Project title: The Coast’s Bailout: Coastal Resource Use, Quality of Life, and Resilience in Southeastern Puerto Rico
Date: September 2, 2013
Project Number: assign
Investigators and affiliation:
Carlos G. García-Quijano, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island
John J. Poggie, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island
Ana Pitchon, Department of Anthropology, California State University-Domínguez Hills
Miguel Del Pozo, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island
José Alvarado Biostatistical Consulting Services
With the collaboration and assistance of: Víctor Pagán, Natalia Rodríguez, and Yasmín Pérez Ortiz.
Dates Covered: June 1 2010-March 1 2013
Executive Summary:
This document reports on the final results of a three year-long, University of Puerto Rico Sea Grant-funded research project investigating the relationships between the use of Coastal Resources (CR) and the well-being and quality of life (QoL/WB) of people living along the coast of Southeastern Puerto Rico (SE PR). SE PR comprises some of the most rural coastal regions of Puerto Rico and has a rich history of intensive and extensive reliance on local coastal environments, which range from offshore reefs and seamounts to extensive estuaries and inshore coastal forests. Residents of this region have been using local coastal resources for generations: CR-based activities form integral part of many SE PR household economies, but the extent and shape of these are not precisely known.
CR use refers to the small-scale harvesting, processing, and exchange of coastal resources like commercial small-scale fishing, subsistence fishing, commercial and subsistence land crabbing, mangrove oyster and clam harvesting, and non-timber coastal forest resource uses such as picking coconuts. We define QoL/WB broadly as “participation in a social form of life that depends not only on physical health but also on healthy (social) relationships” (after J. Velazco’s 2009). QoL/WB is the REAL objective of public policy, and the various indexes and figures used to estimate and formulate policy for (such as the GDP and ICP), are usually limited in scope (e.g. GDP=formal economic activity) and rely on large assumptions about the relationships, expenditures, and QoL/WB of people. However, a considerable part of the value derived from small-scale CR use is manifested outside the scope of officially reported, formal economic activity. However, this information is usually not available for coastal policy makers as they make decisions about the future of the coast. The main goal of this research is to scientifically document the contribution of the coast (productive coastal communities and the physical environment they depend on) to QoL/WB and to make that information available to policy makers and the public as they evaluate alternative uses of coastal environments.
Many families and communities along the rural coasts of Puerto Rico make a living by combining coastal resource use, preparation, marketing, and selling with mainstream jobs in agriculture, retail, services, government, and local industries. This mixed coastal subsistence pattern has existed and persisted for hundreds of years in Puerto Rico’s coasts and dates at least as far back as the time of sugarcane-dominated Caribbean economies. Coastal communities in Puerto Rico have continued to rely on local CRs for at least part of their subsistence and everyday activities throughout the sweeping social, economic, and cultural changes of the last century. Our project builds on a body of research in the last two decades that has profiled fishery and coastal dependency of people all around the coast of Puerto Rico.
This report is based on three years of field research and analysis conducted between June 2010 and July 2013. These included two long-term field visits June-August 2010 and June-July 2011, coupled with several shorter field visits over the duration of the project to conduct focused research, give presentations, and share the results of our work with local communities. This target audience of this report is policy makers, coastal social science researchers, and others (most importantly local communities and community organizations themselves) with an interest in understanding human reliance on CRs and associated phenomena, to make better policy decisions. It also intends to serve as a blueprint for future research and evaluation, for the continued study of small-scale coastal resource dependence in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the world.
Summary of Research Impacts: Coastal regions around the world are increasingly under population and development pressures. To achieve policies that carefully balance economic development with environmental and livelihood sustainability, it will be essential to empirically assess the contribution of locally-based, small-scale CR use to WB/QoL in communities and beyond. Links between the coast and QoL/WB are evident in practically all realms of SE PR residents’ lives: in commercial and household economies, risk reduction and resilience strategies, food security, family and community relationships, social problem (poverty and crime) avoidance, life and job satisfaction, and aesthetic enjoyment. Many of these links (including those related to production and exchange of coastal products) are manifested outside of formallyreported economic activity: assessments of policy trade-offs that only take into account formally reported economic exchanges will undoubtedly underestimate most benefits of CR use and engagement and thus risk policy failure.
This research shows that the quality of life and well-being of a large proportion of SE PR coastal residents of all walks of life is inextricably linked to the use of -and access to- the coast and its resources. It also provides a methodological blueprint to engage mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to provide policy makers with critical information for fulfilling the true objective of public policy: to enhance people’s total quality of life and well-being. These methods can be applied in other locales on the coast of Puerto Rico and beyond.
Objectives and How They were met:
The original objectives of this research were as follows:
1. To map small-scale coastal resource use in the municipalities of Salinas, Guayama, Arroyo, and Patillas, Puerto Rico.
2. To develop culturally-valid measures of WB/QoL and comunity resilience for the study region.
3. To study the (commercial and non-commercial) harvest-to-consumer movement of local CRs and derived products through social networks.
4. To assess the role of CRs in household economic histories with emphasis on CR use impact on resilience and mitigating economic and environmental uncertainty.
5. To survey the extent to which coastal Puerto Ricans in the study region participate inand benefit from- local small-scale CR harvesting and production.
6. To use modeling and scenario simulation techniques to test hypotheses about the impact of small-scale CR use on coastal communities and beyond.
7. To organize and conduct two multi-sector workshops about the importance of small-scale coastal resource use for Puerto Ricans' well-being, quality of life, and resilience.
Note on Methods and objectives: The overall methodology of this research is that of mixed methods, multidisciplinary ethnography. The principal investigators worked with local undergraduate and graduate students, a bio-statistician (J. Alvarado), and a post-doctoral associate (M. Del Pozo) to use a variety of methods to collect data, including 1) CR use mapping, 2)
Ethnographic Interviewing, 3) Participant Observation, 3) Structured Interviewing, 4) archival and secondary data collection.
We conducted 50 ethnographic, semi-structured interviews, 23 with coastal resource users, 22 with seafood sector, and 5 with community environmental activists. In addition, 47 structured interviews were conducted with a randomly selected sample of coastal resource users, as well as 47 separate interviews with randomly selected coastal community households. A variety of methods of analysis were applied to the different types of collected data, with the goal of achieving multi-layered convergent validity for our increased understanding of QoL/WB and resource use in the region. Data to fulfill the different objectives were gathered sometimes simultaneously, sometimes separately, during the different stages in the research process. This is different from other scientific research designs in which specific, separate procedures are used to gather data for specific objectives. Thus in the interest of brevity and readability the objectives discussion below will focus on identifying important results reached by applying the methods discussed in this paragraph.
Significant activities and findings include the following:
1) A large variety of signs of CR use and dependency can be seen in multiple locations up and down the coast, to the extent that we would characterize the coast of SE PR as a coastal resourceengaged coastal landscape.
2) Many residents of coastal SE PR view the identity of their communities as tied to being CR –engaged, “fishing communities”, to the extent that the communities would change in their very essence if CR-use patterns changed.
3) CR users tend to use coastal environments extensively as well as intensively, harvesting a variety of resources over space and time. Beside the more than 40 species of fish species routinely harvested, local people target a variety of coastal forest resources, sometimes in sustained fashion and other times in episodic or opportunistic fashions. This suggests a large degree of reliance on local environments for income and food security.
4) All CR users interviewed reported engaging in a variety of economic activities, together with CR harvesting. This pattern is well-described for Puerto Rico and other tropical small-scale coastal locations, and is a result of adaptation to local ecological conditions as well as economic uncertainty associated with employment availability in rural coastal locations.
5) A particularly important finding is the identification of a regionally- and culturally significant category of CR-use mode related to the use of mangrove and coastal forest resources known as “Pesca de Monte”. This constitutes a parallel use of the coast to offshore, “commercial” fisheries that has gone unreported in official fishery statistics and is thus a largely unknown value to coastal policy makers.
6) 92% of households routinely consume local CRs. 92% of the fish, 98% of the land crabs, and 97% of the bivalves consumed by interviewed households are locally-harvested.
7) All CR harvesters interviewed have household and/or extended family members who participate in the processing, value-adding and marketing of the CRs they harvest. These family members can benefit by earning money or by receiving part of the catch as payment.
8) In our sample of randomly-chosen local households, the most important ways they accessed CRs for consumption was 1) by being captured and brought home by a household member or 2) by a community CR harvester giving CR products to them as gifts. Even when CRs were bought with money, CRs were bought at either the harvester’ or the buyer’s home, which indicate relatively close social relationships. All of these exchanges are very unlikely to be recorded in official expenditure records, which leads to underestimating the real value of CR use.
9) In a randomly selected sample of 47 coastal resident households in the study region, 17 (36%) engaged in CR harvesting as a source of income. In some communities, like Barrancas in Guayama, virtually all randomly chosen households were CR users.
10) 95.7% of surveyed CR users report routinely giving away as a gift an average of 7% of the products of their harvest to people in their communities including family, friends, or those in need.
11) 45% of surveyed residents report routinely receiving products of local CR harvesters as gifts.
12) In seafood restaurants throughout the Coast, CRs sold are overwhelmingly local (95% routinely sell local CRs, which constitute a mean income of 59.8% (not adjusted for beverages). Seafood-based restaurants that sell local CRs report employing more than 250 people in the study region.
13) Seafood restaurant operators have developed mutually beneficial relationships over time with particular CR harvesters that rely on dependability and quality of harvest products in exchange for guaranteed purchase of total harvest. The most important ways that seafood establishments get the CRs they sell is by close, contractual relationships with local CR users and by personal, local, non-contractual relationships.
14) Interviewed SE PR informants have defined WB/QOL as a multi-faceted phenomena, composed of a variety of domains, including health (not measured in this study), wealth, economic security for household reproduction, participating in reciprocity networks and socially beneficial activities, minimizing the impact of socially-destructive activities (such as crime) in their communities, independence, and enjoyment of the environment.
15) Throughout the study region, various forms of CR harvesting, processing, value-adding, marketing, and selling, figure importantly in the informants’ narratives of QoL/WB, or what they often call “a good life.”
16) Overall, domains related to enjoyment of close social relationships were more highly rated/valued for QoL/WB than material wealth domains (as long as, as one informant put it, wealth “is enough to pay the bills”). This pattern was more marked for people who make a living with CR use.
17) The majority of ethnographic informants viewed their QoL/WB as significantly affected by access to coastal resources in their communities. As one community activist informant put it: “one way or another, everyone around here depends on the coast and fishing”.
18) CR use and related economic activities are widely valued as contributing to avoidance of social problems, specially crime, by providing “honorable work” alternatives to a life of crime. This was one of the most widely mentioned and discussed topics in our interviews. Professional CR users mention specifically seeking out at-risk youth in their kin and neighborhood networks to offer them opportunities for honorable employment.
19) Local communities seem to be keenly aware of the links between CR use and the QoL/WB of their communities. Grassroots community groups pursue enhancing CR use and access as part of their local beneficence agendas. This includes actively organizing and collaborating with local fishing associations and other CR users.
20) Although CR users reported economic histories of occupational multiplicity, they tended to consider CR harvesting as the most beneficial and desirable occupation for their QoL/WB and tended to judge other occupations by their similarity to fishing or by the free time that they allowed to engage in CR use. Thus, they tended to report low occupational fungibility (ability to find satisfactory alternative employment to CR use) even though they clearly had a range of skills and occupational experience.
21) We assembled a range of WB/QOL measures, both developed by us and standardized, that we used in structured questionnaires and that were validated by pre-testing.
22) Responses to questions in a Community Solidarity Index indicate that overall coastal communities in SE PR are face-to-face communities with relatively high cohesion and solidarity.
23) People involved in CR use seem to specially invest in solidarity-enhancing activities and experience relatively higher community solidarity. This seems to reflect a greater engagement with reciprocity-based, rather than market-based, exchanges. As one fisher put it, “ I take care of my community so that the community will take care of me when I’m in need”.
24) Material Style of Life (MSL) data gathered with surveyed SE PR coastal residents indicates that material wealth is generally adequate for basic material needs throughout the coastal region. However, residents working in non-CR use jobs in the formal economy showed significantly higher material wealth than CR users.
25) Does their higher material wealth make residents with non-CR use jobs more satisfied or happier than those who work as CR users?: The answer is NO: In our probability samples, NonCR users reported statistically significant lower scores than CR users in their: i) Satisfaction with Life (using Diener’s SWLS scale), ii) Job Satisfaction (using Pollnac and colleagues’ Job Satisfaction Scale), iii) enjoyment of community relationships (using our Community Solidarity Index).
26) Non-CR users also reported spending relatively less time with family and close friends (one of the most important Qol/WB domains) and reported being less inclined to choose the same way of making a living if they had the chance to live their life over again.
27) The convergence of our data indicates that there is a strong overall positive effect of engaging in CR use as a job on subjective well-being and life satisfaction. This comparison is especially valid because it compares people living in the same communities who report similar life priorities and important domains of QoL/WB.
28) Many Non-CR users nevertheless also perceive coastal resources as important for their QoL/WB. 74% (along with 96% of CR users) agreed with the statement that “sin recursos costeros, esta comunidad estaría muerta y triste” (without coastal resources, this community would be dead and sad).
29) An active CR use sector enhances community resilience and access to high-quality food for those beyond CR user families. Vulnerable residents such as the elderly, infirm, or unemployed seem to benefit specially from CR-based reciprocity.
30) At the writing of this report, we are working with programming and coding of the simulation modeling for objective # 6. The full-blown simulations of different coastal policy scenarios are not yet complete. We have however developed the algorithms and weighting procedures for estimating policy impacts of different coastal use policies on a range of SE PR coastal households. Initial runs of the algorithms using a simple database model indicate that QOL/WB or SE PR coastal residents would be maximized by policies that balance formal economy jobs with CR use opportunities and access. Simulations using SIMILE and NETLOGO software are expected in the next few months.
31) Due to field conditions and the timing of research activities, the dedicated multi-sector workshops that were expected to be conducted were replaced by participation and presentation of our project and partial results in two multi-sector environmental community meetings in June and July 2010, and in further collaboration with community representatives regarding socialenvironmental issues over the last two years of this project.
32) The results of this research are being freely shared with local community organizations such as IDEBAJO and Accion Ambiental that have an interest in the communities’ QoL/WB and their relationships to a sustainable coast.
33) Realizing the links between coastal environmental sustainability and the continued Qol/WB of the communities, these groups pursue agendas of environmental sustainability along with their social organizing. The results of our research are presently being used in court and political battles with industrial, large-scale tourism and urbanization developers whom these organizations perceive are threatening the integrity of coastal habitats.
Students Supported:
1. Name: Victor PagánAddress: HC-03 Box 11115, Camuy, PR 00627
Email: < priverabistol@gmail.com>
Degree Sought: M.S. in Social Work, UPR-Río Piedras
Amount paid: $2250
Time period: 1-1-2011 to 12/31/2012
Effort: 180 hours (Sea Grant)
2.Name: Yazmin Pérez Ortiz
Address: Calle 2 ext. 3 urb. Toa Linda, Toa Alta Puerto Rico 00953.
Email: <yasperort@gmail.com>
Degree Sought: B.A. in Biology, UPR-Cayey
Amount paid: $2250
Time period: 1-1-2011 to 12/31/2012
Effort: 180 hours (Sea Grant)
3.Name: Natalia Rodríguez
Address: Calle 8 M-7 El Torito Cayey, PR 00736
Email: < lalapr7@gmail.com >
Degree Sought: M.S. in Environmental Sciences, UPR-Río Piedras
Amount paid: $500
Time period: 6-1-2012 to 12-31-2012
Effort: 40 hours (Sea Grant)
Post Doctoral Associate Supported:
1.Name: Miguel Del Pozo
Address: Almácigo H-25, Urb. Arbolada, Caguas, Puerto Rico 00727
Email: < Miguel.delpozo@upr.edu>
Amount paid: $7500
Time period: 1-1-2011 to 12/31/2012
Effort: 500 hours (Sea Grant)
Principal Investigators:
PI Carlos García-Quijano
Time period: 6-1-2010-3-1-2013
Amount Paid: $12360 (2 months Sea Grant); $19164.86 (2 months plus benefits match)
PI John Poggie
Time period: 6-1-2010-3-1-2013
Amount Paid: $23452 (2 months Sea Grant); $32630.25 (2 months plus benefits match)
Associate Investigator: Ana Pitchon
Time period: 6-1-2010-3-1-2013
Amount Paid: $5000 (1 month Sea Grant)
Publications:
García-Quijano, Carlos, Miguel Del Pozo and John Poggie (submitted to Journal Revista de Ciencias Sociales, University of Puerto Rico) “La pesca de monte: subsistencia y oportunidades de vida en los bosques costeros del sureste de Puerto Rico” (“Pesca de Monte”: Subsistence and Livelihoods in Southeastern Puerto Rico’s Coastal Forests). Expected Fall 2013
Valdés-Pizzini, Manuel and Carlos García-Quijano (submitted to Journal Revista de Ciencias Sociales, University of Puerto Rico) “Indicios y formas de saber: el conocimiento ecológico local de los pescadores puertorriqueños” (Markers and Ways of Knowing: Puerto Rican Fishers’ Local Ecological Knowledge”). Expected Fall 2013
Griffith, David C., García-Quijano, Carlos G., and Manuel Valdés-Pizzini (2013). A Fresh Defense: A Cultural Biography of Puerto Rican Fishing. American Anthropologist 115(1):17-28.
Garcia-Quijano, Carlos, John Poggie, Ana Pitchon, and Miguel Del Pozo (2012) “Investigating Coastal Resource Use, Quality of Life, and Well-Being in Southeastern Puerto Rico”. Anthropology News: March 2012, 6-7.
Project-based Refereed Talks and Presentations: Quality of Life, Well-Being, and Resilience in the Puerto Rican Coast. Carlos García-Quijano, invited Speaker. IGERT Colloquium Series, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, April 18, 2013, Río Piedras, PR.
Roundtable Session: Developing Measures of Well Being for Evaluating Projects. 72th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 29, 2012, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Researching Quality of Life and Well-Being for Coastal Puerto Rican Communities. With John Poggie and Ana Pitchon, 72th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 30, 2012, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Ecosystems-Based Tropical Fisheries Management: Convergence Between Western and Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems. University of Rhode Island Anthropological Student Society Lecture Series, February 24, 2012, Kingston, RI, USA.
Connected by Water: Coastal Peoples and Human Ecosystems in the Inter-American Seas. Invited Keynote Speaker, Inaugural Symposium of Inter-American Seas Institute for Sustainability Science and Policy, Florida State University. December 8, 2011, Tallahassee, Fl, USA.
Community Perspectives on Natural Resource Dependency and Resiliency. Co-Organized with Ana Pitchon and John J. Poggie. 71th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 30, 2011, Seattle, WA, USA
Coastal Resource Use, Quality of Life and Resilience in Puerto Rico. With Ana Pitchon and John J. Poggie. 71th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 30, 2011, Seattle, WA, USA.
The Value of Local Ecological Knowledge: Success, Well-being, and Management of Environmental Complexity in Puerto Rican Small-scale Fisheries. Invited Talk, Methods of Analysis Program in the Social Sciences Colloquium Series, Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Stanford University. March 11, 2011, Palo Alto, California, USA.
Honors/Awards related to this work: Carlos García-Quijano. 2013 University of Rhode Island Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Award.
The Coast's Bailout: Coastal Resource Use, Quality of Life and Resilience in Puerto Rico
Carlos G. García-Quijano
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island
John J. Poggie
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island
Ana Pitchon
Department of Anthropology, California State University-Domínguez Hills
Miguel del Pozo
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island
José Alvarado
Biostatistical Consulting
With the collaboration and assistance of: Víctor Pagán, Natalia Rodríguez, and Yasmín Pérez Ortiz.
“Fácil. Si no tuviera accesso a los recursos costeros, esta comunidad estaría muerta y triste”
“(the answer is) Easy. Without access to coastal resources, this community would be dead and sad”
--Coastal Resident, Puerto Rico.
In the epigraph quote above, a resident of the coastal village of Pozuelo in Guayama, Puerto Rico was responding to a question asked as part of our interviews with coastal residents, seafood business owners, and coastal resource (CR) users around the coast of Southeastern Puerto Rico (SE PR): “How would your community be affected if for any reason the residents of local communities ceased to be able to have access and harvest local coastal resources?”. This particular resident’s answer was remarkable for at least two reasons: one is that this coastal resident, chosen from a randomly chosen sample of Southeastern Puerto Rican households that were not necessarily involved directly with the local coastal resource economy, directly and unequivocally equated having access to coastal resources to any semblance of the community’s life, at least a life that would be worth living. The second reason this resident’s answer is remarkable is precisely because of how common, locally unremarkable, it was. As we traversed the coast of SE PR while interviewing, visiting, and conversing with residents of all walks of life during the last 3 years, time and again we heard highly similar, often identical answers to the question above. Clearly, many coastal SE Puerto Ricans derive significant value, material, social and symbolic, from the coast and, equally importantly, from the activities of those (like fishermen, crabbers, clam and oyster collectors, coconut harvesters) who harvest coastal resources and make them available for human use, exchange, consumption, and even aesthetic enjoyment.
Our endeavor for this UPRSG-supported research project has been guided and inspired by two overarching questions. 1) What is the importance of a healthy coast, one that includes engaged and productive human communities, for Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, and 2) What does local
and greater society really lose if resource-engaged coastal communities are lost or severely changed by one of more of the variety of threats and challenges they face? If, as Costanza et al. (2007) point out, the real universal objective of public policy is not only about economic health but also to increase "well-being" and "quality of life", then to achieve adequate public policy and planning about the coast it will be crucial to understand the linkages between the use of coastal resources and the Quality of Life and Well-Being (QoL/WB) of Puerto Ricans. To produce this critically-needed knowledge, we designed and carried out a long-term, multi-methods and multidisciplinary research project to investigate the extent to which coastal resource use contributes to the well-being, quality of life, and resilience of people in four Puerto Rican municipalities located in the Southeastern coast of the island (Salinas, Guayama, Arroyo, and Patillas). While this report begins with an epigraph that could be considered “negative” because it talks about an scenario of a “sad” and “dead” community, we see the expressions of coastal SE Puerto Ricans as precisely an expression of the “positive” that CR-use and CR-based activities and culture contribute to the region. If loss of CRs and access to them would mean sadness and death to SE PR coastal communities, then this means that CR harvesting, use, and the socially and economically significant activities that radiate from these activities bring “happiness” and “life” to these communities. We thus view this research ultimately as an exercise in what could be called –borrowing from the “positive” psychologist Martin Seligmann-, “Positive Anthropology”: a ethnographic study of small-scale coastal resource use, and how, for coastal SE Puerto Ricans, it contributes to a life worth living.
Definitions
Coastal Resource Use- For the purposes of this study, Coastal Resource use refers to the small-scale harvesting, processing, and exchange of coastal resources. Specifically, this research concentrates on commercial small-scale fishing, subsistence fishing, recreational fishing for food, commercial and subsistence land crabbing, and non-timber coastal forest resource use such as mangrove root mussel harvesting and selling. Small-scale refers to resource use geared toward subsistence consumption and/or petty commodity production, usually carried out by the owners of means of production.
QOL/WB- Well-Being (WB) and Quality Of Life (QOL) are sometimes used in the literature as interchangeable terms with identical meanings and other times as separate constructs measuring different subjective and objective attributes. For the purposes of this research, QOL/WB are conceptually inseparable and refer to a range of attributes dealing with the fulfillment of human needs and functioning of social groups at various scales (nuclear family, extended familily , community, etc.). QOL/WB is broadly defined as “full participation in a social form of life that depends not only on physical health but also on healthy (social) relationships” (Velazco 2009). A more precise working definition is offered by Pollnac et al. (2007): “ Wellbeing refers to the degree to which an individual, family, or larger social grouping can be characterized as being healthy (sound and functional), happy, and prosperous”. Measuring QOL/WB involves the joint assessment of quantitative and qualitative, subjective and objective measures, ideally developed and interpreted in cultural context (Costanza et al. 2007; Pollnac et al. 2007; Velazco 2009). A key component of the proposed research is to use in-depth ethnographic research to achieve locally meaningful definitions and measures of QoL/WB (as well as community resilience (see below) that can be combined with measures used by researchers elsewhere.
Background of this research
The passing of Magnuson-Stevens Act’s National Standard 8 requiring research to… “account (for) the importance of fishery resources to fishing communities” (NMFS 1996) has been one of the most important events in the development of applied coastal social sciences and thus in the increased understanding of how people in U.S. Coasts depend on coastal resources and how CRdependent social groups might be affected by regulating or curtailing access to these resources. In this report herein, we will use Coastal Resources (CR) instead of “fisheries” to denote that people’s use and dependence on coastal environments and their resources often extends beyond the resources that are targeted as “fisheries”. Since the late 1990’s a considerable number of social and economic scientists have put their efforts and creativity towards identifying, measuring, and assessing precisely what shape does this “importance” of fisheries and coastal resources take and how it is manifested. In other words, looking at the value of costal resources for the people that engage in coastal-based harvesting and economic production.
The potential threat to CR-based economies and the communities that depend on them do not come only from catch regulations. The coast, specially biologically productive coastal areas such as a beaches and estuaries, have become focus of competitions for space, and resources for a variety of economic interest sectors, such as tourism (at all scales), recreation, urbanization, and industry, and even parks and conservation In many cases, the plausible alternative uses of the coast are not compatible with CR dependent-communities and if left unchecked or blindly supported can result in displacement of the communities, degradation or pollution of coastal habitats and resources, and/or the redirection of benefits from CRs away from local communities. Many coastal resources themselves (fish, crustaceans, bivalves) are objects of consumerist desire, as has happened with the coast itself as a place of recreation and conspicuous leisure (ValdesPizzini 2006; Brusi 2004; Griffith et al. 2007; Stonich 2000). These processes have on the one hand resulted in the inclusion of coastal resources in the luxury food economy (bringing money to CR harvesters but at the same putting focused pressure on a few highly desired CR’s) and on the
other changing the demographics of many coastal areas by the disruptive process of gentrification and associated processes such as coastal deforestation, construction, and generalized habitat degradation.
One of the realizations that have come about as people-CR interactions are better understood is that dependence on CRs goes beyond mere exchanges of money in the formal market. The value generated by CR use includes the social and cultural acts of productions and exchange that happen in CR users’ households, neighborhoods, and communities, whether the CR is sold commercially, bartered, gifted, or consumed directly (Pollnac et al. 2008; Dyer and Poggie 2000; García-Quijano 2006; Griffith 1999; Griffith et al. 2007; 2012). It has been thoroughly documented in other parts of the world that the satisfaction and enjoyment derived from CR use such as fishing exceeds purely monetary measures (Pollnac and Poggie 2006; 2008; Smith 1981; Gatewood and McCay 1990
Coastal Dependence in Puerto Rico
Recent works with marine fisheries in Puerto Rico have demonstrated that fishery dependence, as well as the impacts of fishing regulations, extend far beyond the specific households that depend directly on fishing (Griffith and Valdés Pizzini 2002; Griffith et al. 2007; Pérez 2005). This is because fishing (as we expect to be the case with other kinds of CR use) happens in the context of households, extended families, and communities that are ‘entangled’ with each other and with regional, national, and global social and economic processes.
A 2012 publication by Griffith, García-Quijano and Valdés-Pizzini (2012), based on a 5-year assessment of commercial fishery dependence around the coast of Puerto Rico, uses a “cultural biography” approach to show that an overall focus of quality (of product, of lived experience, of symbolic connection, of community reproduction) allows commercial fishers to add value to their catch and their activities in such a way that they can defend themselves against claims over seafood markets and coastal habitats made by more powerful actors that rely on economies of scale. Other studies have also identified a moral economy of household reproduction and community beneficence related to fishing that often causes the benefits from fishing to be distributed in the community beyond harvesters and their immediate families, while entrenching harvesters in reciprocity networks and thus enhancing their enjoyment of good social relationships (Griffith et al. 2007; 2012; Valdés-Pizzini et al 2008; García-Quijano 2009).
Griffith and Valdés- Pizzini (2002) show how due to the interplay between local and non-local (regional, global) histories and processes (e.g. Roseberry 1989), although small-scale fisheries are vulnerable to interaction with larger markets, participation (or having the option to participate) in fisheries affords individuals and households ways to partially resist the negative influence of the same larger markets in their lives. This is important because perceived powerlessness in the face of economic downturns can be a major Qol/WB issue.
Community Resiliency and Implications
Resilience is the capacity of a community to adapt to environmental, social, and economic change. The resilience of integrated human and nature systems, or social-ecological systems (SES) is based on three fundamental characteristics: the magnitude of shock that the system can absorb and remain within a given state; the degree to which the system is capable of selforganization; and the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation (Folke et al. 2002). Adaptation fundamentally is the ability of humans to manage resilience, and it is the collective capacity of community members to do this with intention and planning (Walker et al. 2004). When a household or community is resilient, it can absorb shocks and still maintain function. The inability to deal with change through a lack of organic characteristics of resilience
makes a community vulnerable, where a small change in the system can lead to collapse. However, a community that builds and maintains resilience potential will have the components necessary to withstand shock, and instead use these changes to its advantage through development and innovation.
Common characteristics of resilient systems include redundancy, diversity, efficiency, autonomy, strength, interdependence, adaptability, and collaboration (Godschalk 2003).
The sociocultural factors that contribute to the resilience of coastal communities in the face of economic and ecological hazards are understudied when compared to more dramatic disturbances such as natural disasters (Pitchon 2006; Costanza and Farley 2007). These types of systemic shocks pose an equal threat, however, as restricted access to resources, local ecosystem degradation or a decline in an important subsistence species can devastate a community.
Ecological Edges
The concept of the “social-ecological edge” helps to explain why this is a valuable variable in resilience building. An ecological edge is an area that is in a transition zone from one ecosystem to another, and as a result tend to be rich in biodiversity (Odum 1971). The idea of socialecological edge explores how communities living on the edge of varied natural systems have access to diverse environments and species, thus enabling them to maintain the system through diversification and the creation of new opportunities (Turner et al. 2003). McCay’s discussion of the “edge effect” considers the social opportunities that overlapping systems can provide through “the brining together of people, ideas and institutions” (McCay 2000). As we will detail later in this report, this is the case for SE PR, where living on the edge of multiple ecosystems has allowed for diversification in species harvest and use.
In addition to new opportunities presented by accessible biodiversity, communities living on the edge of increasingly popular tourist zones are finding opportunities for resilience through programs in ecotourism and other non-resource dependent activities. For example, as we did our fieldwork in SE PR, an alliance of local community organizations, in collaboration with fishermen associations and funded by a quasi-governmental organization for rural community development (INSEC), were developing ecotourism initiatives around kayak and small-boat tours of the bays and keys along the SE PR coast, with local expert guides, many of them fishers or their children. During our three years of visits, these initiatives seemed to be doing well on their own after the initial period of funding, specially in the Salinas coastal communities.
While diversification is a key to resilience in many social-ecological systems, we must not discount the fact that diversity is dynamic. This can create uncertainty in another form when too many sources of potential stability are perhaps competing against each other or contingent upon the same variables. In addition, other elements of the system must be altered in order to increase diversity, which, if the system does not possess characteristics of resilience in the first place, it may not be able to withstand such pressures (Norberg 2008). Nonetheless, diversity is still a recommended if not fundamental characteristic of social-ecological resilience. As global systems are rapidly changing, both ecologically and socially, the capacity to adapt quickly becomes paramount, in which case having access to and an understanding of various opportunities is key.
Coastal Subsistence Patterns in Puerto Rico: Economic and Environmental Multiplicity
Many families and communities in the rural coasts of Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean make a living by combining coastal resource use, preparation, marketing, and selling with mainstream jobs in agriculture, retail, services, government, and local industries (Comitas 1974; Griffith and Valdés Pizzini 2002; Griffith et al. 2007; Gutierrez 1982). This mixed coastal subsistence pattern of economic or occupational multiplicity has existed for hundreds of years in
Puerto Rico’s coasts and dates at least as far back as the time of sugarcane-dominated Caribbean economies, where formal employment for the majority of people was only available during the planting and harvest times, with no income during the down times of sugarcane agriculture, locally called “el invernazo” CR use was specially important for survival during the “invernazo”. The pattern has been perpetuated by the unpredictability of employment near rural coastal areas after sugarcane was replaced with coastal industries episodically hire and fire large numbers of non-skilled workers, as well as by long traditions of self-reliance and independence typical of rural coasts. Cultural identities strongly related to the use of coastal resources, which are partly results of this long standing dependency (Giusti 1994; Mintz 1960; Griffith and Valdés-Pizzini 2002; Valdés-Pizzini 1987).
The hydrological, geomorphological, and transportation characteristics that made rural coasts preferred places for sugarcane agriculture also made them preferred places for the establishment or large-scale pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and similar industries that came after sugarcane’s demise to provide needed employment but also undesired environmental degradation. The SE PR coast is home to at least 15 large-scale pharmaceutical, petrochemical and power generating industrial developments (Garcia-Quijano 2006).
Table 1. Large Coastal Industries in the study region. Data compiled from Enviromapper Server, United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2012.
Company name
Type of Activity
Location
Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Arroyo
Stryker Biomedical Arroyo
AES Jobos Steam Power Plant Electric Power Generation Guayama
Ayerst-Wyeth Pharmaceutical Guayama
Baxter Pharmaceutical Guayama
Chemsource, Inc. Pharmaceutical Guayama
Colgate-Palmolive Pharmaceutical Guayama
ICI Pharmaceutical Guayama
IPR Pharmaceutical Guayama
Phillips Puerto Rico Core Petroleum Refinery Guayama
Smithkline-Beechamn Pharmaceutical Guayama
Squibb Pharmaceutical Guayama
General Electric Manufacture Maunabo
AEE Aguirre Power Generation ComplexElectric Power Generation Salinas
Steri-Tech Inc. Biomedical Salinas
Allergan Biomedical Santa Isabel
Throughout these changes and processes, coastal communities in Puerto Rico have continued to rely on local CRs for at least part of their subsistence and socially-significant activities. We find Richard Stoffle and colleagues’ concept of Environmental Multiplicity useful to understand the resilience strategies centered around CRs. Environmental Multiplicity refers to the utilization of multiple resources for multiple uses, from a local environment (such as local coasts and estuaries), which includes the social relationships related to and deployed around the harvest, preparation, marketing, and consumption of the resources (Stoffle 1986; Stoffle and Minnis 2008). In the words of Stoffle and Minnis (2008): “The term environmental multiplicity builds on the narrower but established term occupational multiplicity (Comitas 1964), to describe their system of resilient adaptations. Conceptually these terms describe a range of multi-stranded and
redundant connections among the members of a traditional community and between them and their primary natural use areas (Stoffle 1986)”.
Thus, in this conceptual model, environmental, plus occupational, multiplicity, form a system of local adaptations that in general increase resilience of CR dependent communities in faced with an uncertain and dynamic social/economic/ecological environment. The key aspect, especially for policy making, is that the multiplicity makes the communities highly resilient, but only as long as they have access to a relatively healthy local ecosystem. A catastrophic loss of resilience can happen if the communities, for whatever reason, are excluded from access to their local ecosystems, like for example by being displaced by coastal development, gentrification or overly tough harvest regulations, or if resources become degraded by pollution, habitat destruction, or overharvesting. Or, as a crabber and community activist told us in 2011 “Jobs and industries come and go, but as long as the coast is healthy around here we will never go hungry”. This is something that coastal policy making and regulation should take into account.
One of the major finding of this research and previous works (e.g. García-Quijano 2006) is that many people around the SE PR coast build resilience through livelihood diversification and redundancy, combining participation in the formal job economy with use of local resources. Even though, in a given year, CR use contributions to the GNP might be very small (not including coastal tourism) compared to other economic sectors, a number of individuals, households, and communities still spend considerable time and energy harvesting, processing, and exchanging CR-based products. The total value of these activities needs to be documented for rational policy making about the future of coastal areas.
Methodology
This research deals with complex and multidimensional cultural phenomena, such as Coastal Resource Dependence of various groups of people, “emic” and “etic” (Pike 1967) measures of QOL/WB, and the value that CR use and associated activities have for SE PR Puerto Rico Ricans. This is a complex undertaking that necessitates an appropriately broad and flexible methodological framework coupled with diverse, nuanced techniques of elicitation, measurement, and analysis that are appropriate to the specific research objectives and social features being studied.
Our overall methodological approach is that of mixed-methods, multi-disciplinary ethnography
We use ‘multidisciplinary ethnography’ as an umbrella term for a variety of quantitative and qualitative, field -based and archival, exploratory and analytical techniques that we utilized to gather knowledge about the multiple topics related to CR use, as well as QoL/WB addressed in this study. These techniques are deployed around our core method of classical ethnography. Our overall methodology, rather than being discipline-based, is objective-based, and aims to balance the context-richness and attention to detail achievable with open-ended ethnographic methods with the predictive power and comparability of results acquired by exposing respondents to comparable stimuli (for example Kempton et al. 1995, Johnson 1998; 2000; Roos 1998; Harman 1998.
Qualitative Ethnographic Fieldwork
Although we used a variety of methods for data collection and analysis, this study’s central approach is based on qualitative ethnography and the discovery insights reached through ethnography. Ethnography, quite literally “writing culture”, is considered to be the methodological hallmark of Anthropology and is increasingly being used by other sciences, both social and environmental. The defining feature of ethnography, for us, is its “holistic empiricism”, the emphasis on systematically recording varied kinds of data about various interconnected aspects of a society’s culture and social life to develop complete, yet nuanced accounts of a group’s culture that are based on “being there” through systematic fieldwork (Fetterman 2010). Ethnography, and insights achieved through ethnography, are also being increasingly recognized as forming a very productive basis for simulation modeling, both systems and agent-based, because of the empirical “realism” of variable relationships, system logic, and realistic rules that can be achieved through ethnographic work (e.g. Agar 2007; Degnbol 2007).
In this study we used a variety of the techniques commonly associated with qualitative ethnography, including 1) systematic observation, including unobtrusive behavioral observation and “cultural mapping” of CR use in SE PR (Griffith et al 2007; Griffith 2011), 2) Participant observation, including field visits, attending community and CR user meetings and even community-based protests/activism, participating in CR use activities, and informal conversations, 3) Identifying key informants from whom to gather knowledge and perspectives related to the different uses of CR in the study region, QoL, WB, and the relationships between the two, 4)Oral histories and semi-structured interviews with identified key-informants, and 5) identification and analysis of archival and popular cultural material that exemplified CR use and its ties to QoL/WB
Coastal Resource use: cultural mapping
We take an interdisciplinary approach to “mapping”: In our mapping activities, we combined 1) the precise physical mapping of CR and its environmental context by noting and georeferencing CR use and signs of resource use, both observed and reported by field contacts and informants, with 2) “cultural mapping” (Griffith et al. 2007; Griffith 2011; Beebe 2001; Gutberlet et al. 2007), which consists of identifying and documenting the cultural (including material culture),
infrastructural, symbolic, and economic indicators of a human activity (e.g. coastal resource use). We combined two complete drive-throughs of the study region using a hand-held GPS to record signs, physical and cultural material, of CR-based activities with ethnographic, field-based interviews, analysis of archival, secondary data, reports, government databases, oral histories, photographic materials and other relevant sources. We were especially interested in determining what CRs are routinely used in the study area; who the resource users are, where they harvest them and perform other associated activities, and what consumer products result from CR use.
These methods work together to identify and place CR use, users, and their activities in the context of the physical and social total environment For example, one of the principal CRs harvested and marketed in the study region is the land crab (Cardisoma guanhumi) (GarciaQuijano 2006; Govender 2007). During our fieldwork we asked a variety of field contacts and ethnographic informants about the locations where land crabs are captured, processed, and marketed, as well as what the signs of land crab harvesting activities are, and where the land crab harvesters live and market their catch. Then, during our drive through mapping of the study region, we recorded and marked with a hand-held GPS unit the locations where we observed signs of land crab harvesting (crabbers trails through the mangroves, land crab traps), processing/marketing (crab processing tables, houses with land crab holding cages (jueyeras), roadside land crab vendors, se venden jueyes/carne de jueyes signs in local homes, etc.), and finally, signs of the cultural importance of land crabs (e.g. community murals of land crabs or land crabbers). Put together, these methods give us a broad, extensive view of the economic and cultural importance of land crabs for the region’s coastal communities. Se attachment A for a georeferenced database of field observations of CR use, signs and traces.
Key Informant Interviews
The overall intent of our interviews with key informants is to gain an in-depth understanding of coastal residents’ engagement with coastal resources as they relate to QoL/WB in the study region, and to collect information that will complement other research methods such as secondary data analysis. We identified and recruited 23 CR users and 5 community activists. Our sampling list of potential key informants was based on our ethnographic research, as well as on knowledge gained through previous studies in the region, (e.g García-Quijano 2006; 2009), combined with a snowball sample (Johnson 1990) in which we identified local experts in the use, marketing, and cultural importance of the different coastal resources harvested.
The Key Informant Interviews constituted one of the main sources of information of the ethnographic component of this research, and were designed to cover and elicit local information and ‘emic’ perspectives about a variety of topics related to CR use. The focus of these interviews was aimed at understanding the importance of these resources to the informants and their households, their communities, and the region. The interviews usually required several visits and between 3-6 total hours of interviewing and consisted of three parts
Table 2. Summary of characteristics of key informant interviews
Interview #
Protocol Title
I Background Information
Themes covered
Demographic information, types of Coastal Resource Use practiced, job satistfaction, labor history
II Patterns of Coastal Resource Use I
III Cultural models of quality of life, and wellbeing, emic perspectives
Coastal Resource use, Movement of CRs through social networks, CR-based community reciprocity patterns, problems and issues of CRS in area, meaning of CR use
What are the goals of CR users, meaning of WB, QoL, and success, personal and social indicators and determinants
QoL/WB
Interviews with Seafood Restaurant Sector
Types of questions
Demographics, open-ended questions, freelisting of locally-important fish species, snowball list of other expert fishers
Open-ended questions, list of social relationships related to CR use, following harvested CRs through social networks
Open-ended questions
We also conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with owners, managers, and cooks who work in the SE PR seafood restaurants and food vending establishments. From previous experience in the study region we knew that the seafood sector was an important link between local CR users and the wider economy in the study region and that some of the locally-harvested CRs were marketed in local seafood eateries, which constituted a reliable venue to add value to local CR production. Furthermore, over the years we had learned that, like in other coastal locations around the world, there are close social relationships between fishing and other CR user families and the families that operate local seafood eateries; with the same families in many cases being involved in CR harvesting and in the seafood eatery sector. However, we wanted more specific information about the actual levels and variability of engagement of local seafood eateries with local CRs and the importance of local CRs in attracting clientele and revenue from outside the region.
As part of our CR-use mapping activities we identified a total of 27 seafood-oriented eateries in the study regions. These local seafood eateries varied from formal, expensive “sit-down restaurants”, to less formal, medium price restaurant-bars and/or family-style restaurantscafeterias, to food trucks and seafood fritter and “pincho” (kabob) stands which often consist of a table, a portable fryer/grill and a seafood warming counter (see photo) located in the front of the seller’s home. We were able to conduct interviews with owners/managers/cooks in 22 of the 27 eateries. The seafood eatery interviews were shorter and more focused than the CR user ethnographic interviews, and most of them were done in one or at most two visits and 1-2 hours of interviewing. The interviews with the seafood eatery sector included: 1)Demographics, restaurant characteristics and interviewees role in the restaurant 2) Local CRs sold, how they were sold/prepared, and their importance to the eatery’s economy, 3) Relationship of eatery with local CR harvesters/suppliers, 4) Cultural models and definitions of QoL/WB. The PIs collaborated in writing the interview protocol and PI Garcia-Quijano tested the interview instrument. Our two local research assistants, Victor Pagán and Yasmín Pérez, were in charge of conducting the bulk of the interviews.
Analysis of Ethnographic Interview Data
Using Atlas.ti (Muhr 2004)1 as a qualitative analysis platform, we analyzed the different types of interview, secondary sources, and cultural mapping data together and treated them as sources of information for understanding CR dependency and its connections to QOL/WB that I would be testing in the exploratory phase of this research (cf Bernard and Ryan 1998). Because out principal goal was to elicit “emic” meanings and perspectives, we treated primary interviews data as the most important source of information.
Structured Interviews
Based on the cultural mapping, archival, and ethnographic data, we designed and conducted structured interviews with a randomly chosen sample of coastal SE Puerto Ricans. We chose six specific communities in the study region for the structured interviews: 1) Playa/Playita and Aguirre in Salinas; 2) Barrancas and Pozuelo in Guayama, 3) Playa/Malecon in Arroyo, and 4) el Bajo in Patillas. The six communities were chosen to maximize representation of CR engagement, linkages with local and regional economy, and types of CRs used.
The goal of the structured interviews was to assess variation in CR use, dependence, and impacts on QoL/WB and resilience among a probability sample of households, both CR users and others, chosen because they were residents, in the study region. The structured interviews designed to systematically gather data on CR use and dependency and variation in domains related to QoL/WB, specifically to shed light on the specific mechanisms (economic stability, enjoyment of coastal environments, enjoyment of satisfactory social relationships, sense of identity and community belonging, and others). By targeting and interviewing both CR users and coastal residents who are not necessarily CR users we achieved a comprehensive look at CR use and dependency throughout the study region.
The two types of structured interviews were designed to be complementary: although the different interview protocols included sets of questions that were specific to the two samples, a core group of questions about both CR use and QoL/WB were included in both samples so that we could compare between two targeted groups. As detailed below, sampling strategies were also different and designed to the specific group of respondents targeted.
Our analysis of structured interview data had three main goals: 1) to identify patterns of variation in CR users and coastal residents’ engagement with local CRs , 2) to identify patterns of variation related to QoL/WB and how it manifests, and 3 2) Build on ethnographic data to identify and understand the mechanisms (e.g. direct market participation, CR-Based reciprocity; household and community reproduction; social beneficence) by which the value generated by CR use in the region reaches people.
Structured Interviews with Resource Users
The CR user respondents were chosen randomly, stratified by the main resource used (commercial fisheries, land crabs, clams, mangrove oysters, etc.) and coastal communities. Because there are no comprehensive lists of CR users in the region (there are no license lists for many CR users, especially those who are part-timers and those who do “pesca de monte”,), our sampling universe consisted of a list of CR users compiled by combining 1) commercial fishing license record with, 2) lists of CR users for different CRs complied during our cultural mapping exercises, our ethnographic interviews, and conversations with local resource managers, and 3) Roadside CR vendors (specially jueyeros (land crabbers) and clam/oyster vendors) that we spotted regularly during fieldwork. Originally we planned to choose 10 CR users per each of the 6 coastal communities for a total of 60 respondents. However, due to unplanned fieldwork factors related to the availability of respondents and/or our ability to find them due to their laboral and geographic mobility, we ended up with a total sample of 47 CR user respondents with some
communities more represented (for example, Pozuelo in Guayama) than others. The PIs collaborated in writing the interview protocol and Garcia-Quijano tested the interview instrument. Postdoctoral Associate Del Pozo coordinated and performed the majority of the interviews.
The Structured Interview protocol for CR users consisted of 5: parts 1) Demographics, 2) Labor history and patterns of participation in Coastal Resource use, 3) Participation in activities related to the processing and marketing of CRS, 4) Variation in dimensions of QoL/WB identified from ethnographic research and literature (e.g. job satisfaction, life satisfaction, life domain weighted importance) 5) Open-ended questions about CR use and quality of life.
Structured Interviews with Coastal Residents
Doing probability samples of households in irregularly settled rural areas has long been a challenge for social scientists (Bernard 2005; Kumar 2007; Kilworth et al. 1998; 2003). Sampling can be specially difficult in a coastal region like the SE PR coast, where remote rural communities are interspersed with a few small urban areas, inserted in a diverse topography, with a meandering coastline and estuaries (see Garcia-Quijano 2006). Recent technological advances such as the widespread availability of georeferenced aerial photography have yielded promising new geographically-based sampling methodologies such as Geographical Cluster Sampling (GCS), (Kumar 200x). Combining georeferenced maps with US census data in regions with highly-clustered rural habitation has been used to further optimize GCS techniques (Alvarado and Gavillan, TRAMIL).
As part of this study, we collaborated with subcontracted GIS and Census statistics expert Jose Alvarado to create a GCS-based sampling methodology to randomly choose households for interviews using US Census blocks overlaid on Google Earth ™ freeware aerial photographs. An added advantage of this methodology is that it can be replicated easily and relatively inexpensively. We conducted complete interviews with a total of 47 coastal households. Local student researchers Víctor Pagán, Natalia Rodríguez, and Yasmín Pérez recruited households and performed the interviews.
Coastal Household sampling methodology
The sample frame for this study was the total occupied house units in the following communities: Pesaco Arizona (Arroyo), El Bajo (Patillas), Barracas (Guayama), Pozuelo (Guayama), Aquirre (Salinas) and Playa Playita (Salinas). Every community was geographically delimited by the study PI Dr. Carlos Garcia-Quijano using Google Earth. Figure 3 shows the Google Earth geographic delimitation of Playa Playita Community. The Census Bureau 2010 Blocks Tiger Line Shape Files were downloaded from the Census Bureau FTP Site (www2.census.gov) and converted to Google Earth .kml files utilizing shp2kml version 2.0 free software. Once converted, the 2010 Census Blocks1 were used to approximate the communities’ geographical delimitation. Figure 4 shows Census Bloc approximation of Playa Playita Community. A total of 1,953 Blocks were used to approximate this community.
The Census 2010 Data was downloaded from the Census Bureau FTP Site and imported into MySQL (Open Source Relational Data Base Manager System). This data in combination with the Blocks Tiger Lines Files were utilized to estimate the number of occupied households unites for every Census Block inside the community geographical area. For each community a Cluster Sampling Methodology was used to select the Census Blocks’ households were the survey was conducted. The inclusion criterion was to select the Census Blocks with 10 or more occupied household units. Figure 5 shows the selected Census Blocks for Playa Playita. Only 28 Blocks had 10 or more occupied household units.
The intended sample interviews were equally distributed among the communities, each community with 10 interviews. For each community a list with the selected Census Blocks was created and sorted by the percentage of the households that were occupied by the household’s owner. The 10 interviews per community were distributed according to the following criteria:
• If the selected blocks for a community have at least 10 Census Blocks with 10 or more occupied house units then one interview would be conducted in each of the top 10 selected Census Blocks based on the percentage of owner occupied household unit.
• In the communities were the selected Census Blocks were less than 10, then two interviews would be assigned to the Blocks with the higher percentage of owner occupied household unit until the 10 interviews were allocated.
Figure X show the Blocks where the survey was conducted. These blocks were the top 10 Blocks of Playa Playita Community with more than 10 occupied house units and with the highest percentage of owners occupied house units.
Once the number of interviews where distributed among the selected blocks, Google Earth’s .kml files were created with the respective Blocks maps so the interviewers could use them as a reference to conduct the interviews in that particular area or sector of the communities.”
The Coastal Residents’ Households Structured Questionnaire consisted of 5: parts 1) Demographics, 2) Respondent and household patterns of consumption and use of local CRs, including participation in activities related to the processing and marketing of CRs, 3) Variation in dimensions of QoL/WB identified from ethnographic research and literature (e.g. job satisfaction, life satisfaction, life domain weighted importance) 4) Open-ended questions about CR use and quality of life.
Workshops and Meetings with Community Members
We conducted and participated in two meeting with coastal community members, one in June of 2010 and one in July 2011. During part of our ethnographic fieldwork we developed a working relationship with local environmental and social organizations (IDEBAJO and Cambio Ambiental), and we identified their regular meetings as a useful venue to reach a broad sector of the local coastal communities. The two times we participated in the meetings, we also invited
other community members that we identified as representing important stakeholders. During the meetings we engaged in both sharing information with the groups, as well as in gathering further ethnographic data.
The in June 2010 meeting, conducted in the Jobos Bay NERR, we shared our research approach and objectives with the a group that included local fishers, community organizers, youth, ecotourism venture operators, and environmental activists. Their feedback was very valuable an led us to very productive explorations of CR and QoL/WB linkages. In the July 2011 meeting, we shared our (up to that date) research results and solicited participants opinions and feedback, which was a key step in the verification and refinement of our research definitions and hypotheses. A third workshop in which one or more of the research team’s members will share the final results and establish plans for the regional dissemination of the project’s data will take place in January 2014.
Participating and linking/coordinating our activities with community organizations became a key component of our ethnographic fieldwork, and some of the most important insights about the value and importance of CR use in the region (for example, the links between CR use and reduced criminal activity in the region) came from our participant observation with these community organizations. We have actively cooperated in the environmental conservation agenda of these organizations by sharing out data about the importance of CRs for local economies.
Simulation Modeling
Based on the data and data relationships identified during the various phases of this study, we are at the time of this report preparing and conducting simulation modeling of the trade-offs in community and household QoL/WB effects of different policy-scenarios of coastal use in the region. The main unit of modeling is at the coastal household level: thus we are using an actorbased or agent-based modeling approach using Simile (Simulistics 2012) and Netlogo (Wilensky 1999) software.
An important characteristic of our approach to modeling is that it is ethnography-based: that is, we are using the insights from our mixed-methods ethnographic activities to 1) formulate the algorithms used for calculating Qol/WB levels and changes, 2) define the domains of QoL/WB used in modeling and the effects of levels of access to CRs in these domains, and 3) define the relative weights of these domains, for different types of coastal residents as they relate to overall QoL/WB. The algorithms, domains, and weights themselves are results of the research activities, thus they will be described in later sections of this report.
Research Objectives and Results
The original objectives of this research were as follows:
1. To map small-scale coastal resource use in the municipalities of Salinas, Guayama, Arroyo, and Patillas, Puerto Rico.
2. To develop culturally-valid measures of WB/QoL and comunity resilience for the study region.
3. To study the (commercial and non-commercial) harvest-to-consumer movement of local CRs and derived products through social networks.
4. To assess the role of CRs in household economic histories with emphasis on CR use impact on resilience and mitigating economic and environmental uncertainty.
5. To survey the extent to which coastal Puerto Ricans in the study region participate inand benefit from- local small-scale CR harvesting and production.
6. To use modeling and scenario simulation techniques to test hypotheses about the impact of small-scale CR use on coastal communities and beyond.
7. To organize and conduct two multi-sector workshops about the importance of small-scale coastal resource use for Puerto Ricans' well-being, quality of life, and resilience.
As detailed in the section Methodology above, a variety of methods of analysis were applied to the different types of collected data, with the goal of achieving multi-layered convergent validity for our increased understanding of QoL/WB and resource use in the region. Data to fulfill the different objectives were gathered sometimes simultaneously, sometimes separately, during the different stages in the research process. This is different from other scientific research designs in which specific, separate procedures are used to gather data for specific objectives. Thus in the interest of brevity and readability the objectives discussion below will focus on identifying important results reached by applying the methods discussed in this paragraph.
Physical and political geography
Puerto Rico is about 60 by 165 km, with an area of 9,104 km2 and 501 km of coastline (Cadilla 1988). Most people in Puerto Rico reside along the coastal plains. Our study regions, Coastal SE PR, is composed of the municipalities of (from East to West along the southern Coast of Puerto Rico) Patillas, Arroyo, Guayama, and Salinas. Politically, socially, and physically, SE PR can be called a coherent “region” of Puerto Rico’s Coast. An unifying characteristic of SE PR is being an ecologically rich and productive coastline that is also rural, relatively undeveloped with the accompanying lack formal economy opportunities and chronic unemployment that between 2000 and 2013 has hovered around 22-24% for the region, compared with between 12-17% for Puerto Rico as a whole (García-Quijano 2006, PR DTOP 2013). This is a key feature of the historical and continuing patterns of CR use and dependence as an economic strategy.
Physically, the SE PR coast is “a low-lying alluvial plain with a coastline either of beach plain or of mangrove, and wave erosion where alluvial cliffs form the coast eastward” (Morelock, Ramírez and Barreto 2002:5). The plain was formed by an extensive alluvial fan that extends from the mountain ranges to the north (Morelock, Ramírez and Barreto 2002). The plain extends from West to East until volcanic rocks from the Cuchilla de la Pandura mountain range reach the coastline. As with most coastal plains around Puerto Rico, much of the original flora has been removed to make room for coastal agriculture (specially sugarcane) and coastal development. More than 50% of this coast is suffering erosion (Morelock, Ramírez and Barreto 2002; JOBANERR 2002). This erosion is a major cause of marine ecosystem degradation through sedimentation of estuaries and coral reefs (Cambers 1998).
The three principal types of coastline that are found in Puerto Rico: rocky cliff and headlands, mangrove shoreline, and sand/gravel beaches are found interspersed throughout the study region.
Between Salinas and Guayama there are extensive mangrove forests, including the Bay of Jobos, site of the JOBANERR National Estuarine Research Reserve (NOAA) an important collaborating institution for this research project. Small mangrove islands, called Cayos (Keys), with associated fringing and patch reefs are found close to shore from Santa Isabel to Guayama. From Punta Las Mareas in Guayama eastward the coast is dominantly the result of wave erosion of the alluvial plain (Morelock 1978). Betweeen Arroyo and Punta Viento in Patillas, the coastline is predominantly beach-associated alluvial plain interspersed with mangrove shoreline and small estuaries.
Estuaries occur throughout the region, including the second-largest estuary in Puerto Rico, the Bay of Jobos. The estuarine zones of the region are important sources of nutrients for local marine life and are important nurseries and refuges for marine fish, mollusks, crustaceans, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Fringing reefs, patch reefs, and small barrier reefs occur at varied distances from the shore and throughout the area (JOBANERR 2002). These coral reefs, along with the Cayos, or mangrove islands, Thallassia sp. and Syrygodium sp. seagrass prairies, sand flats and muddy bottom areas make up a complex and productive underwater environment. The continental shelf (where most small-scale fishing in Puerto Rico occurs) is fairly wide by Puerto Rico standards (between 11-13 miles) south of Santa Isabel, Salinas, and Guayama, narrowing down from West to East until it gets as close as 1 mile to the shore near the coast of Patillas (Morelock 1978).
Table 3. Puerto Rican municipalities in this study’s area
Municipality Population (2010 United States Census)
Arroyo 19575
Guayama 45362
Patillas 19277
Salinas 31078
Coastal Communities Included in this Study
Pueblo de Arroyo (Arizona, Palmar, Callejon del Pescao)
Barrancas, Pozuelo, Jobos and surroundings
El Bajo and Guardarraya
Aguirre and surroundings, Playa, Playita
Descriptions of Coastal Communities
The following Descriptions of Coastal Communities are condensed and updated (through our cultural mapping activities) versions of community descriptions and profiles done by PI GarcíaQuijano as part of previous work in SE PR (Garcia-Quijano 2006), and as part of a Puerto Ricowide fishing community profiling research project (Griffith et al. 2007; 2012).
Arroyo
Arroyo was part of Guayama until 1855 (Toro-Sugrañes 1995). Arroyo’s commercial fishers landed approximately 45 thousand pounds of fish in between 2002-2003, worth more than 100 thousand dollars (Griffith et al. 2007; NOAA Fisheries). Unemployment in 2013 is reported at 24.9% (PR DTOP 2013). Arroyo was the most important seaport in the Southeast Coast until the early 20th century. Central Lafayette was a sugarcane mill that, along with the port of Arroyo, dominated economic life in this municipality (Lloréns 2005).
Arroyo Playa
The port of Arroyo is adjacent to the waterfront, and consists of a small embayment protected by a breakwater, about 30 small-boat slots used mostly by fishers. Arroyo has an active group of small-scale fishers, and pescadores de monte. There is a politically and socially active fishers’ association (Asociación de Pescadores Coral Marine), as well as at least two groups of loosely associated independent fishers. Coral Marine recently opened a restaurant to add value to their
catch by selling it cooked and prepared. Arroyo has a beautiful waterfront that Arroyanos take great pride on and which, with political and economic ebbs and flows, fluctuates from a bustling social center and to quiet or even depressed, with fishes and their activities being a constant presence over the years. There is a active commercial scuba shop near the waterfront where divers fill their tanks and which serves as a social meeting place for some groups of fishers. The waterfront in general during weekdays is a fisher meeting and socializing area, and we observed groups of fishers of various ages, including retired fishers meeting there on weekdays.
The coastal forests to the East of the port, specially the plain known locally as “Mar del Sur”, are reported to be used extensively by “Pescadores de Monte” for land crabs, coconuts, and other resources. Commercial fishers from Arroyo routinely fish a wide area along the southeastern coast, but the extensive seagrass shallows and some fringing reefs located 2-3 miles offshore between Guayama and Arroyo appear to be a preferred area.
Guayama
Guayama has long been the center of economic activity in the Southeast. Through its former port of Arroyo, and the coastal communities of Las Mareas, Machete and Pozuelo, Guayama has historically dominated seagoing activity in the area. Because it is a medical, commercial, and administrative center, most people in the southeast have to pass through Guayama at one time or the other. Central Machete was Guayama’s sugarcane mill and it occupied a strategic location between Central Lafayette to the East and Central Aguirre to the west. After the bust of the sugarcane industry, with the development of the section 936 tax-relief petrochemical, pharmaceutical, medical, and energy industry sectors (Dietz 1986, 2003) and the establishment of 16 industrial complexes in Guayama, when Guayama developed a solid stronghold in the economy of the region (Dietz 1986; 2003; Griffith, Valdés-Pizzini and García-Quijano 2006). Since these industries were mostly established along low-lying coastal areas, coastal communities (and especially CR users) have suffered from marginalization and coastal degradation. The three coastal communities where most CR use activities occur in Guayama are Barrancas and Pozuelo (described below) and Puente de Jobos. Unemployment in Guayama is slightly lower than in the smaller neighboring towns, but it is still high at 20.7% in 2013 (DTOP 2013).
Pozuelo
Pozuelo is Guayama’s best known fishing community and is located on a peninsula that stretches into the sea from the Bay of Jobos. Pozuelo is a center for seafood restaurant and eateries, and 6 of our interviewed seafood restaurants are located there. An obvious link between fishing and other economic activities in Pozuelo is the seafood restaurant business. According to informants many of the most luxurious restaurants do not belong to Pozuelo natives, but the smaller ones do belong to locals. Also, one of the fishers associations in Pozuelo has branched into a restaurant itself. To the best of my knowledge, that restaurant sells exclusively local catch.
There are also two fishing associations (Barrio Pozuelo Fishers Association and the Barrio Pozuelo Independent Fishers Association, which have, according to locals, at least 50 fishers between the two). Pozuelo’s fishers association branched into two separate associations after a dispute over management (also see Griffith and Valdés-Pizzini 2002). The new group, the Asociación de Pescadores Independientes de Pozuelo (Independent Fishers Association of Pozuelo) formed after disagreement with the original group over the use of resources and boats belonging to the association. There are two docking facilities in Pozuelo, one used by the Independientes, (Independent Fishers Association), and the other used by the original association. Other fishers tie their yolas to mangroves in the channels or pull them in a trailer. The Independientes dock, however, doesn’t appear to have strict ownership, and most Pozuelo fishers
can use the dock and the fish cleaning tables there. Docking overnight in the communal dock seems to be more restricted.
We found extensive use of mangrove of coastal forest products, especially land crabs and mangrove oysters and clams, mostly in the mangrove channels and forests near the Jobos Bay and Bosque de Jobos. Many houses have land crab pens, and there always were numerous “se venden jueyes” signs. There are several semi-permanent stands where local mangrove oyster and clam fishers/vendors market their catch. These stands can be quite active centers of social activity, specially on weekends and holidays.
Pozuelo is also a focus of recreational fishing and boating (of the luxury boat sort), since the Club Náutico de Guayama (Guayama Yatch Club) is located on territory taken from mangrove flats in Pozuelo. The maritime police and the FURA (Fuerzas Unidas de Rápida Acción, Puerto Rican police’s elite anti drug-smuggling unit, equipped with high-speed motor boats and helicopters) are also located in Pozuelo, near the Club Náutico.
Pozuelo’s fishers association branched into two separate associations after a dispute over management (also see Griffith and Valdés-Pizzini 2002). The new group, the Asociación de Pescadores Independientes de Pozuelo (Independent Fishers Association of Pozuelo) formed after disagreement with the original group over the use of resources and boats belonging to the association. There are two docking facilities in Pozuelo, one used by the Independientes, (Independent Fishers Association), and the other used by the original association. Other fishers tie their yolas to mangroves in the channels or pull them in a trailer. The Independientes dock, however, doesn’t appear to have strict ownership, and most Pozuelo fishers can use the dock and the fish cleaning table there. Docking overnight in the communal dock seems to be more restricted.
During 2010-2011, CR users and other residents in Pozuelo were active organizing and resisting a Guayama municipal government –led development of the Pozuelo mangrove lagoon as a tourist and business attraction. Despite local protests, contractors moved ahead and were in the process of excavating and draining several mangrove tidal flat areas, which the community was at the time protesting furiously. In our interviews, residents and CR users from Pozuelo repeatedly told us that their protests stemmed from being keenly aware that their QoL/WB and identity as a community were tied to the health of the mangroves and estuaries around them. They viewed the “development” of the coast as an unwanted intrusion that would degrade their resource base and only bring social problems to the community while all the profits (“como siempre” (as always happens), they repeated, would go elsewhere.
Barrancas
Barrancas consisting of six streets lined with houses, located right next to the water to the east of the Phillips Puerto Rico petroleum refinery, which dominates the landscape. When driving around Barrancas one can see commercial yolas and powerboats in trailers, and the community is dotted with small fishers workshops, consisting of a shed (sometimes just a palm frond roof), a few tools, a workbench, and fishing traps in various stages of construction and/or repair. Barrancas amateur baseball team is named the “Marlins”. There are two small seafood restaurants close to two fish markets. There is a small high-surf beach from which some small yolas can be launched to sea, but the larger yolas and powerboatscannot launch from there.
The original coastal community was called Las Mareas, and residents were forced to relocate for the building of the Phillips refinery complex. When Phillips developers, assisted by the local government, expropriated the low-lying tidal flat areas in Matuyas, the whole community was
relocated to prefabricated houses where Barrancas is presently located. Not only were they displaced, but also they also were relocated from a mangrove-protected inlet to the high-surf zone, where fishers now now have to trail their boats over one mile of rough terrain to the mangroves, where they can launch their boats.
Many Barrancas residents also report extensive use of coastal forest products, especially land crabs. During our 2011 fieldwork, a large “corrida” (aggregation) of land crabs was happening and there was intense land crabbing activity, both commercial and for selfconsumption. According to Barrancas fishers, there are 20-25 boat owners who fish in Barrancas, and about the same number of strikers. Families of these fishers also work selling fish or helping out with cleaning and marketing. The two local fish markets buy fish from fishers in Barrancas, but there is no formal association. Most fishers personally market part of their catch to restaurants and to private buyers.
Patillas
Patillas is a coastal town with a tradition of dependence on the sea. Patillas has long been a moderately used port and the coastal parts of the municipality dealt with piracy and invasion attempts during the years of the colonial wars in the Caribbean (Toro-Sugrañes 1995). The population of Patillas is 20,150 (2000 United States Census). Patillas suffers from high unemployment (24.5% in 2013; DTOP 2013).
El Bajo
El Bajo de Patillas is located close to Arroyo, and near the Patillas River floodplain. It is also located near the Former Central Lafayette, and has a strong history of dependence on sugarcane work. In many ways, El Bajo de Patillas is closer to Arroyo than to the other coastal barrio of Patillas, even socially (García-Quijano 2006).
The largest group of fishers in Patillas operates out of El Bajo (The Shallows). As the name implies, their coastal barrio fronts the extensive shallows that were formed by the combined action of a rivermouth, the coastal mangroves, and the fringing coral reefs. These factors enhance biological productivity of coastal waters, and thus, historically, fishers from El Bajo have been able to fish relatively close to shore. The estuarie sand coastal forests near El Bajo are also used for “Pesca de Monte” activities, and there are also large swaths of mangrove and coastal forest to the East that are used by “pescadores de monte” from El Bajo. Coconuts from the coastal plain East of El Bajo seem to be a specially important “Pesca de Monte” resource.
The public beach of Patillas is located in el Bajo, as well as the only bay suitable for overnight anchorage of boats and sailboats in the region to the east of Guayama. The seafood restaurant scene of Patillas is also concentrated in El Bajo, and three of the seafood restaurants we interviewed are located there.
The Asociación de Pescadores de El Bajo de Patillas (Fishers Association of El Bajo) has about 35-40 members. It is located right next to the Maritime Police Station and the Public Balneario of Patillas, as well as very near the large vacation houses of rich people from San Juan which are usually only occupied during the Holidays. It is dramatic how all the different and sometimes strongly competing stakeholders come together within meters of each other in a short length of coast.
Salinas
Fishing, internal coastal tourism, and recreational boating are important activities in Salinas. Unemployment is high at 24.5% (DTOP 2013). Salinas has four beautiful bays surrounded by mangroves, plus hundreds of mangrove channels, locally called Caños, that zig-zag between and
around the bays. These protected channels and bays have made Salinas a center for recreational boating. Those same mangroves also have been the recipients of a continued assault by all kinds of actors, including Public Health agents fighting malaria, developers, marina builders, and a city Mayor who in the 1980’s designated a coastal lagoon as a landfill (interviews with Salinas fishers, 2003-04).
The coastal plain of Salinas was a major area of cane cultivation, with Central Aguirre being the largest sugarcane operation in this municipality. Similar to other southeastern municipalities, the coastal communities of Salinas are remnants of the sugarcane past. These coastal communities are Playa, Playita, and Aguirre. Each of these communities has its own embayment. That is, each community has a bay that is associated with it. Playa has the Bay of Salinas, Playita has an associated smaller bay to the east, and Aguirre has the deep sector of the bay of Jobos.
Playita and Playa
The communities of Playa and Playita are continuous to one another on land, but when approached from the sea, they are separated by coastal topography (they each have their own bay). Hence, each community has its own Fishers Association: Playa has the Asociación de Pescadores de la Playa de Salinas (Also known as Pescadería Don Piche), and Playita has the Asociación de Pescadores de La Playita de Salinas). Fishers associations in Playa and Playita apparently have a conflict-ridden history. Fishers repeatedly told me how conflicts over management have driven them from the associations. Association membership data analyzed by Griffith et al. 2007 seem to confirm that membership in associations in these communities has dropped over time.
The communities of Playita and Playa are a focal point of the seafood restaurant ‘scene’ in the area, and many people travel to Playa and Playita to visit the restaurants there. Land crabs are an important resource in the area, and many of the restaurants specialize in them. Boating and recreational fishing are very important as well, and many of the fishers in Playa and Playita double as captains, boat mechanics and charter operators for the recreational sector.
Playa and Playita’s engagement with the tourism and recreational boating sectors allows them to enjoy economic opportunities in the form of abundant buyers for their fish and jobs as guides and charter captains. The opportunities, however, come at an environmental cost and social cost. Most fishers from these two communities whom I talked to mentioned that recreational boating has greatly damaged their bays and mangrove channels. The fishers claim that noise pollution from jet-skis scares baitfish species out of the bay, while pollution coming from recreational yatchs anchored inside the bays is an important source of environmental degradation. Some ways in which these yatchs pollute are by dumping used water and human waste and by the leaking of engine oil, gasoline, transmission fluid, and other substances from boats that have been left there anchored (semi-abandoned) for long periods of time. Shiny floating spots resulting from gas and diesel spills are frequently seen in the area where recreational vessels anchor inside the bays of Salinas.
Gentrification is evident: wealthy boat owners from Ponce and San Juan also have been buying residents out of waterfront property and now own almost all residential properties with docking right of way, while R users mostly live one or two streets removed from the water: if they have boats in the water, they are usually at one of the two very active and organized fishers associations of Playa and Playita. A fisher from Playita gave PI García-Quijano a “tour” of the Salinas bays in his small boat in 2010 to show fishing, historical, and environmentally-impacted areas from a seaside perspective. As we moved trough the bays the coast seemed dominated by
luxury boats and vacation homes and the fisher literally held back tears as he said: “wow, they have really taken La Playa away from us”.
Coastal forest products are also very actively used by residents of Playa and Playita. An extensive coastal forest with mangroves, tidal flats, channels and lagoons, called Punta Arenas and located to the East of Playa and Playita is especially important, and routinely visited by “pescadores the monte” from these communities for land crabs, mangrove clams and oysters, coconuts and maví tree bark. Local residents and community organization members recently fought and temporarily won an injunction to a proposed luxury residential/tourism development that would have degraded a large portion of Punta Arenas’ productive “Pesca de Monte” grounds (which are also important nurseries for marine fisheries offshore), and no doubt would have prevented access to most of the remaining area. Findings this research project were made available by us and used by the community organizations to help prove the impact that the proposed developments would have had in livelihoods and QoL/WB.
Aguirre
If there is one community in Puerto Rico that is a testament to the coastal sugarcane past, that community has to be Aguirre. The National Estuarine Research Reserve (JOBANERR), a valued collaborator and support place for this research, is located in Aguirre. Aguirre is different from other former sugarcane-dependent communities in that instead of being a former satellite colony of a sugar mill, Aguirre was in fact located inside the area owned by a sugar mill. To enter Aguirre one has to go through the former gates of the Central Aguirre, the same gates outside of which, until the near past, any employee that fell out of grace with the administration would find themselves, together with their families and all of their belongings, under rain or shine.
Aguirre occupies the deep end of the Bay of Jobos. There are three principal groups of human dwellings associated with Aguirre: 1) A group of houses just outside of the gates called Barrio El Coqui, 2) a group of houses that used to belong to Central Aguirre (now they belong to their tenants) and which share the plantation house architecture that one sees in the southeastern United States (Wooden construction, high ceilings, and a wrap-around porch), and 3) a group of newer but more modest houses in and around the Aguirre’s plaza called Montesoría I and II. A related group of houses called Urbanización Eugene Rice, was built for laborers on the East side of Aguirre.
There are about 10-12 active fishers that are from Aguirre, and according to three elder fishers whom we interviewed for this study, this number is on the decline. I, however, observed a lot of fishing activity during the time I spent in Aguirre. I observed that life in Aguirre is still oriented towards the sea, and the elder fishers are very well respected, and stand as pillars of the community.
Aguirre and several nearby communities (like Mosquito and San Felipe), where we interviewed CR users, are located among productive coastal forest areas, and are very active in “Pesca de Monte”, with “se venden jueyes” signs and crab pens in many houses and these communities are widely-known around the region as a place to find quality local land crabs. The Central Termoeléctrica de Aguirre (Thermoelectric Power Plant of Aguirre), one of two twin thermoelectric powerplants that provide electricity to much of Puerto Rico, brings to Aguirre area some jobs, but it also brings air pollution, water pollution and constant deafening noise. The plant has a cool water intake and a hot water outtake inside the Bay, used for its cooling system. Ships carrying fuel for the plant come in regularly, creating leak hazards, and disturbing the soft bottoms with the powerful tugboats’ propellers. Air pollution from the power plant has been the subject of many controversies between Aguirreños and the Puerto Rico Power Authority, and
while some advance has been made with the help of the JOBANERR reserve officials, Aguirreños whom I talked with still claim that their air quality is sub-par thanks to the power plant. The sugarcane mill was also responsible for some environmental damage. Fishers in Aguirre report that, over the years, several instances of molasses spills into the bay resulted in episodes of massive fish and shellfish mortalities. A long-standing controversy regarding the impact of the hot-water outtake on the Jobos Bay ecosystems is a major point of contention between fishers in the study region and the government.
Coastal Resources
CR use in these communities spans several different types of human-ecological engagement with coastal resources (commercial, subsistence, recreational; estuarine, marine, “Pesca de Monte”/coastal forest), a range of population sizes -between 45k (Guayama) and 20k (Arroyo)and degrees of access to the larger economy. Throughout the proposed study region, most CR use and dependence happens in the context of rural, economically vulnerable communities. The region also has a long-standing pattern of multiple livelihoods that combine CR use with labor in the agricultural and industrial economy (Griffith and Valdes-Pizzini 2002; Garcia-quijano 2006; 2009).
Throughout this project’s fieldwork, we have identified that CR harvesting for human use happens in two major modes of engagement with coastal resources: 1) Marine/capture fisheries, and 2) “Pesca de Monte”. Before we start describing the two modes of CR use, we would like to note that although it is not always easy to differentiate between the two modes of engagement because many residents along the coast practice both types simultaneously to in time (for example a person can be both “pescador comercial” and “pescador de monte”, they constitute culturally significant, “emic” categories based on distinct ecological interactions.
Marine/Capture Fisheries
Locally called “pesca”, this category refers to what is usually understood by “fishing” or “fisheries” by the general public, scientists, and government agencies. Marine fisheries in the region are predominantly “small scale fisheries” (McGoodwin 1990:8-11): Fishers use small, operator-owned watercraft called “yolas”, have low capital investment, are managed at the household level and are oriented towards petty commodity, informally marketed production. A variety of hook and line, net, trap, and diving-based gears are used to catch more than 100 coastal, reef, and estuarine species of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks (Griffith, Valdés-Pizzini, and García-Quijano 2007; Suarez-Caabro 1979). As with other tropical fisheries in the Caribbean, most of the economically important fish species belong to the snapper (Lutjanidae), grouper (Serranidae), grunt (Haemulidae), mackerels and tunas (Scombridae), jack (Carangidae), and parrotfishes (Scaridae) families. Mollusks such as the Queen Conch (Strombus gigas ) and the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) are also economically important, as well as crustaceans like the spiny lobster (Panulirus argus ). Fishery landings are marketed in a variety of ways, including: formally in fishing cooperatives/associations or private “pescaderías” fishhouses, and more informally from individual fishers’ homes, taken by order to buyer’s homes, and (in a practice we infrequently, but steadily, observed, sold itinerantly from coolers or hangers in along welltraveled streets. Also, in what we will detail later is an important finding of this research, there is widespread subsistence/recreation fishing (food fishing) for self or gifted consumption.
Table 4. Marine Capture fisheries. Principal gear types and species landed through study region, based in reports to fishery statistics program (1999-2003). Adapted from GarcíaQuijano (2006) and Griffith et al. (2007).
gear1 gear2 gear3
Arroyo Gill net Fish trap Scuba
Guayama Fish trap Gill net
Patillas Fish trap Scuba
Species1 Landings (1999-2003)
Species2 Landings (1999-2003)
Species3 Landings (1999-2003)
Parrotfishes (Scaridae) Lobster (Panulirus argus) Halfbeaks (Hemyramphidae)
Bottom Line Lobster (Panulirus argus)
White Grunt (Haemulon plumierii) Lane Snapper (Lutjanus synagris)
Bottom Line Lobster (Panulirus argus) Lane snapper (Lutjanus synagris) Parrotfishes (Scaridae)
Yellowtail Snapper (Ocyurus chrysurus)
Salinas Fish trap Gill net
Bottom Line Lane snapper (Lutjanus synagris)
Mutton Snapper (Lutjanus analis) White grunt (Haemulon plumierii) Lobster (Panulirus argus)
Pesca de Monte: An “emic” (Pike 1967) cultural category meaning literally “forest fisheries” and which we translate as “coastal forest fisheries”, “pesca de monte” refers to the use of costal forest resources. Coastal forest in the study region include a variety of ecosystems such as mangroves, wetlands, tidal flats, and associated estuarine bodies of water like mangrove channels, lagoons, permanent and tidal alike. We first learned about the cultural category of “Pesca de Monte” from local fishers and residents in the first week of research activities in 2010 and quickly found out, as we asked around, that it is used in the same way throughout the study region (and possibly beyond to the East and West along the coast). In our more than 30 combined years of experience working in the Puerto Rican coast, none of us had heard the term “Pesca de Monte”, but when we asked around, it seemed that everyone around SE PR’s rural coast, CR users and laypeople alike, knew exactly what it meant.
Like with marine fisheries, the use of “Pesca de Monte” resources happens in a context of smallscale resource use, and it is more defined by the ecosystem in which it happens than by the people who practice it. In fact, many Cr users that we interviewed during this research were or had benn along their lives, both marine and “de Monte” fishers.
A variety of coastal resources sought during “Pesca de Monte” activities. The most important of these is the Atlantic land Crab (Cardisoma guanhumi), followed by mangrove oysters (Crassostrea rhizophorae), lucine clams (Lucina pectinata), blue crabs (Callinectes sp.), and interestingly several terrestrial plant species such as coconuts (Cocos nucifera), sea grapes (Coccoloba uvifera) , and the maví tree (Colubrina sp.). A variety of estuarine or semi-estuarine fishes and baitfishes such as white mullet (Mugil curema), liza (Mugil cephalus), mojarras (Gerres cinereus), drum (Micropogonias furnieri), snook (Centropomus undecimalis), sardines and herrings (Harengula y Opistonema sp.), ballyhoo (Hemiramphus sp.), cutlassfish (Thichiurus lepturus) and picudilla (Sphyraena picudilla) are sometimes considered to be part of the “Pesca de Monte” resources, if they are fished from land, around more inland inside estuarine water bodies rather than in open bodies of water where they would be considered regular “pesca”. Duting interviews and conversations we learned that CR users use a sort of continuum to separate these “Pesca de Monte” activities from just “marine fisheries activities happening in an estuary”. They tend to classify more as “Pesca de Monte” the capture of estuarine fish in shallow waters, using cast nets or small gillnets, in the narrower inland portions of estuaries or under mangrove
roots, and more as “capture fisheries” catches made in open, more seaward estuarine waters, especially when made from boats and/or using hook and line and larger nets.
“Pesca de Monte” is a widely-shared, culturally-significant cultural category of human interaction with coastal resources and as such it is important to know about for understanding coastal human ecology and for policy making. Although some excellent work has described the use of resource such as land crabs (Govender 2007), To the best of our knowledge “Pesca de Monte” as a cultural category is not officially described or used in our study region or for the majority of the coast of Puerto Rico for that matter (with the exception of similar historical accounts of “pescadores materos” by Giusti 1994).
What is a good life around this coast?: Local Definitions of Quality of Life and Well-Being
As we set about doing our interviews about the meanings and components of QoL/WB, a quick realization we had is that local residents used a different phrase to refer to the construct we were after: “the good life” (referring to a life worth living). A Don Teófilo, a fisher from the coastal village of Aguirre in Salinas, Puerto Rico told us the following in June 2010 when we asked him about the connections between fishing and quality of life:
“It’s simple: all the things that take away from our good life, that which you call “calidad de vida y bienestar”, that you see around here: “La Termoeléctrica (points to giant electrical generation plant that literally casts a shadow over his house),oil spills, pollution, unemployment, “el abandono” (feeling forgotten by society), unhealthy food, crime. As long as there is fishing, and capturing your “jueyito” (land crab), we will have some quality of life and also some independence”
From then on, we asked our ethnographic informants about what is “a good life” and its components. Some of the most frequent answers were related to social connections, like: “be part of a community”, “feel connected”, “spend time with my family”, “spend time with friends”, “help my community in THEIR quality of life”, and “help kinds stay away from crime and drugs. Others were related to making a living: “lead an honorable life and livelihood”, “be able to provide for your family” (social reproduction). Some answers were particular and highly frequent among CR harvesters, like “be my own boss”, “stay healthy and sane, in my therapy, being out there in the sea” and, “be out there, in the reefs, and lagoons”. When earning money was referenced, it was almost invariably talked about in the context of household reproduction, of making enough money to pay the bills, and of income security. In the case of CR users, money earned was also talked about in the context of being able to reinvest in their CR use so that they continue making a living with it. Our informants’ accounts of QoL/WB resonate with previous research accounts, such as Griffith, Valdés Pizzini and colleagues’ “injury and therapy” (Griffith et al. 1992; Griffith and Valdés Pizzini 2002), and the cultural model of success described by García-Quijano (2006; 2009). They are also consistent with descriptions of moral economies associated with rural communities, specially those making a living from natural resources (Scott 1972; Griffith 2010; Griffith et al. 2012).
Form our ethnographic interviews we developed a set of “Domains of Life” related to QoL/WB. With some consultation with literature on QoL/WB, we used these domains to measure relative domain importance variation in it in our structured surveys.
CR use and quality community lives
Economic resilience
SE PR coastal residents view CR use and access as a source of economic activity that is somewhat independent from larger economic and job market fluctuations, and thus softens the local impact of regional and global economic downturns. A repeated theme in our interview narratives is that coastal residents who have the knowledge and ability to strategically use local CR’s have felt the latest economic recession much less than, for example, office and industry workers in the nearby metropolitan areas who depend only or mostly on the mainstream job markets. Consider the words of a fisher from Aguirre in an 2010 interview: “I feel like, do you understand me, the economic crisis has made us more equal. We do not depend on large companies, but on the sea and our communities,
you see, those office workers in San Juan do not know how to survive the crisis, but we do…our insurance is the coast!”. Or like a “pescador de monte” from Arroya said: “yes, there is this economic recession, but nothing has really changed for us (CR users). We work, do odd-jobs, and we fish or catch crabs, sell some “salmorejo”. Life hasn’t changed for us”.
Social Problems and Crime
As Puerto Rico experiences widespread and rapidly increasing drug-trade related violence, with record murder rates, Puerto Ricans perceive crime as a major QoL/WB issue and increasingly value any roads that might lead young people away from a life of crime. As we traversed the coast of SE PR , asking questions about CR use and its importance for local communities, a topic that came up time and again was the connection between CR use-based activities and the lessening of social problems, specifically crime. In fact, this connection was practically universally mentioned by people from all walks of life that we talked to, and this was not only mentioned by our prompting: lessening crime by engaging youth in fishing an related activities was one of the main agendas of IDEBAJO community meetings we attended. It was repeatedly mentioned that one of the key contributions of CR use activities to the region’s QoL/WB is that it represents a viable alternative for young people, specially school dropouts and those already in the criminal justice system, and participate in non-criminal economic activities.
The brief story told to us by a fisherman we’ll call Lázaro exemplifies this connection: In one of our interviews with Lázaro, an evidently active, successful, and upstanding fisher, we were surprised when he listed “vendedor de crack” (crack cocaine pusher) as one of the previous jobs in his laboral history. A little later in the interview he told us the story behind it and the link to fishing: Lazaro had a rough childhood in which he ran away from home and was living in poverty and homeless. In the street he became addicted to drugs and became a drug pusher to finance his habit. He was by his own account on the way to an early death when his half brother, who had become a fisherman and saved money to buy his own boat, came over one day and offered him a position as his striker and apprentice on the condition of him cleaning up. Lazaro took the opportunity, sobered up, and fishing has been his life since. Now he owns his own boat and fishes everyday. “If it weren’t for the sea and fishing I would be dead”. At the time of our interview, he was set on following his older brother’s lead and getting another, younger, brother into fishing and boats, “para sacarlo de la calle” (getting him off the streets).
Fishermen, land crabbers, and other expert CR users repeatedly told us how they specially cherish their ability afforded by their trade to provide local youths (usually their neighbors and extended family members) an opportunity to learn a skill-based trade and “ganarse la vida honradamente” (make an honorable living). A clam fisher and roadside vendor we interviewed in 2010 and 2011, and who we will call Daniel, reported that he usually has between one and three helpers whom he teaches his trade to and takes to the estuarine lagoons of Salinas to fish with him. His helpers are usually youths from his community. In many cases they have been referred to him by kin or neighbors who are worried about the youth’s prospects or approached by Daniel himself to afford them an opportunity to make a living. In an interview in July 2010, he told us:
“I hire local kids or young guys, out of jail or out of drugs, alcohol, or with a learning disability, to help them out. Nobody gives these kids a job, but they are my neighbors, nephews, my friends’ kids. I care about them!
Who would give “los muchachos” (endearing term for “the guys”) a chance if we did not? Nobody, that’s who! I do more than the police to keep them from a life of crime”
Daniel’s quote illustrates one how opportunities such as CR use in a community context are superior to formal, market-based employment. Many businesses are reluctant to hire ex-convicts, recovering addicts or similar because they fear problems associated with the employee’s issues. But independent, locally connected CR users like Daniel have the support of the kin and neighborhood networks to keep and eye on and sanction the “muchachos” if they dare to steal from the one giving them an opportunity. Several of Daniel’s stories about this topic revolved around how young guys he hired and “le fallaron” would get much worse fallout from their own families than from himself. When “muchachos” misbehave, community networks rather than formal law, sanction and resolve issues.
Interestingly, when Post-doc associate Del Pozo told some fishermen from NE Puerto Rico about our research in SE PR, some of them mentioned an official after-jail reentry program based around fishing in the 1970’s that was short-lived but successful. We are currently doing archival research about this program to include it in further writing and dissemination of results from this project.
This builds on a long tradition of local poor youth harvesting CRs for supplementary nutrition, petty income for school supplies, etc. CR use can be specially important for youths with handcaps or learning disabilities what would make a formal economy job unlikely. Such is the case of Julio, a “pescador de monte” we interviewed in July 2012. In his childhood years, Julio developed severe neurological and learning problems. His older cousin –whom we also interviewed-, who was a “pescador de monte”, saw that Julio had inclination and talent for harvesting CRs and, realized that being poor and with his condition, Julio probably would never be able to get satisfactory formal economy employment. So he took Julio under his wing to teach him to catch, prepare, and market land crabs and other coastal forest resources. Nowadays, Julio not only is economically independent but is also known around his community as an expert land crabber who brings in quality food. His cousin and mentor told us: “I did not want to see my cousin homeless or institutionalized, so I taught him how to become a land crabber and that’s how he makes a living now”.
In general, as also noted in an article recently published by PI García-Quijano along with David Griffith and Manuel Valdés Pizzini, coastal communities seem, to be highly aware that CR use is important for creating and reproducing “quality lives” and quality communities (Griffith et al 2012). In June 2011, a community elder fisherman we were interviewing in Playita, Salinas pointed to a group of young adult (16-20 years old) fishers working hard as a team, classifying and cleaning the day’s catch in an impressively fast and efficient manner and told us: “The main benefit, the best quality that you get from fishing around here, from fishing for a living, is right there: “good, hard working, healthy, wholesome(‘sanos’), responsible young kids”. Fishing and other CR use is viewed by many along the SE PR coast as, in the words of a community activist from Arroyo during a meeting in July 2011: “not only an economic alternative, but an alternative for a good life”.
Structured Questionnaire Interviews with Coastal Resource Users and with Coastal Residents
CR USERS (n=47)- Patterns of resource use
CRs used and sold: In the overall sample, fifteen respondents reported to harvest more than one of the three important CRs we asked about in the questions about income (commercial fishing, land crabs, oysters/clams). Eight reported receiving income from more than one of them. For the those receiving income from both commercial fishing and land crabbing (the two most widely reported), commercial fishing tended to be more important in terms of relative percentage than crabbing, with the exception of one respondent who reported 99% of income from crabbing and 1% from commercial fishing.
Table 5 Types of CRs harvested and sold by respondents
CR use entails a series of activities form harvesting to cleaning and value adding to selling. We asked about the range of Productive CR use-based activities that respondents and their households are engaged in:
Table 6 CR-based productive activities reported by respondents
Breadth of activities: Respondents reported that they and their household members participate in an average of 3 (St.Dev. .780) of the activities in the categories above. The most common configuration of productive activities was harvesting and cleaning (n=41), followed by harvesting, cleaning and selling (n=37), while 6 reported participating in harvesting, cleaning, selling, and adding value. In our analysis we separate “cleaning”, the standard and basic form of adding value to catch, from other forms of “adding value” that rely more on preparation as semiprocessed or ready-to-eat food.
Table 7 Respondents by number of CR-use productive activities
of CR-based activities
We asked CR users whether their engagement with CRs consisted of one or more of the following categories:
Table 8 Types of CR use reported
CR harvesting effort: The respondents reported that they spend an average of 23.80 (St. Dev. 13.22) hours actively harvesting CRS and an additional 13.52 (st. Dev. 12.09) hours in other closely related activities.
Thirty-nine (82.9%) of 47 respondents consider that “they have raised their family with income from local CRs. 45 of 47 (95.7%) report that the routinely give away CR-based products to others in community, which is am important contribution of Cr suers tho their communities’ Qol/WB.
CR users- Local CR-based income
We asked respondents about the relative contribution of different local CRs to their household income. We also added the total income reported from the different CRs to each respondents’ household to get an idea of total CR contribution to income reported for each household. As it often happens to questions related income, a few repondents (4) declines to answer these questions.
Income from all CRS contributed to an average of 55.7% (St.Dev. 29.15) of our respondents’ household incomes. There was a large variation in total CR-use income reported: 12 respondents reported between 10% and 30% income; 20 respondents between 40% and 70%, and 11 between 90% and 100%. This coincides with previous studies of fishing-based income in the study region (Garcia-Quijano 2006), and over most of the coast of Puerto Rico (Griffith et al. 2007) that show a variety of levels of engagement with fishing and other coastal resource within an overall high income dependence in fishing and other CRs.
Broken down by the different CRS, 27 commercial fishing participants reported average 54.93% of fishing income, 20 land crabbers reported average 38.1% of land crabbing income, 4 oyster/clam harvesters reported average 35.25% oster/clam income, and 2 reported 3.5% income from other CRS.
Because of the occupational multiplicity, in time and in space, that characterizes use of coastal resources such as fishing in these coastal communities, figures of income derived from local CRs, while useful, have to be interpreted with caution (See Griffith and Valdes-Pizzini 2002; GarciaQuijano 2006). It might be more useful to look at CR income contribution to households over time, over the household histories.
Table 9. % Income from 3 main CRs, all sample
Table 10. % Income from # main CRs’ by reported participation
In terms of their assessments of projecting their economic situation into the future: -“my economic situation is better now than 5 years ago”: 26 “YES”, 21 “NO” - “I expect my economic situation to be better in 5 years than it is now”: 25 “YES”, 22 “NO”
Coastal residents: patterns of CR use/consumption
CR use and consumption is an overwhelmingly LOCAL trade, based on local resources.
Table 11. Reported Consumption of 3 main CRs that are captured locally:
Fisheries Products (not Pesca de Monte)
-43 (91.5%) of the coastal residents’ sample reported to routinely eat local fish. Of these:
- 2 (4.3%) Consume it daily or almost daily
- 12 (25.5%) 3 or more times a week
- 10 (19.1%) or or two times a week
- 15 (31.9%) several times a month
- 8 (17%) several times a year
Respondents who consume local fish report that an average of 92.91 % (St. Dev. 15.78) of the fish of all kinds consumed in their household is locally caught.
-34 (72.3%) of the 43 reported that all (100%) of the fish consumed in their household is local fish. The rest range between 50% and 90%.
Based on our ethnography, we assembled a list of the ways in which local fish can be accessed and asked respondent coastal residents to indicate the ways in which their household accesses fish:
Table 12. Ways of accessing local fish ranked by number of reports. Way of accessing local fish
As the table shows, the most frequently mentioned way of accessing fish for the respondent’ households are a result of close social relationships with the fish harvester.
In fact, the frequency of responses ordinally matches social distance between the harvester and the respondents’ household. The closest possible social distance between the CR harvester and the consumers, “caught by a member of the household” (24)- was the most frequently mentioned, followed by “received as gift from fishers in community” (15). Gift-giving is a signifier of social closeness exchange in exchanges (Mauss 196x).
The most frequently-mentioned money exchange transactions are still dependent on relatively close, face-to-face social relationships and visiting the home of one of the parties in the exchange: buying directly from fishers who either sell the fish form their home (13) or bring it to the respondents’ home (13). Buying fish form a local fish house or association, a transaction that is more in the formal economy format of store-customer (which we expected to much higher up in frequency), comes up fifth, tied with eating fish in a local restaurant with 11 mentions.
We also asked the respondents to rank the ways of accessing fish they mentioned, and the rankings show a similar pattern, with caught by a member of the household ranked #1 by 17 respondents (probably the 17 CR users in the random sample) followed by buying from local fisher who brings it home (#1 by 7 respondents), and received as a gift (#1 by 6 respondents).
These results highlight the importance of close social relationships for accessing local fish: a significant portion of the high-quality, fresh fish consumed by residents of these coastal communities depends on close personal connections like family, kin, and neighbor networks.
An important implication of these results for policy is that A lot, possibly most, of the real value people get from local, fresh fish will be missed if it is measured by standard economic, currencyexchange approaches: 1) the two most frequent ways in which people access local fish do not involve currency exchange at all, and the next two most frequent rely on informal market exchanges that will be unlikely to be reported or captured in any official expenditure record. Assessments of the value of local fisheries based on currency expenditures are most probably grossly underestimating the value of fisheries (and by extension the value of the natural and social capital that make local fisheries possible) for local populations.
These patterns coincide to what we were told by ethnographic informants that, in the words of one of the informants “around here, you might find that people don’t spend too much on local seafood, but it is because people around here grow up knowing how to get their own, they catch a lot of their fish and land crabs”(interview, July 2010).
We did, however, ask for approximate amount spent by household buying fish (and crabs and oysters/clams) and tabulated these results. Realizing that they are most underestimations, and that money expenditures are just one part of the economic activity generated by local CRs. Coastal residents spent an average of $16.46 (St. Dev. 19.65) weekly buying fish; average $18.20 (St. Dev. 21.75) during Lent and $14.42 (St. Dev. 21.69) outside of Lent.
Jueyes (Land Crabs)
-35 (74.5%) of coastal residents interviewed reported eating land crabs. Of these:
- 1 (2.1%) consume it daily or almost daily
- 0 consume it three or more times a week
- 4 (8.5%) consume it one or two times a week
- 8 (17%) consume it several times a month
- 22 (46.8%) consume it several times a year
Land crabs are a food item of high periodicity and less biomass(confined to narrow swath of coastal plain) than coastal fish, thus are not as much an everyday food item but they are an item routinely caught and highly sought after when available. Also, a 2 month-long closed season is in place for land crabs when it is illegal to possess or sell them fresh (and they are most often sold alive, or recently killed and not frequently frozen).
An average of 98.29% of the land crabs consumed by the coastal residents are local.
During our ethnographic work we created a list of the ways land crabs are accessed by region residents. Using the list, we asked the respondents about the how they get their land crabs.
Table 13. Ways of accessing local land crabs ranked by number of reports
Trade in land crabs is also local and happening in the context of a face-to-face community. “Buy alive, cleaned ready to eat from a local crabber” was the most frequently mentioned and this is a transaction that practically always happens either at the crabbers’ home or the respondents’ home, since land crabs are not usually sold in associations or fish house. Because of this, it is not easy to make a distinction between personal versus anonymous buying relationships. A variation of this practice is characteristic of the land crab because of the ways land crabs are caught, cleaned, and marketed. Crabs are typically sold alive, due to their being terrestrial creatures, easy to keep alive for a time, and also because they are detritivores and deposit feeders that require a “cleaning” period before being safely eaten –this cleaning period is also an opportunity to add nutritional and economic value by “fattening” the crab and often also give it a special flavor by feeding the crab with specific foodstuffs or ‘crab food recipes’ (e.g. corn, coconut, mangoes, others). fourteen respondents reported getting crabs alive from crabber to clean and fatten at home.
For crabs, “captured by a household member” was the second most frequently mentioned way to access crabs. This coincides with our ethnographic interviews and observations that many households, especially in communities near mangroves and tidal flats, catch and clean their own crabs, some opportunistically (crabs sometimes live or congregate in the residents’ backyards or near their house, so its easy to capture them), some in a more concerted fashion. Many region residents go on land crab harvesting forays recreationally or with a special purpose in mind (capture crabs for an upcoming family feast). It is also common, for example, for children to
forage for crabs to contribute to their homes’ food supply and/or to sell as petty commodities to supplement their allowances or their parents’ income. About a third (12) respondents also mentioned getting crabs as a gift from a local crabber.
Value adding by preparing specific dishes is very important for land crabs, and these dishes can take some specialized knowledge to prepared:
- Eating land crabs in local restaurants in a variety of ways: whole boiled (5), in a highdemand dish called Arroz-con-jueyes (Rice with crabs)(10), or as part of fritters (11)
- Buying crab meat to prepare dishes such as samorejo (5), Arroz con Jueyes (12), or fritters (2)
- Other regions or Puerto Rico are also land crab producing, and (6) respondents reported eating land crabs in restaurants when visiting.
Again, taking into account that these are probably underestimations of the real value because important ways of accessing land crabs do not include money transactions, we asked the respondents approximately how much they spend weekly buying land crabs (because many did not eat land crabs weekly, we asked them to average it to a weekly amount).
- They reported spending an average of $7.63 (St. Dev. 17.31) a week buying land crabs, $8.00 (St. Dev. 17.43 during LENT) and $4.23 (St. Dev. 5.06) outside of LENT.
Mangrove Oysters and Clams
- 12 (25.5%) of the respondents report that they consume local mangrove oysters and clams. We asked about these two separate species of CRs together because they are usually marketed, prepared and sold together, and most CR users who harvets and sell one also harvest and sell the other.
- The proportion of use seems low, but eating raw shellfish not something that everyone does, and we found an interesting pattern of geographical aggregation: Although an important, but not large, proportion of respondents report consuming local oysters and clams, when we look at specific communities we found that they are aggregated in the settlements around the mangrove channel areas that is the prime habitat for these mollusks: Pozuelo, Aguirre, and Barrancas. 11 of the 12 respondents who consume ousters and clams live in these three communities.
- 6 (60%) of the 10 interviewed Pozuelo residents report eating local oysters/clams
- These 3 (specially Pozuelo) Pozuelo were also where we observed the most oyster and clam harvesting and selling activity in our ethnographic research and cultural mapping activities.
- An explanation for this pattern is that people eat what grows around their local environment. Eating local oysters/clams might be a highly localized traditions of these estuarine communities. Loss of access to these CRs might affect these communities disproportionally.
- -The 12 respondents who consume oysters/clams report that 97.5% of these mollusks that they consume are local.
Table 14. Ways of accessing local mangrove oysters and clams ranked by number of reports
The main way respondents access oysters and clams is buying them directly from local shellfish stands. Four also report that local fishers give away oysters and clams to them and 3 that household members harvest and bring them in. Even though the numbers are small to much about them, a reason why most respondents go to vendors for their shellfish might be that harvesting, cleaning, and shucking oysters and clams is a specialized (and arduous, even slightly dangerous) trade requiring specific skills and equipment. Also, like land crabs, these are not really everyday nutritional items. Still, some do report harvesting by family members and getting oysters and clams as gifts. Our ethnographic work, which included spending time around the oyster and clam stands of ethnographic informants (and consuming some of the product too) also reveals that the very experience of roadside vending, consumption and presentation of the clams and oysters themselves is one of the value-adding mechanisms/strategies of harvesters/vendors.
Respondents report spending an average of $3.75 (St. Dev 3.22) weekly in mangrove oysters and clams; $4 (St. Dev. 4.04) during Lent and $3.58 (St. Dev. 3.60) outside of Lent.
Other Coastal Resources
Table 15. Other coastal resources used in SE PR
A variety of coastal resources are utilized and consumed by local residents. One of the unexpected findings of this research is the breadth of resources utilized by coastal residents and the extent of this utilization. Four kinds of CRs that seems to be very widely consumed are baitfish (19), blue crabs (Callinectes sp.) (18), West Indian Top Shell (18), and coconuts (40). Two of these (coconuts and blue crabs) are among the resources usually grouped as “pesca de monte”, and baitfish is sometimes grouped with “pesca de monte” and sometimes with regular, “marine” fisheries, depending on where the baitfishing is taking place. W.I. Top Shell (burgao, Cittarum pica) is a reef or rocky coast mollusk of high value that is caught by a variety of people and exploitation lavels, sometimes by casually gleaning off reefs and sometimes by targeted fishing trips.
Looking back, if we had known about the extent and frequency that these resources are utilized we would have asked more specific questions about their harvest and utilization. It seems that the use of local coastal forest products (coconuts and others) is a widespread, yet understudied,
economic and alimentary practice for around the SE PR coast, specially consistent with the conceptual framework of Environmental Multiplicity (Stoffle 1986; Stoffle and Minnis 2008).
Future research could specifically target the understanding of the use of coastal forests in SE PR and elsewhere around the Puerto Rican coast.
Interviews with Seafood Restaurants in SE PR
We interviewed managerial staff (owners, managers, or cooks) in 22 out of 27 seafood-based identified in region during cultural mapping drive-throughs. These establishments range from small, roadside food stands to sit down restaiurants, but the modal category was “bar and restaurant”
-21 of the 22 restaurants regularly sells local CRs
- 21 out of the 22 (95%) indicated that local CRs were Very Important or Essential to their business.
-The reported mean percentage of the restaurant’s income from selling local CRs was 59.8% (Std.Dev. 23.87). This income is not beverage-adjusted, and most restaurants in this region sell alcohol. This means the percentage of the income from FOOD attributed to local CRs will be much higher. Not only that, but also while a significant income comes from alcoholic beverages, most clients who consume these beverages come to the restaurant because of the local CRs, so the alcoholic beverages income is dependent on local CRS as well.
- Respondents reported that practically all of the local clientele and an average of 80% of the clientele that comes from outside of the region comes to their restaurant looking specifically for local coastal CRS.
-Relationship between seafood restaurants and local CR harvesters (How do the restaurants get their local CRs?)- We asked about who they bought their local CRs from and the type of relationship they had with the harvesters. We later coded their answers as to whether the restaurant buyer-harvester relationship was a: 1) close, contractual long-term relationship where both the buyer and the harvester had privileged/exclusive access to the other, 2) personal, local, but casual relationship, or 3) an anonymous, market-principle relationship.
-The modal type of relationship was a close, contractual relationship (68.2% for fish and 50% for land crabs), with the majority of the reminder being a personal, local, but casual relationship (22.7% for fish and 35% for land crabs). Anonymous, market-type relationships were 9.1% for fish and 15% for land crabs. Thus, 90.9% of restaurants get their fish -and 85% of restaurants get their land crabs- through local, personal relationships (contractual and casual). Thus, local CR production and marketing through restaurants in the study region relies strongly on personal connections and local social networks. This ties the restaurant sector closely to local producers and local resources.
Some key details about Coastal Resources sold in restaurants:
- All those that sell local CRs (21/22) sell fish whole (fried or grilled)
- 20 of those sell fish in fillets or “guisado”
- 19 of the 21 that sell local CRs sell land crabs, not including frituras/fritters (18 sell “arroz con jueyes”, 19 sell “salmorejo”, 9 sell whole, boiled crabs (a specialty fare).
- 19 restaurants in sample sell spiny lobster, not including frituras.
- 20 sell queen conch, not including frituras
- 19 restaurants sell seafood frituras (fritters): trunkfish 19, octopus 18, lobster 16, land crabs 17, queen conch 17.
- In terms of fish sold whole, in fillets, or stewed, the most important species are chillo (silk snapper, Lutjanus vivanus) 20, meros (groupers, Serranidae) 17, dorado (mahi-mahi, Coryphaena hippurus) 11, and arrayao (lane snapper, Lutjanus synagris) 10.
- Respondents reported the specific local CRs that customers most frequently come into the restaurant looking specifically for are: jueyes (land crabs, Cardisoma guanhumi) 15 mentioned, carrucho (Queen conch, Strombus giga) 11, langosta (spiny lobster, Panulirus argus) 11, arrayao (lane snapper, Lutjanus synagris) 11, chillo (silk snapper, Lutjanus vivanus) 10, sierra (mackerel,
Scomberomorus maculates or S. cavalla) 8, colirrubia (yellowtail snapper, Ocyurus chrysurus) 7, and chapín (trunkfish, Lactophrys trigonus)7
-The approximate geographic origin composition of restaurants’ clientele by informant reports was: local community 11.3%, other communities in region 21.7%, other municipalities in PR 48.9%, outside PR 18.2%
- Seafood restaurants in study region are mostly Family businesses: - 12 report that other household members work in establishment - 12 report that extended family members work in establishment - 18 report that either household OR extended family members work in establishment
- According to the respondent reports, and average of 11.5 people per restaurant work in the sector, ranging from 3 (min) to 26 (max), for a total of 242 jobs for the 22 restaurants in the sample.
- Of the total 242 people reportedly employed by the seafood restaurants, 69 worked in restaurants with less than 50% of income coming from local CRs, and 173 worked in restaurants with 50% or more of their income coming from local CRs.
Structured
Questionnaire Data: Measuring QoL/WB and its relationship with CR use
Important Life Domains – Respondents in both the CR users and Residents samples were asked to: 1) rate 12 life domains, identified from ethnographic fieldwork and previous studies, in terms of their importance to the respondents’ well-being, as well as 2) mention the 5 most important of those 12 presented life domains. Domains of Life questions consisted of 12 questions representing 12 domains of life, rated on a 5-point Likert Scale, ranging from Essential, Very Important, Important, Of Little Importance, Not Important.
The domains of life questions were based directly on the key informant’s narratives and descriptions of important things in life for the QoL/WB, specifically those related with making a living and economic activity. They were designed to measure the relative importance of these domains for the questionnaire respondents in both samples, and thus get a glimpse of the motivations behind economic activity and lifestyle decisions. With these questions we are also indirectly getting at the basic question about the drivers and motivation of human economic behavior by asking respondents about what is important for them in their life.
On average, respondents in both samples rated domains related to enjoying and maintaining close kin social relationships as the most important domains of their lives: “Have good relationships with my family” and “spending time with family and friends” were the highest rated items in both samples, and “having good relationships with neighbors and community members” also rated relatively high. Conversely, “making a lot of money” was the single lowest rated domain for both samples”.
These patterns of relative importance were similar for both samples with the exception of the domains related to economic independence (specially “being my own boss”), which were rated very high by the CR users while they were of relatively lower importance for the coastal residents sample. This is consistent with long-standing cross-cultural findings about economic independence being one of the key values of making a living as small-scale producer in a larger economy. Fishers have been found to specially value both the economic and the physical independence and mobility afforded by working at sea (e.g. Comitas 1974, McGoodwin 2006; Pollnac and Poggie 2006; Poggie 1978): respondents in the CR users’ sample also rated “spend a lot of time out in the coast and sea” and almost as highly as the domains related to close kin and community social relationships.
Emphasis on economic independence, not having to work for an overseer or landlord, has been a robust and repeated theme of our work with Puerto Rican and other Caribbean small-scale fishers over the years, and in some of our interviews was linked to the history of oppression, inequality, and injustice around the rural coasts, mostly related to sugarcane agriculture, and being part of the plantation worker or peasant social class during the heyday of the sugarcane plantation system. Having experienced economic subjugation, there is a lot of emphasis on independence, being one’s own boss, as a key component of self-actualization. Also, a small number of crew fishing from small boats requires that fishers exercise considerable independence in their decision making. These fishers must be psychologically independent ;for, in this work, they are now their own bosses, with their physical and economic fate in their own hands. Without this capacity, they would be poorly adapted to the requirements of their work and probably unsuccessful at doing it, hence prone to leave the occupation.
Historically, and even during the height of the sugar cane industry, workers did maintain independent resource harvesting work in the “invernazo” (Griffith and Valdes-Pizzini 2002; Griffith et al 2007; Garcia-Quijano 2006, Giusti 1994). We suspect this keep them
psychologically independent, reasonably nourished, and mindful of how much better it is to be an independent producer. All these factors relate to QoL/WB over the long haul and point out one upside of occupational multiplicity. Griffith, Valdés Pizzini, and colleagues’ key finding about fishing being considered “therapy” to life’s “injuries” certainly holds as a robust and repeated finding in this research, being voiced literally and repeatedly by CR users we interviewed, we have found that it also extends to more land-based “pesca de monte”. We suspect that part of the reason many resource users view their CR use as therapy is because it allowed them to keep their sense of independence and avoid becoming dependent welfare clients or subjugated proletarian workers.
Domains of Life Frequencies:
Table 16 CR users’ Ratings of Domains of Life Importance
tiempo con mi familia y mis amigos
Tener buenas relaciones con mi familia
Tener control sobre como me gano la vida
Ser mi propio jefe
Tener buenas relaciones con vecinos y gente de mi comunidad
Pasar mucho tiempo en contacto con el mar y la costa
Poder mantener y criar una familia
Poder ganarme la vida con recursos costeros 4.49 0.882
Trabajar para ayudar a mi comunidad 4.23 0.89
Hacer
Table 17. Coastal Residents’ ratings of Domains of Life Importance
Tener buenas relaciones con mi familia
Pasar tiempo con mi familia y mis amigos
Poder mantener y criar una familia 4.23 0.84
Tener control sobre como me gano la vida
Tener buenas relaciones con vecinos y gente de mi comunidad
Ganar un sueldo estable
Ser mi propio jefe
Trabajar para ayudar a mi comunidad
Pasar mucho tiempo en contacto con el mar y la costa 3.4 1.116
Hacer actividades que sean emocionantes y retantes
Domains of Life: Factor Analysis
We did diagnostic factor analysis (PCA with Varimax) using SYSTAT and SPSS. Besides to reduce data for further analysis, factor analysis was key for our weighting of domains of life that affect QoL/WB, a crucial step for understanding and modeling QoL/WB.
CR users sample:
4 factors greater than 1, account for 72.1% of variance.
Table 18. Domains of Life, Principal Components Analysis results
- 1st Factor loaded high on “spending time in Coast”, “be my own boss”, and “having control over how I make a living”
-loads negative on questions related to income and income security
We call this factor: Independence
- 2nd Factor: Loads high on “have good relationships with family”, “spend time with family and friends”
loads negative on questions related to income ad income security
We call this factor: Close kin and social relationships
- 3rd Factor: Loads high on “maintain family”, “make a living with coastal resources”, income and income security related variables but in lower magnitude
We call this factor: Economic Household Reproduction
4th factor:
-loads high on: “having good relationships with community” and “work to help my community”
-We call this factor: Community-Oriented Relationships
Coastal Residents’ Sample
4 factors greater than 1, account for 68% of variance
[insert residents’ sample factor analysis domains of Life Table]
1st factor:
Loads high on “raise and maintain a family”, “good relationships with family”, spend time with family and friends”
We call this factor “Social Household Reproduction and Relationships”
2nd Factor:
-Loads high on “good relationships with community”, “work to help my community”
-We call this factor “community relationships”
3rd Factor:
-Loads high on “being one’s own boss”, “spend time in contact with coast”, “make a living with CRs”
-We call this factor “independence and coastal livelihood”
4th factor:
-Loads high on “Make a lot of money” and “work to help community”
-We call this factor: “Affluence”
Table 19. Most Important Domains of Life for CR users
Table 20. Most Important Domains of Life for Coastal Residents' sample
The strong pattern in two independent samples runs counter to the dominant socioeconomic paradigm in North American cultures that focuses on material affluence and capital accumulation and which often drives economic policy related to development of the coast. ( cf Cotton and Dunlap 1980. Overall, the frequencies and relative domain importance results resonate with emerging results of research related to QOL/WB: that beyond a certain base level of material and health security, social relationships and freedom to pursue interests and self-actualization become much more important to people than merely capital accumulation or material affluence (e.g. Kubiszewski et al. 2013; Max-Neef 1995; Stiglitz et al. 2010).
CR Users Sample: Relationship between CR use and important Life Domains We asked the respondents about the relationship between CR use and important life domains identified in previous question. We team-coded the responses by theme/topic, adding codes until reaching thematic saturation. Codes were created to illustrate and quantify the diversity of answers and perspectives, emphasizing “in-vivo codes” (using the repondents’ own words when possible) as well as topics that from our ethnographic work and relevant literature/theory. The codes created and frequency of answers are tabulated below:
Community Solidarity
In our ethnographic work and previous studies we found that the quality and type of community relationships were an important component of QOL/WB for our ethnographic informants. This was repeatedly mentioned specifically in the context of the importance of CR use for the community. Our informants repeatedly mentioned that CR use-related activities tend to both contribute –and be characteristic of- desirable community characteristics such as high degree of face-to-face interactions, people knowing and helping each other, and overall high reciprocity, respect and solidarity (also see García-Quijano 2006;2009; Griffith et al. 2007; 2013). We refer to these aggregated characteristics as Community Solidarity, and in our structured questionnaires asked a group of questions to elicit respondents’ assessments of Community Solidarity in the coastal locations where they live.
Table 22. Community Solidarity Questions
Community Solidarity Questions
1. La gente de mi comunidad tiende a cooperar y a ayudarse entre sí
2. Si yo sufriera un accidente o enfermedad, o perdiera mi trabajo, podría contar con la gente de esta comunidad
3. Si alguna otra persona de esta comunidad sufriera accidente o enfermedad, o perdiera trabajo, podría contar conmigo
4. En la comunidad donde yo vivo la gente comparte mucho entre sí
5. En la comunidad donde yo vivo todo el mundo se conoce
6. En la comunidad donde yo vivo hay unión entre los vecinos
7. En la comunidad donde yo vivo
Our main objective was to create a Community Solidarity Index to be used as a variable to compare across informants, geographic locations, CR use characteristics, and others. This Index can also provide an overall assessment of people’s perceptions and enjoyment of the communities in which they live and work, an important component of QoL/WB.
We used factor analysis (PCA with Varimax) in SPSS 19 to reduce data and weight variables for this index. In both samples (CR users and Coastal residents), 2 of the 7 questions’ response patterns had too little variance to be useful for an index. These were questions 3 and 5 in the table above. We believe that the response pattern for question 3, whether the informant would help fellow community members in rough times, is due to a social desirability response bias (it is unlikely that the respondent would admit to the interviewer, or even to themselves, that they might be unlikely to help a community member in need). Interestingly, for question 4, whether they felt they could count on their fellow community members to help THEM in a time if need, got more varied responses, albeit still generally positive response patterns.
For question 5, whether in their community most people know everyone else (todo el mundo se conoce) there was little variance as well, with almost all respondents highly agreeing almost unanimously across samples and communities. In this case we think it points to the overall characteristic of a face-to-face, natural resource dependent community for SE PR coastal locales in our study.
After excluding the two variables with too little variance, our PCA results in the CR users sample showed only one factor with eigenvalues higher than 0.5, explaining 70% or variability (CR users
sample). All remaining 5 variables loaded highly on this factor. Thus we assume equal variable weights.
We ran the same analysis with 5 Index variables for the Coastal Residents sample, and found similar results (one factor higher than 0.5, explaining 72.9% of variance, and some slight differences, mainly in the response patterns of question 4, whether they felt the community would take care of them in time of need. Maybe this is due to CR users tendency to be highly involved in reciprocal solidarity networks through capturing, marketing, and giving away fish (Griffith et al 2007. Garcia-Quijano 2006). CR users repeatedly mentioned specific, deliberate engagement in community solidarity-enhancing activities and enhancing their value to their communities and engage in reciprocal relationships, which is part of their overall complexity and uncertainty management strategy (fieldwork, Garcia-Quijano 2006, 2009). In other words, CR users show a conscious engagement with community solidarity and reciprocity management.
Based on the factor analysis results (unidimensional factor solution with high factor loadings), we are confident of using a simple additive index for Community Solidarity. The Community Solidarity Index measures variation in a domain of QOL/WB that has been identified as important by informants across all samples and multiple studies. In the diagnostic factor analysis we found that the 5 variables chosen had equivalent loadings, ranging from .789 to .856, in one factor that explained most of the variance (70-72%). Diagnostic factor analysis helped trim down 2 of the original variables. The results for both samples, seem to indicate that for all the interviewed respondents, their communities are face-to-face communities with overall high community solidarity.
Material Style of Life (MSL)
An important aspect in our comparison of resource users and residents is cumulative wealth. We want to go beyond highly fluctuating and difficult-to-measure “current income” and obtain a more long-term and cumulative measure of this variable. We feel that a material style of life (MSL) index best fits these requirements. We measured MSL by asking respondents in both samples about which of 18 items in a material culture checklist could be found in their household (see table for the list of items). The list of items and services used was modified from a list of items used by Garcia-Quijano (2006) with fishers in this study’s region in 2003-2004, which was in turn modified from the list Poggie (1978) used to assess ‘material culture’ for fishers in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. The modifications reflect the range of added items that a Puerto Rican working-class family might be expected to own at the time of this research.
Table 23 Material Style of Life Items reported by respondents
We used the Guttman scaling routine from ANTHROPAC X (Borgatti 2001) to test for unidimensional scalability of the 20 items in the material culture list. Guest (2002) and Poggie (1972) provide an useful examples and discussion of using Gutmann scaling to rank individuals according to wealth in an Ecuadorian fishing village and a Mexican Industrial City, respectively, which we used as a template for our scaling analysis. We ran a heuristic Gutman Scaling solution of MLS items (modified from ANTHROPAC analysis for respondents in both samples. MLS items appear to scale unidimensionally (Coeficients or Reproducibility (COR): (.91) CR users and (.90) Residents), a necessary condition to using Gutmann Scale step scores as an ordinal variable to compare between respondents. To further enhance the usefulness of MLS scale scores as a variable that is comparable within as well as between the samples, we decided to run the Guttman Scale for all cases in both samples together (n=94, COR=.90) and compute ordinal step scores for all cases in relation to each other. These step scores were further used as a variable for
description and further analysis: an internal ordinal measure better illustrates relative difference in MLS than merely comparing the number of items mentioned.
The 94 respondents had average ordinal MLS step scores of 10.68 (Std. Dev. 3.77), with respondents reporting a minimum of 3 and maximum of 18 items in their household (average 13.3 items We used the Guttman scale step scores for several comparisons between and within samples:
1) Compared average Mat Style scores between CR users and Residents samples: Slight but statistically significant higher MLS for respondents in resident sample (CR avg= 9.79 (3.85); Residents Avg=11.57 (3.50); Mann-Whitney test p=.023).
2) Compared Average Mat Style scores between all CR users (n=64) in both samples and all non-CR users (n=30) in the Residents’ sample: Slight but statistically significant higher MLS for non-CR users than for CR users (CR users avg= 9.98 (3.68); non-CR users avg= 12.17 (3.58); Mann-Whitney test p.008)
Does their higher material wealth make residents with non-CR use jobs more satisfied or happier than those who work as CR users? Finding a significantly higher Material Styles of Life for non CR users provides us with a good opportunity to test the fundamental QoL/WB hypothesis of whether more material possessions result in more Qol/WB.
CR users vs. Residents QoL/WB Comparisons
Community Solidarity Index
We computed the additive CommSol Index for each case in both samples. Some sample comparisons of CommSol Scores (keeping in mind that overall CommSol scores indicated relatively high CommSol assessments)
1. Between samples: ANOVA: CR users sample significantly higher CommSol scores. (ANOVA p=.05; F=3.845)
2. Even stronger pattern in the same direction when compared 64 CR users in both samples with 30 non CR users. (ANOVA p= .018; F= 5.685).
Even though we found high CommSol scores, indicating an overall sense of a face-to-face community, we found significantly higher CommSol values for respondents who are CR users. Again, together with ethnographic results, this might reflect a greater engagement with reciprocity-based rather than market-based, exchanges. This is remarkable because the value generated by these types of reciprocal exchanges is recognized as an important dimension of economic welfare that traditional economic measures do not capture (Stiglitz 2008; Kubiszewski et al. 2013). Thus, points a “hidden” value of CR use-based economic activity that probably goes unnoticed by policymakers.
Diener Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS)
The Diener SWLS is widely tested and validated cross-culturally as measuring “Satisfaction With Life”. To assess its appropriateness for rural Coastal Puerto Ricans we did diagnostic factor analysis: if the SWLS measured overall satisfaction with life, we would expect the results for the SWLS in both samples to scale in one factor/dimension or close to one factor/dimension.
The SWLS scale is usually asked using a 7-point Likert scale, but after extensive questionnaire testing with multiple questioning strategies, we found that a 7-point scale did not work well with people from this study’s population to the point of being confusing and off-putting to the
respondents. However a 5 point scale worked quite well. Thus we decided to ask the SWLS questions using the 5-point Likert scale.
For the Coastal Resource Users sample, we only found one factor larger than 1.0, explaining 66.9% of variance. All 5 questions loaded highly (between .805 and .872) for that factor. For the Coastal Residents sample, we found two factors larger than 1.0 which explained 72% of the variance. Questions 1 to 4 loaded highly on the first factor (between .775 and .849), and only Question 5 loaded high on the second factor (.986).
This data distribution (close to unidimensional) support using the SWLS as a single additive index variable to assess Satisfaction with Life. Due to our decision to use a 5-point Likert Scale, possible scores in this variable for our study can range from 5 (all ones) to 25 (all fives).
Diener SWLS Comparisons:
1)Respondents in the CR users sample had significantly higher SWLS scores (mean=22.57(3.33)) than those in the Residents’ Sample (mean=19.70 (3.83)). Mann-Whitney Test p<.000.
2)In the combined samples, those who work with local CRs (n=64) reported significantly higher SWLS scores (mean= 21.67 (3.88) than the non-CR users (n=30; mean= 20.00(3.57)). MannWhitney Test p=.014.
Job Satisfaction
Job Satisfaction has been found to be a key component of QOl/WB across cultures with occupational differentiation/specialization (refs Pollnac, Poggie, Gersuny, others). To measure variation in Job Satisfaction (JS) we used the 9 questions developed and cross-culturally tested by Pollnac, Poggie, and colleagues (refs) to measure job satisfaction, which has the advantage of having been developed to measure variation in job satisfaction in coastal communities and related settings. This scale rates the respondent satisfaction with their job in 9 domains (mention domains), using a 5-point Likert scale (1 to 5: very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, very satisfied).
Because we wanted to have a comprehensive overall measure of jobs satisfaction that could be used to compare between and within samples, we computed a simple additive measure of job satisfaction, after verifying that our jobs satisfaction data follow patterns similar to previous studies using and developing the job satisfaction scale in small-scale fisheries and coastal settings. Our overall job satisfaction score (JobSat) is the cumulative score of the 9 scores (possible max: 45; min: 9).
Overall JobSatisfaction Comparisons:
1) Respondents in the CR users sample reported significantly higher overall job satisfaction (mean=36.62 (3.21) )than those in the Residents’ Sample (mean=33.70 (5.62)). MannWhitney Test p=.006.
2) In the combined samples, those who work with local CRs (n=64) reported significantly higher overall job satisfaction (mean=36.19(3.73)) than the non-CR users (n=30; mean= 32.97(5.98)). Mann-Whitney Test p=.004.
- For triangulation, we asked all respondents: If you could live your life again, would you make a living the same way again as you have done in your life?
1) CR users sample: 45=YES, 2=NO; Residents sample 32=YES; 15=NO (30 non CR users 17/30 YES; 17 CR users 15/17 YES).
2) In Total, of 94 combined sample: 60/64 of people who work in CR use (93.7%) answered YES, while 17/30 non-CR users (56.6%) said Yes.
So, the convergence of our data indicates strongly and statistically significantly that even in the context of an overall face-to-face, rural, natural resource dependent community, people who are engaged economically with coastal resource use and harvesting (coastal resource users) seem to have higher life and job satisfaction than those who do not, even though they have a statistically significant lower material style of life. This data strongly indicates that there is an overall positive effect of engaging in CR use as a job on subjective well-being and life satisfaction.
This comparison is especially valid because we are comparing between people living in the same rural, face-to-face coastal communities and who report similar life priorities and important domains (see Domains of Life).
Our hypotheses testing builds on the ethnographic insights of researchers like Griffith and Valdes-Pizzini (2002), Griffith et al. (1992; 2007), Poggie, Pollnac, McGoodwin… about the links between fishing and well-being, therapy, etc.
Because we are comparing modes of production, one more focused on material possessions and one more focused on engagement with a local environment and social reproduction, our results also resonate with recent insights on the study of well-being as an economic/ecological phenomena, where after a certain base level of material well-being (measured as income), focusing on more income starts to diminish returns on well being until it starts to vary inversely with well-being as the costs of increasing income (like for example time spent working, social conflicts, inequality, environmental impacts) start to out pace the gains in well-being (Kubiszewski et al. 2013; Max Nees 200x).
Modeling Qol/WB and CR use
At the writing of this report in early September 2013 we are working with programming and coding of the simulation modeling for this research objective (research objective #6 above). By necessity, the Qol/WB modeling activities are the last step in this research project’s sequence because the models depend on real-time collected data for formulation and accuracy. The fullblown simulations of different coastal policy scenarios are not yet complete. We have however developed the algorithms and weighting procedures for estimating policy impacts of different coastal use policies on a range of SE PR coastal households. Initial runs of the algorithms using a simple database model indicate that QOL/WB or SE PR coastal residents would be maximized by policies that balance formal economy jobs with CR use opportunities and access. Simulations using SIMILE and NETLOGO software are expected in the next few months. We consider the modeling activities an specially important research endeavor to help formulating coastal policy, thus we intend to submit a focused report on the modeling activities when they are done to Sea Grant.
Summary of Research Impacts: Coastal regions around the world are increasingly under population and development pressures. To achieve policies that carefully balance economic development with environmental and livelihood sustainability, it will be essential to empirically assess the contribution of locally-based, small-scale CR use to WB/QoL in communities and beyond.
We have found a variety of links between the coast and QoL/WB. These links are evident in practically all realms of SE PR residents’ lives: in commercial and household economies, risk reduction and resilience strategies, food security, family and community relationships, social problem (poverty and crime) avoidance, life and job satisfaction, and aesthetic enjoyment. Se PR coastal residents seem for the most part to be keenly aware of the value of the coast and CRs to them and their communities. Access to and health of CRs seems to be widely perceived as a social justice, Qol/WB issue and many organize to actively protect the value of the Coast.
An important finding for policy and measurement is that many of these links (including those related to production and exchange of coastal products) are manifested outside of formallyreported economic activity, in a realm of kin, neighborhood, and friendship reciprocity networks. In fact, our findings strongly indicate that most of the real value that CR use accrues to these Cr communities happens in this realm. Thus assessments of policy trade-offs that only take into account formally reported economic exchanges will undoubtedly underestimate most benefits of CR use and engagement and thus risk policy failure.
This research shows that the quality of life and well-being of a large proportion of SE PR coastal residents of all walks of life is inextricably linked to the use of -and access to- the coast and its resources. It also provides a methodological blueprint to engage mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to provide policy makers with critical information for fulfilling the true objective of public policy: to enhance people’s total quality of life and well-being. These methods can be applied in other locales on the coast of Puerto Rico and beyond.
Puerto Rico was been hit particularly hard by the 2008 recession, with tens of thousands of jobs lost to an already vulnerable mainstream economy with very high baseline unemployment rates, compared to the mainland Unites States. In the US and elsewhere, government-backed measures such as 'bailouts' and ‘stimulus packages’ have been employed as a way to protect sectors and institutions that play important role in the economy. However, public policy should not only be about economic health but about increasing people’s QoL/WB. If a healthy coast contributes significantly to QoL/WB, then shouldn’t greater society be concerned with the coast’s vulnerability to potentially disruptive and de-localizing processes such as excessive industrial and tourism development, and gentrification? The value of a healthy coast that includes productive, vibrant, CR-engaged communities goes far beyond numbers of jobs or dollar-figures, indicating the importance of standardizing an index of QoL/WB for inclusion in public policy. CR-engaged communities are transformational agents that make coastal “ecosystem services” available to local and regional populations, and their activities include socially-beneficial activities and processes beyond direct contributions to GDP. The total value of these activities needs to be documented for rational policy making about the future of coastal areas.
Acknowledgements:
The following individuals and institutions provided valuable time, information, support, and collaboration for the completion of project:
Institutions: University of Rhode Island Research Office and Department of Sociology and Anthropology: Instituto de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias y Programa BRIC at University of Puerto Rico-Cayey; Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios del Litoral (CIEL) at University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez; IGERT Program of the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of Puerto Rico; Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve
Individuals:
Rhode Island: Jon Blaney, Annette Hillman, Gary Haro, Franca Cirelli, Julia Iacono, Heather McVey, Catherine Robinson, Ayn Plant, Theresa Nobile, Calvin Peters, Erika Poggie, Elizabeth McLean, J.A. McFarlan.
Puerto Rico: Lillian Ramírez Durand, Angel Dieppa, Luis Encarnación, Carmen González, Nilda Peña, Sandra Lebrón, Epifanio Burgos, Claudio Burgos, Félix Laboy, Don Elín, Ignacio Del Valle, Samuel del Valle, Zulma Oliveras, Froilán Oliveras, Ruth Tata Santiago, Nelson Santos Torres, Alberto Rubio, Alejandro Torres Abreu, Isar Godreau, Vionex Martí, Errol Montes, Jess Zimmerman, Manuel Valdés-Pizzini, Ruperto Chaparro, Yulissa García, Cristina Olán, Lidia Ayala, Gerónimo Quijano, Isabel Quijano, Carlos García Goyco, Rina Biaggi, Fernando Quijano, Nicole García, Walter Vázquez, Hilda Colón, Francisco García, Alma Echevarría, Hilda Lloréns, Khalil García-Lloréns.
Many fishers, crabbers, and other CR users, and their families in the Coast of SE PR, who generously gave us their time and shared their knowledge and experience with us. Without their collaboration this research would not have been possible.
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