers leader, and showed my related difficulty in oper- at the beginning of fieldwork, Álvaro once ating within patronage networks and the vari- asked me how they would know where the ous spheres of resource politics, brought me to information they gave me would end up. ‘Si te analyze the tensions between us and how they doy mis secretos…,’ he began (if I give you my shaped my perspective. My fixation on political secrets). I stopped to search for words to tell division among the fishers, however, produced that my intention was to give ‘as objective a at first a such a sense of failure that I had to perspective’ as possible about the fishers, but ask myself whether I would have been able to he, for good reason, hurried to correct me: ‘as see ‘resistance’, had I wanted to, or had I been trustworthy a perspective as possible’. At that someone else, or had my entry to politics been moment, more than I, it was he who spoke the through other people. This highlighted for me language of ethnography. In the end, Álvaro did that ethnographers should more carefully exam- not trust his secrets about political mediatorship ine where the need to categorize and judge to me, but instead made me examine why I had comes from, and how and how much it blocks thought it possible in the first place. us from seeing. As I have shown in this essay, the ways Notes in which the fishers’ leadership reasoned about power and networked with other actors to 1 This article draws on research funded by the defend what they considered to be their right Academy of Finland (project number 1138203). as fishers to space and livelihoods, reflected I am deeply grateful to the fishers, political popular narratives about the people’s oil, long- leaders and their families that co-operated with me during field research. I am also very term experience of authoritarian Mexico and its grateful for collaboration with representatives political legacy since 2000, and disillusionment of governmental institutions, the oil industry with the PRI of the 1990s and the neoliberal and non-governmental organizations in Mexico. policies enforced recently by both PRI and I thank the reviewer for highly valuable comments to the earlier version of the manuscript. PAN. Analyzing my relationship with Álvaro, I also thank Anja Nygren, Eija Ranta, Elina however, underscored my difficulty in capturing Oinas, Heikki Wilenius, Jenni Mölkänen, Jeremy in thought and words the leader that Álvaro Gould, Katono Ouma, Saija Niemi and Tuomas
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Tammisto for their important comments on ideas Cerwonka, Allaine and Liisa H. Malkki 2007. for and draft versions of this article, and Marie- Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Louise Karttunen for her excellent language Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: The University of editing. Chicago Press. 2 All names of people in this article are pseudonyms. 3 Petróleos Mexicanos was privatized in 2014. Coleman, Leo 2009. The Obligation to Receive: The 4 These estimates are from an interview with Countertransference, the Ethnographer, Protestants, a fishing official in 2011 and official statistics and Proselytization in North India. In John from 2009 (INEGI, 2010). Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi (eds), Being 5 This is based on Saury Arias’ (2010: 111) There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of estimates of the number of fishers in Frontera, Truth. Berkley: University of California Press. one of Tabasco’s three coastal fishing towns. Collins, Peter and Anselma Gallinat 2010. The 6 While my interpretations of Álvaro’s opinions Ethnographic Self as Resource: an Introduction. are speculative, surmise about my possible links In Peter Collins and Anselma Gallinat (eds), The with the U.S. was expressed more explicitly to Ethnographic Self as Resource: Writing Memory and me by a government official who suspected that I Experience into Ethnography. New York: Berghahn was tracking fishers involved in the smuggling of Books. drugs to the U.S. 7 Pseudonym for a subcontractor company which Crapanzano, Vincent 2012. ‘At the Heart of the was carrying out geophysical studies along Discipline’: Critical Reflections on Fieldwork. In Tabasco’s coast. Antonius C.G.M. Robben and Jeffrey A. Sluka (eds), Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. REFERENCES Second Edition. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Diario Oficial 2003. Acuerdo Secretarial No. 117. Anand, Nikhil 2011. PRESSURE. The PoliTechnics Poder Ejecutivo. Secretaria de Marina. DO, 11 of water supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology 26 September 2003. (4): 542–564. Diario Oficial de la Federación 2014a. Ley de Asociación Ecológica Santo Tomás 2013. Hidrocarburos, DOF 11-08-2014. Cámara de Comunidades tabasquenas demandan a autoridades Diputados del H. Congreso de la Unión. DOF, 11 por contaminacion mediante amparo colectivo. August 2014. http://aestomas. org/comunidades-tabasquenas- demandan-a-autoridades-por-contaminacion- Diario Oficial de la Federación 2014b. Ley de mediante-amparo-colectivo/
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Watts, Michael 2012. A Tale of Two Gulfs: Life, Petroleum Revenues Historically and Comparatively. Death, and Dispossession along Two Oil Frontiers. In Owen Logan and John-Andrew McNeish (eds), American Quarterly 64 (3): 437–467. Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas. London: Pluto Press. Watts, Michael 2015. Frontiers as Social Space: Edges of the State, Ordering Power & Governing Territory. Presentation at PhD course Governance at the Edge of the State, University of Copenhagen, 8–11 LIINA-MAIJA QUIST September 2015. Ph.D. CANDIDATE DEVELOPMENT STUDIES Zalik, Anna 2012. The Race to the Bottom and UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI the Demise of the Landlord: The Struggle over [email protected]
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