In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

From the smallest towns to the largest cities across Mexico, the annual celebration of a community’s patron saint’s feast day is a greatly anticipated and much-lauded event. In Ciudad del Carmen, the veneration of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, the Virgen del Carmen, is no exception . The patron saint’s feast stretches across several days each summer in the blazing heat and occasional deluges of late July. The height of the fiesta is the procession of the Virgen del Carmen, a delicate, bridelike statue in a brown brocade dress, draped in a white lace mantle with her head surrounded by a huge gold coronet. The city takes to the streets to watch the eighteen-inch-tall brunette virgin atop a flower-strewn platform carried in procession through Ciudad del Carmen, passing under colorful flags and swirling foil confetti. Known as a patroness and protector of sailors and fishers, Our Lady of Carmen is similarly celebrated in port cities throughout the Catholicized world, from the tourist mecca of Ibiza, Spain, to the small fishing village of Ocumare de la Costa, Venezuela. Fishers and other Carmelitas alike turn out in droves each year to watch the Virgen proceed through the streets and on a maritime peregrination. Each year the port of Carmen officially closes to all other traffic for three hours in the middle of the afternoon of the procession, and hundreds of small, decoratively festooned fishing boats accompany the figure on its recorrido through the Laguna de Términos. The Virgen del Carmen was named patron saint to the island on July 16, 1717, the day the Spanish finally recaptured the island of Tris from the English palo de tinte plunderers reluctant to give up their settlement . As patroness of the sea, the Virgen del Carmen offered hope, solace, and courage to many a sailor on the Spanish Main. The centrality of the Virgen’s dominion over the port of Carmen and coastal PART 2 THE PESQUERA AND THE PETROLERA 104 The Pesquera and the Petrolera Campeche through the centuries would see her relevance as patroness of the sea only strengthen. The Virgencita, or Little Virgin, witnessed the transition of the port of Carmen to commercial fishing, offering her blessings over shrimp trawlers. The Virgen’s annual procession through the streets and the more participatory phase through the Laguna de Términos carries a deep symbolism that resonates with the region’s political economy. Rather than an ancient tradition rooted in the community’s distant past, the practice of carrying the Virgen is instead quite modern. The figure’s first paseo through the Laguna de Términos began in 1956 by fishers under the guidance and inspiration of a much-revered priest who rose through the ranks to become a bishop, Monsignor Faustino Robelledo Blanco. The modern tradition of carrying the Virgen aboard the shrimp boats anchored itself within the coastal community’s cultural heritage. Thus, the maritime procession is explicitly linked to the success of the commercialization of the shrimp industry in the port of Carmen and the veneration and propitiation of the Virgen as the patron saint of fishers. For fifty-two years the Virgen figure was carried by a commercial shrimp boat in a stately marine procession through the Laguna de Términos to the delight of Carmelitas and visitors from near and far. For decades while shrimping carried the economy of Carmen, a shrimping boat, or cameronero, carried the Virgen. However, after the decline of commercial shrimping—and indeed all fishing activity, including the region ’s long-vibrant artisanal, or ribereño, sector—a thriving competitor stepped up to carry the figure instead: the petroleum industry. Thus, it should not have come as a surprise when in 2009 Cotemar, just one of the dozens of private offshore oil-services providers contracted by Pemex, stepped up to assume the mantle. Surely the aging and decrepit shrimp trawler was unfit and unsafe to carry out the important public ritual. The shrimp trawler, one of only a couple of dozen remaining of Carmen’s fleet of hundreds, was a sign of a once-robust industry now in decline. Now, a new era would be ushered in, distinguished by new traditions shaped by the ever-changing cycle of commodity exploitation in the Laguna de Términos. Even though the age of oil arrived in Ciudad del Carmen three decades earlier, the thought of passing the Virgen figure from cameronero to petrolero—from shrimp boat to...

Share