Fishers At Work, Workers At Sea: Puerto Rican Journey Thru Labor & Refuge

7. Power Games: Work Versus Leisure Along Puerto Rico's Coast

7 Power Games Work Versus Leisure Along Puerto Rico's Coast IN THE LATE 19805, working on behalf of the Southeast Regional Office of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), we and several colleagues spent the better part of a year visiting coastal municipalities and small islands in the Puerto Rico/U.S. Virgin Island archipelago, interviewing sportfishers and creating an inventory of recreational infrastructure. This work was part of the NMFS's attempt to incorporate into its research agenda more studies of leisure uses of the nation's coastal and marine resources, which constituted a shift away from its previous focus on commercial uses of the coast. These shifting research priorities reflected the growing political and economic influence of leisure capital interests on or near the coasts of the Americas. Through the 1990s, tourism became one of the largest global industries in the world, converting marine and coastal landscapes in ways that have far-reaching implications for the labor and livelihood of fishing families (Griffith 1999). Our work for NMFS involved documenting the existence of and discussing the use of marinas, launching ramps, boat storage areas, and the like; speaking with members of sportfishing clubs; discovering budding or incipient boating, lodging, and other tourist facilities; and determining the links between commercial and recreational uses of the coast. Like coastal communities throughout the Americas, Puerto Rico's coastal towns have witnessed growth proceeding at rates far higher than most inland regions, creating new jobs and new business opportunities while threatening to exacerbate conflicts over the uses of public and private lands and waters. Although growth in urban port and harbor development, conventional tourism, ecotourism, heritage tourism, and development oriented 194 Copyrighted Material Power Games 195 toward seasonal living and retirement create investment and employment opportunities, they also compete with one another for space, labor, capital, and political favor. These developments occur as commercial fishing and seafood processing, long mainstays of coastal environments, suffer from several problems related to ecosystem changes and new regulatory environments. These problems are likely to arrest the future growth of and alter the complexions of commercial fishing and related industries (Durrenberger 1992, 1995; Griffith 1997, 1999; Maril 1995). One of the critical processes that triggers disagreements and conflicts between the environmental movements and the state and private sectors in Puerto Rico is the sharp increase in tourism and recreational infrastructure in the coastal zone. Most leisure and tourism growth has occurred along the West and East Coasts. Throughout the Caribbean, urban, tourist, and leisure development in the coastal zone tends to directly affect traditional fishing communities in negative ways (Stonich 1998). Puerto Rican fishers, who are directly affected by development and by conservation measures, have developed a critical outlook and have taken an active political stance that puts them at the forefront of many environmental causes. In 1983, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Sanctuary Program, attempting to develop a sanctuary for conservation and recreational purposes along the Southwest Coast, encountered fierce opposition by fishers and community organizations. Members of the local community and fishers themselves felt that a federal marine sanctuary would, in fact, curtail their freedom, penalizing them instead of confronting those principally responsible for mangrove destruction and sewage disposal: specifically, upper-class absentee owners of hates (stilt houses) used as second residences, who had control over the shoreline. We examine this situation in detail later in this chapter. Economic restructuring, with new political economic agendas in competition with one another while traditional ones either remain stable or enter a decline, inevitably creates social problems among residents and between residents and newcomers . Few countries of the Americas have been spared. New Copyrighted Material 196 CHAPTER SEVEN regulations on groundfishing in the Northeast United States, cutting fishing incomes in half, have been enacted against a background of a more generalized decline in textile and other industrial production (Griffith and Dyer 1996). Economic dislocation has been even more common and more disruptive in other parts of the Americas (Nash 1994). Throughout the Caribbean and coastal Latin America, corporations such as Hilton and Marriott have privatized stretches of coastline for resorts that are far beyond the consumption levels of native inhabitants. Gentrification, changing environmental laws, and the strategic use of coastlines by Caribbean and Latin American military forces-in part justified by the trade in immigrants and drugs, both intimately tied to tourism-have displaced natives of coastal dwellings or threatened their ability...