“When I was a girl, my dad would fill his pangas with mountains of Callo de Hachas and other clams,” says Ramona Mendéz, “and sometimes I even helped him cutting the Callo de Hachas and removing the clams. I also remember more recently when there were almost none at all.”
By 2011, the once plentiful scallop and clam fishery of the Ensenada de La Paz, near the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico, had collapsed. A census in 2011 estimated that the stock of Callo de Hacha penshell clams had fallen to about 100,000 for all three local varieties. In 2012, the population estimate was down below 66,000. Fishing communities without fish inevitably get drawn into desperate strategies to sustain income, and El Manglito in La Paz was no different. Crime, drugs, and despair become the new normal. When authorities close a dying fishery, what people have done for generations to sustain themselves and their families becomes tantamount to illegal fishing. Internal strife within the community grows. Positive visions of the future become as scarce as fish.