The Mexican women who defied drug-dealers, fly-tippers and chauvinists to build a thriving business
( a fascinating read)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/11/mexico-el-manglito-la-paz-women-mangroves-environment-guardianas-del-conchalito-baja-california-fishing-conservation#img-1
Graciela ‘Chela’ Olachea, one of Las Guardianas. None of the women were well educated but they knew they risked losing everything unless they protected the environment
Seascape: the state of our oceans
The Mexican women who defied drug-dealers, fly-tippers and chauvinists to build a thriving business
The Guardianas del Conchalito ignored chants of ‘get back to your kitchens’, determined to protect the environment and create a sustainable shellfish operation
By Joanna Moorhead in La Paz, Mexico. Photographs by Benjamin Soto for the Guardian
Tue 11 Mar 2025 07.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 14 Mar 2025 12.27 EDT
Ahead of the small boat, as it bobs on the waters near La Paz in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur, is a long line of old plastic bottles strung together on top of the waves. Underneath them are as many as 100,000 oysters, waiting to be sold to the upmarket hotels down the coast. Cheli Mendez, who oversees the project, pulls a shell up from below, cuts it open with a knife, and gives me the contents to try: a plump, tasty oyster. Mendez is one of a group known as Guardianas del Conchalito, or guardians of the shells, and theirs is the first oyster-growing business in the region run entirely by women, she says.
. . . .
But this is far from the only success this unusual group of women has had. It all began with four of them sitting round a rickety picnic table, staring out across a rubbish-strewn mangrove plantation in the spring of 2017. They were angry: their fishing village was being ruined by drug-dealers and fast-encroaching tourism, and the shellfish they treasured were being depleted by illegal fishing. We said to the men, ‘we want to clear the place up. And we want to be paid to do it’ None of the women had been educated beyond school, but they did understand that they risked losing everything unless something was done to change things. “The mangroves were dying, the trash was everywhere,” says Graciela “Chela” Olachea, at 63 the oldest of the group. Huge lorries would arrive to fly-tip on a regular basis, and joyriders on motorbikes would screech across the land. Claudia Reyes, 41, says: “Things were bad, and getting worse.”
Soon others had joined them at the picnic table in El Manglito, the neighbourhood of La Paz made famous by John Steinbeck. He wrote about the area’s pearl divers – the forebears of these proud, strong women. “The picnic table became our office,” says Reyes. They had come up with the name for their group by then, based on the callo de hacha, a rare type of scallop that are a prized local delicacy. “We went to the men who were the decision-makers in our community, and we said, ‘We want to clear the place up. And we want to be paid to do it.’”
The men – their husbands, fathers, grandfathers, sons – were not impressed. But they eventually and reluctantly agreed, offering wages for five women. But now there were 14 meeting around that picnic table. The money amounted to 8,500 Mexican pesos a week (£320) between them all, a tiny amount for each woman. “But we agreed to it,” says Reyes. “We wanted to show we could do this: we wanted to make a difference, and we wanted to earn some money.”
. . . .
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/11/mexico-el-manglito-la-paz-women-mangroves-environment-guardianas-del-conchalito-baja-california-fishing-conservation
= new reply since forum marked as read
