En el mar

La jaibera gives an account of the relationship between the racialized women of the Caribbean Coastal communities and their environments. This is a relationship where freedom is built and understood in terms of community and body rather than in terms of private property and individuality. In this type of relationship there is no place for the gender division imposed by a colonial patriarchal capitalism that only values the work that can be translated into chrematistic terms. In patriarchal capitalism, the shore fishing economic system of “jaiba, sardinilla y boquerones…” (“crab, sardine and anchovies…”), which women carry out for self-consumption, is not considered productive at all. But, the racialized women of the coast are autonomous to the extent that their work, and that of other racialized women, guarantees community food autonomy when men embark on deep-sea fishing. Shore fishing carried out by women from the coast for self-consumption and retail plays a central role in achieving quality and food safety for the entire community.

“En mi cesta traigo yo acabada de pescar… ” (“in my basket I bring freshly caught…”) portrays the daily work of racialized women in coastal communities, a work that has become increasingly precarious as a result of the economic greed of mostly foreign private companies and the pollution provoked by industrial fishing and tourism; the dispossession and privatization of the beaches that prevent women from accessing the sea; and of state policies that understand integration into the production chain as the only means for development and female empowerment. This idea of integration in reality not only forces women to work double shifts but also completely breaks the coastal communities’ food autonomy and their environmental balance. In addition, we must consider that non-governmental organizations’ ideals usually understand women’s emancipation only in terms of chrematistic translation and cultural assimilation. In this sense, La jaibera is a celebratory song that defends the use of the beach as a public space. But above all it’s also a song that, when asserting “una jaiba muy sabrosa voy a darle de comer pues la jaiba se parece a la mujer, si quiere comer jaibita acabada de pescar ven y sígueme a mi casita que te voy a convidar” («I am going to feed you with very tasty crab [Callinectes sapidus]because the crab looks like a woman, if you want to eat fresh crab come and follow me to my  house, I am going to share it with you ”),challenges a hegemonic and stereotypical sexuality and, in turn, celebrates sexual agency as exercised through the joy of the body. Regardless of how we label this song (radical ecology, ecofeminism, communitarian feminism), it is in any case a song of self-representation, a form of dialogue of collective emancipation that, in its apparent simplicity, raises the deep and indissoluble relationship between body and territory. In the current context of economic and ecological debacle, the song alludes to the environmental racism that has been, to a large extent, the cause of the generalized environmental crisis that we live in, and whose most atrocious effects seem to be diagrammed on the geographical and physical cartographies of racialized communities.

In this sense, the companies’ ontological comfort and the commodified «responsibility» that intends to limit sustainability to the cleaning of the -already privatized- beaches and the ridiculous «conscious» reduction of an already depleted fishery are not enough. Especially when socially responsible certifications allow, to a certain extent, to continue benefiting from the fruit of the extractive logic of material and epistemic dispossession whose target continues to be racialized communities. «La jaibera se va y no volverá» (“The crab seller is leaving and will not return”) and her departure requires us to carry out an exercise of radical political imagination in which we are able to embrace and strengthen community sustainability, and to recognize that there is no «social responsibility» from above. There is no social responsibility without the recognition of the environmental debt owed to these racialized communities or without restitution. Any attempt of sustainability that ignores these two elements does nothing more than reproduce the racist colonial narratives of managing the well-being of a few at the expense of others.

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