Ahead of the small boat, as it bobs on the waters near La Paz in the Mexican state of Baja California, 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.
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.”
-
Las Guardianas del Conchalito. ‘I used to ask my husband’s permission if I wanted to leave the house. Now if I go out, I just tell him: “I’ll be back”,’ one says
The women set about positioning boulders around the perimeter of the plantation to stop the lorries from coming in and to deter the motorbikes. They dug channels from the sea to restore the water flow to the mangroves and cleared the rubbish. They kept watch at the water’s edge, shouting at the illegal fishing boats, some of whose occupants were their own relatives, to go away.
And perhaps most impressively, they patrolled the land through the night, facing down, they say, the drug-dealers and telling them to move on.
Today we are talking near the old picnic table, sitting under a newly built palapa, or thatched sun shelter. Although February is winter and it’s early morning, the sun is already strong; temperatures will reach 28C (82.4F) in a few hours’ time.
The Baja peninsula, snaking for 775 miles (1,250km) down the Mexican coast from the US border, is desert plains dotted with cacti. It is a growing tourist destination, and the guardianas suspect some of the rubbish in their mangroves was illegally dumped by construction companies.
-
‘It’s not just what’s happening in the ocean … it all affects the shellfish,’ says Wildcoast’s Celeste Ortega, pictured. Above, the palapa where Las guardianas meet
The jewels of the region are the beaches: the nearby coves of Balandra are said to be the most beautiful in Mexico. And the seas here in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, is teeming: the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau called it “the world’s aquarium”. It is home to about 900 species of fish, including more than 70 found nowhere else on the planet, and its marine megafauna includes whale sharks, grey whales and humpback whales.
Slowly, the fishers of El Manglito came to understand the importance of sustainability, and the need to stick to quotas so the shellfish would thrive. The women’s first meeting around the picnic table had been in 2017; by autumn the following year, the area was unrecognisable. The drug-dealers had moved on; the fly-tipping had stopped. The mangroves are green and healthy now, and the whole plantation is pristine, with no litter in sight.
At one point during our conversation, a motorbike appears with two young lads on the back. Several of the women get up and run across, shouting at them to go away. They do and quickly: the guardianas clearly are not women to be ignored.
After the mangrove was cleaned up, the women say that the men thought they could go back to how things had been – them doing the fishing, the women cleaning the shellfish for very little money, as they had in the past. “But we felt we had done the work,” says Daniela Bareño, 35. “We knew we deserved more. Chela would go down to the shore when they were out in their boats and yell: ‘These are ours.’ And the men would shout: ‘Get back to your kitchens.’”
By now they were getting funding from environmental organisations. One of their backers was Wildcoast, a California-based charity dedicated to conserving coastal and marine ecosystems. Celeste Ortega, Wildcoast’s mangrove conservation manager, says: “We started talking to the women about the mangroves and how it’s not just what’s happening in the ocean, but what’s happening on the land that affects the shellfish.
“The trees are a vital part of the ecosystem and that’s the reason the shellfish are here: they attach themselves to the mangrove trees, and that’s how they grow.”
Today, the Guardianas del Conchalito is a legally recognised community co-operative and all its members receive a living wage.
“We do things differently from the men,” says Bareño. “They had a more individualistic attitude; we work democratically. We have meetings each Monday, we talk things through, we reach decisions collectively.”
-
The picnic table where Las Guardianas first got together; some of the community’s 100,000 or so oysters; Andrea, El Manglito’s first university graduate; the mangrove seedlings being planted to restore the plantation
And their work has paid off in other ways too. Andrea Mendez Garcia, 27, studied marine biology after school, becoming the first university graduate from El Manglito. Her inspiration is her mother, Marta – a guardiana.
Other women say their work has influenced their children as well. “My girls are proud of me,” says Adriana Mendez, 56, of her two daughters. “One is at university doing bioengineering and agriculture.”
Away from the sea, the biggest changes for the Guardianas del Conchalito have been in their own lives. “Before all this, I didn’t really believe in myself,” says Reyes. “But now I know I can achieve things: I know it’s possible.”
Other women say their relationships have been upended, too. “I used to ask my husband’s permission if I wanted to leave the house,” says Rosa María Hale Romero, who’s in her early 60s. “Now if I go out, I just tell him: ‘I’ll be back.’ And instead of me serving him, he brings me my coffee.”
All the women laugh, in shared recognition; and then they are silent for a moment. After a while, Reyes speaks again. “The truth is, it wasn’t only the mangrove we transformed,” she says. “We transformed ourselves as well.”
