Ten years have passed since the members of Asociación de Pescadores Artesanales de las Lagunas Costeras (APALCO) began defending the biodiversity of this protected area along with their economic autonomy through sorority.

Report: Carla Alves

Translation from Spanish: Christina Hamilton

Photographs: Mara Quintero

“I always say that the lagoon gives us everything. We don’t want to leave this place not even when we’re dead. I think we all feel the same way,” says Beatriz, president of APALCO since 2009, and one of the 15 fishing families who, for five generations, have lived on the shores of Laguna de Rocha, in Uruguay.

It’s midday on a Sunday, and the sun shines brightly on the immense, calm water of the lagoon. At the edge of the water, some girls and boys play while more diners arrive at the Cocina de la Barra (Sandbar Kitchen). The specialities include prawn empanadas and the silverside fillets, just some of the recipes prepared by the women who have been part of the restaurant for ten years. Today, Beatriz, Andrea, Natalia, Valeria, Paola, Elizabeth, Mariana, and Leticia are working.

While making siri crab croquettes, Beatriz explains that every weekend the dishes are freshly prepared, and they vary depending on the day’s catch, as they only serve what the lagoon produces.

During the week, some of the cooks also go fishing, like Andrea, who goes out alone in her boat. She loves this activity: “I’ve tried other things, but no, what I like most is this, and I do it my way and at my pace. It’s what I was taught, what was instilled in me, and what I want to teach to my daughter, even though she’s already told me she’s going to be a soccer player,” she says, laughing a bit.

Beatriz does not go fishing, but she clarifies that there are other related jobs that the women from the lagoon have always done, which are cumbersome and often overlooked: cleaning fish and crabs, deboning them and selling them.

The Path to Economic Autonomy

In 2010, Laguna de Rocha, a 72-square-kilometre area, was declared a protected area due to its high biodiversity. The lagoon is home to various species of fish, crabs, prawns and molluscs, as well as birds such as herons, coots, gulls, terns, storks and skimmers. It connects with the Atlantic Ocean through a 100-metre sandbar, which is referred to as “la barra.”

Cocina de la Barra’s history is closely tied to the lagoon’s incorporation into the National System of Protected Areas in Uruguay (SNAP). At that moment, the women saw an opportunity because the area, unknown despite its beauty, would become a tourist attraction, which would lead to potential visitors needing some type of amenities.

A year earlier, the Uruguayan Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries (MGAP) had come to the lagoon offering funding for the Asociación de Pescadores Artesanales de Lagunas Costeras (Association of Artisan Fishermen of Coastal Lagoons) (APALCO) to implement a project. At the time, the men were leading the association and they wanted to develop prawn aquaculture, which consisted of creating enclosures for prawn farming, given that prawn production is not always possible. The project failed because it was not approved by the National System of Protected Areas in Uruguay. Faced with this, the men gave up: “They closed the doors, kept fishing, and that was it,” Beatriz said.

However, the women saw that those resources were still available and decided they would not waste the opportunity, as they needed funds to start the business and could not get them any other way. “Maybe this is the only chance we’ll have,” they thought. When they contacted MGAP again, they offered them funding for a productive venture. Thus, Cocina de la Barra was born.

“When we were given the opportunity to start this business, what we wanted, first of all, was for no one from outside to come and open a super-duper restaurant that would change everything. Because we’ve lived here on the lagoon our whole lives.

We’re cooks, and we’re also fisherwomen,” they say, adding: “We thought it was better to do it ourselves, before someone from outside came along and didn’t have any respect for the place.” Setting up the kitchen changed the lives of the fisherwomen and their community forever. For the first time, women achieved economic independence and they were the ones who achieved important advances in the area: the connection to potable water, electricity, and the road for boys, girls and adolescents to attend school.

“We’d always worked alongside the men; I could even say we worked even more than them. My mother, for example, although she didn’t really like going fishing, would be there working with the fish as soon as my father arrived and she was the last to finish because she was the one who washed all the boxes, sorted them and delivered the fish to the buyer, but the money wasn’t hers. The eight of us changed that,” Beatriz celebrates.

It was not easy. They say that working in the restaurant meant a significant change in family dynamics, especially for those with young children, given that caregiving duties continued to fall on women. However, there was a process of adaptation through which household work began to be shared with men.

The women were also able to purchase their own vehicles and obtain driver’s licences for the first time. Previously, to leave the lagoon, they had to take a taxi or hop on the van that took the children to school. Seeing the progress, many men realised the project was a good thing in the end and they began to collaborate, for example, with the construction of the restaurant decks and benches.

Cocina de la Barra also benefitted the other women in the lagoon, who are responsible for processing the siri crab, “the star product” as they call it. “Siri crab is what we used to work with and what those who remain working at home continue to do. It’s the women who extract the flesh, and that’s their income, not so much the fish, which remains the men’s work.” To extract the siri crab flesh, the women spend an hour and a half cleaning it on the shore of the lagoon, debone it, dissect it, boil the white flesh first and then the black part from the claws. All this to obtain just one kilo.

“We changed the entire community, even the veterans; even my father changed. He’s always really happy to go fishing so we have everything we need, and he’s grateful,” Beatriz says.

Currently, APALCO’s only income comes from the gastronomic venture. “We try to maintain everything we fought so hard for, everything we did to keep all the association’s paperwork up to date, the bank account,” Beatriz comments.

The Lagoon’s Lack of Protection

With the lagoon’s incorporation into the National System of Protected Areas in Uruguay, the Specific Advisory Commission (CAE) began its sessions. The CAE is comprised of the National Directorate of Aquatic Resources (DINARA), the National Commission for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the Municipality of Rocha, the Directorate of Artisan Fishing, the Directorate of the Environment, the Municipality of La Paloma, and local fishermen and producers. It was at this forum that the need for electricity and for the area to be protected against predatory fishing, which threatens biodiversity and the livelihoods of those who are knowledgeable about the lagoon’s cycles and respect it, were raised. However, the CAE has not met for four years.

APALCO members lament that the area “is very neglected” by the authorities and that the only ones who respect the fishing seasons are the locals. “There is no one monitoring the water,” they complain. In this regard, they explained that, despite the agreements on fishing exclusion zones, as well as having defined permitted volumes, they cannot prevent outsiders from arriving with their boats and exploiting the resources, since the State grants permits for sport fishing but then fails to monitor the activity.

As a result, “fishing has changed; it’s dropped dramatically,” they point out. The reason, they say, is that there is a lack of space for discussion and a lack of control systems. “Everything affects the area: the openings of the sandbar, how and when they are done, who has the power to demand that they come and open it, whether it’s the producers; whether the riverbank floods because they allow construction near the stream; what they allow to be planted and what they don’t, and what pesticides they use on the crops. The same thing happens in fishing: There are those that respect and those that exploit, how many nets they put in, what size fish they keep. There is negligence,” Beatriz concludes.

Establishing Networks

Over the years, the restaurant has become a space for the women’s empowerment, not only economically and in leadership, but also personally. And it has united them to confront gender violence.

“We learned to talk to each other and with the professionals” from the University of the Republic, Cecilia and Ximena. “Before, we didn’t get involved. We knew what the woman next door was going through with her husband, and we didn’t get involved. We had to confront those issues a few years ago. But they made us grow stronger,” they say.

As part of the project they are implementing with the grant from Fondo Mujeres del Sur (FMS), the group seeks to create a cooperation network with other fishing groups working in the region. It was with this objective that they travelled to Chile to meet with an organisation in Valparaíso.

As evening fell, they told us about their travel experience. They summarised the exchange as being “spectacular”. They recall it was their first time travelling by plane, and the experience allowed them to see new possibilities and appreciate their own achievements as well. They were able to see the comparisons, and this allowed them to observe that, while Chilean women are more advanced in terms of legislation, the environment in which they work is much more sexist than in Rocha. For example, women often cannot go fishing because the men will not let them “for fear of bad luck.”

Andrea light-heartedly recalls that back in Chile, she tried to strike up a conversation with some fishermen, but they ignored her. Then she told them, “I do the same thing you do,” and that’s how she got their attention. Incredulous, they began to ask her questions. She told them: “I go out in a small dinghy boat; sometimes I go out alone, sometimes I go out with my husband. I set up my own net, cast the net, catch the fish, fillet the fish, and process the siri crab and prawns.” “They looked at me as if to say, ‘Where on earth did she come from?’” she says, laughing.

“Like any vulnerable community, sometimes you have to fight back. And we, as women, sometimes even more so, because people and the authorities listen more to men than to women. They think we might be pushovers,” they recapitulate, adding: “When we started, there were very few of us, we were very timid, but we’ve changed. We’re not like that anymore; we’ve come to defend ourselves.”