| Summary: | This thesis focuses on the success achieved by a newly formed women's fishing
cooperative in San Felipe, Yucatan, in Mexico. Examining the ways in which this
cooperative has been able to identify and embrace new opportunities and find creative
solutions to problems reveals that much of their success stems from a capacity to break
and continuously remake local rules, wherein a dynamic balance of attention between
social and ecological factors is achieved. In this case, long traditions of local resource
management, self-enforcement, and personal interpretation of the rules have allowed for
a blending of tradition and change-tolerant resilience. In recent years, women's
participation in both fishing and conservation has been a catalyst for social change within
their port.
This ethnographic study provides insight into how women in San Felipe have become
central to decisions affecting resource management. In diverse areas such as the octopus
fishery, mangrove conservation, and the social policing of outsiders in the community,
fisherwomen's informal influence is often as powerful as decisions made by official
institutions. In some cases, the very nature of fisherwomen's unobtrusive rule breaking
and subtle enforcement allows them to push boundaries in ways that would not be
tolerated otherwise. As a result, constant negotiations of power and subtle testing of
social rules have allowed fisherwomen to blur traditional boundaries of gender, race, and
class, allowing them access to opportunities from which they would normally be
excluded. === Science, Faculty of === Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for === Graduate
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