Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico, María L Cruz-Torres, 2023, University of Texas Press
The over-representation of women in the most precarious aspects of the informal economy often goes overlooked, but in the Global South this can be a critical aspect of social relations.
Women’s lowly status is hardly surprising, given that even in the formal labour market they are so often confined to sectors that provide low-quality, insecure, and poorly paid jobs—if they are lucky to find employment at all.
The gender gap in job participation in regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean continues to be highly elevated, and in some respects has been exacerbated by Covid-19 and the subsequent supply chain shortages.
In 2022, 48 out of every 100 working-age women in Latin America and the Caribbean did not participate in the labour market and there was a gap of 22.6 percentage points between male and female participation.
This is compounded by a male-dominated culture that continues to consign women to domestic roles and sectors: in LAC, women still undertake the vast majority of unpaid care work, spending between 6.3 and 29.5 hours more per week than men caring for others.
In short, much of the labour executed by women continues to be undervalued or marginalised, generally degraded by society, if not rendered conveniently invisible.
What is surprising, however, is the cursory attention given by the Left to this issue, and in particular to the marginalised role often assigned to feminist Marxism despite its critical attention to the specific forms of exploitation faced by women in capitalist societies.
Some strands of Marxist theory and practice on the left remain resistant to feminist contributions to socialism, often excusing this through a dismissive hostility to any concentration on gender without reference to class.
It is hardly surprising that some exasperated feminist scholars believe Marxist accounts of exploitation are simply unable to understand specific gender-related dimensions of the exploitation and oppression of labour under capitalism.
We can bemoan this state of affairs as much as we like, but a fruitful way of responding can be to look at the labour of women in a more granular way through ethnographic studies.
These can highlight how women themselves confront disdain for their labour, and in response to exploitation develop the solidarity and consciousness that is a distinguishing feature of the organised working class.
María Cruz-Torres offers a good start with Pink Gold, which examines women’s historical and contemporary participation in the local seafood industry of Mazatlán, a large port and one of the most important tourist destinations in Mexico.
She explores the trajectory and cultural role of the city’s changueras, women market traders selling predominantly shrimp in the informal economy.
Once persecuted and harassed by local authorities as an obstacle to tourism development, they have through their own struggle become active contributors to the local economy, symbols of resistance and perseverance, and icons of popular culture in southern Sinaloa.
Moreover, their work takes place within an economy both local and global, dealing in a prized commodity—seafood, especially shrimp, which has become a trademark of Mazatlán and an important determinant of social relations at each link of the commodity chain.
Through a close understanding of the lives of these women, Cruz-Torres addresses interconnections between gender and labour as well as the politics of resistance and survival in an industry traditionally understood as male-dominated.
She explores how a group with limited economic resources and social capital has undertaken collective action to assert economic and political rights to resources and public space.
Those struggles have been courageous—in 1984, for example, local authorities tried to strip the changueras of their shrimp, provoking a violent confrontation with police that sparked both cross-class solidarity with middle-class students but also a new consciousness of their persecuted condition.
Positioning her study in theoretical work on feminist political ecology, the social relations of commodities, and gender, the author provides a valuable account of women’s participation in informal economies in the Global South.
She asks how a group of women who neither own the means of production nor exert any control in the decision-making process over how resources are used can still effect meaningful change through their control of other stages of the commodity chain.
There have been few such studies applying feminist political ecology in Mexico—addressing how gender shapes women’s connections to natural resources through their labour—making this work both original and ground-breaking.
Indeed, next time you eat a shrimp, think of the changueras.
Read this and receive articles straight to your inbox by subscribing on Substack
Categories: Mexico, North America