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Lessons of Governance from Traditional Fisheries: The Huaves of San Francisco del Mar Pueblo Viejo, Oaxaca

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Book cover Coastal Heritage and Cultural Resilience

Part of the book series: Ethnobiology ((EBL))

Abstract

To cope with fisheries unsustainability, the Mexican government has recently promoted strategies of public participation to support decision making. This type of strategy is important in the Huave Lagunar System (HLS) in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, where fishers have historically maintained close ethnobiological interactions with their natural resources. This chapter describes the pre-Hispanic fishery system of San Francisco del Mar Pueblo Viejo under the premise that self-government practices in HLS favor the pursuit of social resilience, the ability of a self-organizing system to return to its original state after being disturbed by extreme events. The design of a Fisheries and Climate Planning Agenda that includes strategies considering key aspects of social diversity presents itself as an opportunity to facilitate the reach of social support for decision making, an essential step toward supporting a realistic panorama of sustainability for the sector.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tehuanos, or nortes, are arid, strong winds of up to 120 km/h that flow along the Isthmus of Tehuantepec from October to February for periods of 3–5 days. This large-scale phenomenon temporally defines the dynamics of coastal lagoons (e.g., replacement of water masses, evaporation rates, recruitment of organisms) and strongly influences the Gulf of Tehuantepec (Cervantes-Hernández et al. 2006).

  2. 2.

    In 1970, most of the inhabitants left this locality because dunes, known locally as the “loma blanca,” broke through the town and covered it. This phenomenon was occasioned by the introduced livestock that intensively grazed the native coastal vegetation, eroding the capability of the dunes to withstand wind erosion. A new locality, San Francisco del Mar Pueblo Nuevo, was created and, since 1994, has been the head of the municipality. Few inhabitants remained in the old town.

  3. 3.

    Shrimp.

  4. 4.

    Simplified, each person is linked to a companion animal life force, which is the nahual (Scholz 2011).

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Zepeda-Domínguez, J.A., Espinoza-Tenorio, A. (2018). Lessons of Governance from Traditional Fisheries: The Huaves of San Francisco del Mar Pueblo Viejo, Oaxaca. In: Price, L., Narchi, N. (eds) Coastal Heritage and Cultural Resilience. Ethnobiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99025-5_4

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