Building Knowledge and Community in Mexico
By Victoria Carvajal
This past summer, I spent a month living on Isla El Pardito, a small island off the coast of Baja California Sur in Mexico's Sea of Cortez, that for over the past century has been home to a single multi-generational fishing family, La Familia Cuevas. Returning to the broader region felt like a full-circle moment, as I had first visited years before on a study-abroad course as an undergraduate student, a trip that solidified my wish to build my career in this field. But this was my first time visiting the island itself, as was the opportunity to meet its community. My work there centers on the human dimensions of artisanal, or small-scale, fishing communities, taking a look at how people who depend on the ocean for their livelihoods make decisions about the resources they manage, and what makes an outside partnership with researchers or managers feel collaborative rather than extractive.
One of the most important policies for fieldwork prioritized by my advisor’s lab, the Senko Lab for Marine Megafauna & Fisheries Conservation at ASU, is to build long-term working relationships based on earned trust and genuine, ongoing investment in the wellbeing of the communities we work with. So instead of launching into surveys or interviews this summer, I spent the month mostly observing, listening, and only informally piloting some early ideas, a decision that ended up shaping the entire trip. I didn't expect just how warmly and readily this very tight-knit, multi-generational fishing community would welcome me into their lives.
The Cuevas family is made up of wonderful, incredibly generous people who truly treated me as one of their own, and within days I felt less like a visiting researcher and more like someone they'd simply folded into their day-to-day lives. The value in the human relationships I was able to start building and the knowledge I gained from the perspectives of people who have been working with the ocean for over a century were exactly the kind of firsthand grounding I was hoping for in order to shape my research questions around what actually matters to them. Watching how decisions get made, who has a say, what counts as a fair trade-off, and what “collaboration” actually looks like from the communities’ side has helped me start to understand more of their perspectives and provide a far sharper sense of which research questions are worth asking. Juan and Felipe Cuevas, two brothers who run the island's fishing operations and the community’s collaboration with the Senko Lab, both worked with me extensively to hear my ideas and promised to help me connect with up to 80 surrounding fishery communities next summer!
Parallel to that work, I helped co-lead another Senko Lab project focused on novel, fisher-invented bycatch reduction solutions, which brought its own memorable moments, including a night on the water when our team encountered what may have been a hawksbill and green sea turtle species hybrid (an incredibly rare and special moment none of us were prepared for!). But the most meaningful part of that project involved a modified gillnet design we tested for the first time this season. Rather than a solely researcher-developed endeavor, the idea for this specialized fishing net came from one of the Senko Lab’s partners at our Atlantic Ocean research site in North Carolina, a fisherman who designed the modification himself. Witnessing it work in real time and hearing Juan and Felipe affirm its success, was the first time I'd been part of a collaboration on a project jointly developed with a member of the communities we hope to benefit the most.
What stayed with me afterward was less the technology itself and more the concept it laid the groundwork for: a fisherman working in an entirely different ocean basin, on the opposite side of the continent, had arrived at a solution that ended up working for a community he'd never met. That kind of knowledge transfer, moving directly between fishing communities rather than only from researcher to fisher, wasn't something I'd considered before this project. In fact, it opened up an idea that Dr. Senko and I are incredibly excited about: potentially facilitating a fisher learning exchange, in which the North Carolina fisherman who designed the gillnet visits the Cuevas family in Mexico, and vice versa. It's a project that would combine several of my worlds simultaneously, from translating between English and Spanish to working in the exact region I already know well from a period I previously spent at Duke University's Marine Lab, and it's already shaping how I'm thinking about the next phase of my research. None of it would mean much, though, without the part that's ironically hardest to put into a research synopsis: the kindness of a community that welcomed me into their daily lives, and their willingness to share their perspectives with someone who showed up hoping to learn.
