Book Review: Pink Gold

Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico, by María L. Cruz-Torres (2023). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

María L. Cruz-Torres’s recent ethnography, Pink Gold, examines shrimp trading in the Mexican port city of Mazatlán (Sinaloa State). In the text, the author offers a detailed analysis of the role that women play as shrimp traders, focusing on their livelihoods and the challenges of selling a highly perishable and valuable commodity that is also heavily regulated and policed. Pink Gold recounts how these women, locally known as changueras, have become integral in linking aquaculture and extraction from estuaries to year-round shrimp consumption within the local community. In doing so, the book illuminates the complex social relations, hardships, and labor practices inherent in this largely informal economy.

Pink Gold consists of seven chapters and offers a nuanced examination of the work involved in being a changuera. The first two chapters provide an account of the socio-economic, political, and environmental conditions, as well as the women’s personal circumstances, that led them to shrimp trading. Chapter One, “Contested Grounds,” situates women’s shrimp trading in the informal economy during the 1980s, as a response to the effects of Mexico’s debt crisis. Working as a shrimp trader was challenging for two main reasons; first, the women had long daily commutes from their peripheral communities into Mazatlán – and second, they sold poached estuarine shrimp, which was illegal under Mexico’s fisheries legislation, as only fishing cooperatives could market shrimp. The exclusion of changueras from legal forms of trading forced them to transport pounds of shrimp in buckets, often on buses or, in the best case, by hiring a driver. This shrimp was often confiscated at checkpoints, and changueras faced harassment from fishery inspectors, marines employed by fishing cooperatives, soldiers, and police officers. Finally, selling shrimp on the street was also illegal because changueras could not prove that their product was legally caught, and they lacked the necessary municipal permit to sell on the streets.

With the support of local university students, changueras eventually organized a union in order to guarantee collective political representation. By the end of the 1980s, the municipal authorities had recognized the changueras’ union, thus legalizing the women’s role as shrimp traders. They were allowed to operate in an open market, under the condition that they dealt solely in shrimp sourced from newly established aquaculture farms, a development stemming from private investments linked to the opening of the Mexican economy. This neoliberal transformation had different outcomes: changueras could now prove the shrimp’s legal origin, and the shrimp could be delivered to them (such that they no longer needed to travel to buy it). Additionally, because farmed shrimp have at least two annual production cycles, changueras could now sell product for most of the year. This chapter recounts the dual reconfiguration brought about by neoliberalism: as shrimp vending on Mazatlán’s streets grew in the 1980s, driven by Mexico’s debt crisis and subsequent structural reforms leading to underemployment, the opening of Mexico’s economy enabled changueras to become established shrimp vendors instead of peddlers.

Chapter Two, “On Becoming Changueras,” examines how the term changueras has taken on different meanings over time. For people familiar with the lexicon of Sinaloan fishing, the word dismissively refers to either women-poachers or women who sell poached shrimp. Women shrimp traders, however, have transformed the changuera label into a symbol of identity, empowerment, and livelihood. As such, this chapter illustrates how economic necessity drove some changueras into shrimp trading, with their work shaped by personal experiences, family ties, and community relationships.

Chapters Three to Seven examine the changueras’ everyday work-related challenges at Mazatlán’s municipal market against the backdrop of harsh economic conditions and the rise of drug-fueled violence. These chapters detail how, in their efforts to sell a perishable commodity and procure economic necessities for their households, changueras leverage their bargaining skills, assertiveness, and entrepreneurship, along with the extensive knowledge of shrimp that they acquired in their home fishing communities. Changueras must also cultivate social relations within the market in and beyond Mazatlán; market shrimp, as Cruz-Torres shows, is a commodity that, at the point of selling, is infused with social value seen in the changueras’ work, their social relations, and moral obligations. Throughout these chapters, Cruz-Torres examines the entanglements between the moral and commodity economies in play and the ways in which these reinforce each other.

Changueras must also navigate friendship and competition amongst themselves – as well as the cordial but often aggressive, even violent, relationships with some customers, shrimp wholesalers, and money lenders. Being a changuera requires more than simply the skills of the trade (bargaining, entrepreneurship, and assertiveness), labor-power (setting up their stands, carrying and moving buckets and tubs of shrimp and ice), and time (long days that begin early and end late). It also requires emotional labor and resilience to handle aggressive customers and money lenders, along with the courage to navigate the uncertainties of shrimp trading in street markets.

Livelihoods in shrimp trading are difficult to sustain. Changueras often “just work to pay [their] debts” (222), a burden that causes them to toil through stormy or cold weather, illnesses, emergencies, and family celebrations. To manage these economic challenges and cover their work and household expenses, changueras rely on informal credit and savings networks involving individuals in- and outside the shrimp market. Central to this is the practice of cundina, a rotating savings system in which a group of women periodically contribute money with the goal of eventually receiving a larger lump sum. They also use Mexico’s common informal credit system known as fiado, which consists of taking goods to sell and re-paying for them later. This transaction “is tightly bound to the trust between vendor and customer” (236). Informal credit and saving systems enable changueras to continue their market presence, even when sales are down. Yet, when money lenders or wholesalers find out that changueras are paying other debts or that they do not have money to pay, they can become aggressive and insulting. As such, fear permeates the relationship between changueras and their money lenders – and debt, along with the anxiety it causes, demonstrates the fragility of social relationships mediated by money and commodities.

By providing a nuanced ethnographic account of shrimp trading, Cruz-Torres shows how changueras are intertwined in the local and global dynamics of capitalism. The book traces the interplay between structural socio-economic conditions and women’s life trajectories, while also showing how individual changueras have made their own ways in Mexico’s male-dominated seafood sector. Cruz-Torres argues that “gender and socio-economic class shape the manner by and through which women historically were able to carve out their unique livelihoods as shrimp traders in rural and urban contexts in Northern Mexico” (xvi). As such, Cruz-Torres offers crucial insights into the making of gendered labor regimes in Mexico.

Pink Gold sensitively captures the travails of work in Mazatlán’s informal seafood economy. However, it does also miss some opportunities to deepen the analysis of the conundrums intrinsic to shrimp trading. For example, since the livelihoods of the changueras depend on shrimp aquaculture, which is in decline due to the effects of climate change, engaging with the literature examining work, labor, and nature is a must (see, for example, Besky and Blanchette 2019). What does it mean for these women to rely on shrimp monocultures? And what risks stem from the transformation of shrimp from a seasonal source of food into a year-round commodity? It is not enough to simply make mention of the fragility of shrimp production or to note that these transformations are not of interest to changueras because their main concern is to make a decent living. A wider frame could situate the book’s economies of shrimp farming and trading within the planetary climate crisis.

Furthermore, there is no analysis of how shrimp trading reproduces the conditions of self-exploitation and accumulation (Gago 2017). Cruz-Torres’s ethnography does show the ways in which these processes are constantly engendered and reproduced, but it is in the rules and penalties outlined in the changueras’ union that self-exploitation becomes a (veiled) requirement. One rule requires them to work “every day of the year unless they are sick or have an emergency” (136). This rule contrasts with how, as noted by the author, some changueras would prefer to work only on weekends or during high-sale days or due to their social obligations which, in many cases, means that they must take on a second job. Rules are enforced through penalties that can consist of “suspending women from working for two to four weeks especially when sales are at the highest” (137). This harsh penalty is similar to a sanction that I have recorded in Mexico’s automotive industry, which is applied to subcontracted workers when they are held responsible for assembly-line stoppages (González Jiménez 2024). Regardless, as resourceful and resilient women, changueras are usually able to navigate their suspension at the market by simply selling shrimp elsewhere.

Yet, it is in such moments that I longed for a discussion of how such self-exploitation is naturalized by the shrimp traders themselves – or how the draconian rules and penalties interfere with the sphere of social reproduction, while also reproducing the long-standing and sharp separation between so-called “productive” and “reproductive” labor. Criticism of this and other practices, I believe, would not undermine Cruz-Torres’s larger effort to document the challenges and struggles that the changueras face in carving out their livelihoods within an overall context of economic precarity and drug-fueled violence. Such a critique, instead, could offer insight into how the forms of discipline often found in factory work also operate within the so-called “informal economy.” It could, furthermore, expand our understanding of the ways in which workers juggle their livelihoods with care responsibilities during this era of neoliberal precarity intersected by the violence unleashed by the War on Drugs.

In conclusion, Pink Gold contributes to the anthropology of work by decentering the worker-wage relationship (Denning 2010; Millar 2014); by situating women shrimp traders as workers and protagonists, the ethnography illuminates how making a living often means creating one’s own employment in the informal sector, and it lays bare the travails and risks of such an endeavor. Pink Gold also contributes to other fields connected to the anthropology of work such as commodity studies, gift economies, studies of reproductive labor, and the anthropology of capitalism. For scholars and students of Mexico, as well as anyone interested in food production and supply chains, informal economies, or gendered labor relations, this is a must-read ethnography.

References

Besky, Sarah, and Alex Blanchette, eds. 2019. How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Denning, Michael. 2010. “Wageless Life.” New Left Review 66:79-88.

Gago, Verónica. 2017. Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

González Jiménez, Alejandra. 2024. “Economy of Favors: Tiered Labor Systems on Mexico’s Car Assembly Lines.” Cultural Anthropology 39(3):400-427.

Millar, Katheleen M. 2014. “The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 29(1):32-53.

Author Biography

Alejandra González Jiménez is a sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research examines automobile production in Mexico in the era of free trade.