“We saw the shift in the mouth of the river,” De La Rosa Pérez says. “We saw changes in the ecological processes from the animals to the forest. Everything continued to change, and finally one mangrove that had been there for three or four centuries shifted onto the land, so as time went by, people began to sustain themselves from the mangroves.”
As De La Rosa Pérez recalls, the community would sell whatever they could: wood, tree bark, fish and crabs. So when a local politician tried to label the mangrove workers as ecological predators, De La Rosa Pérez was enraged. While the mangrove workers were accused of destroying the trees through their fishing and logging practices, the reality is the trees were actually dying on their own.
“We’ve begun to speak a new language, a cross between the language of the professionals, of technicians and scientists, and the language of the community.”
“When I was 3, we would compete to see who could find the biggest tree that was buried,” De La Rosa Pérez says. “The mangrove had disappeared, maybe because of the salinity or lack of tributaries. That experience resulted in an answer in ’92 … I went out to the salt mines with the mangrove workers. They dug out the dirt with their hands and with shovels. They pulled up the tree to prove they hadn’t cut it down.”
That proof laid the groundwork for a long-term alliance between the local community and CVS, establishing a set of sustainable practices for using the mangroves. Among them is a rotation plan for leveraging the mangroves from only one designated area at a time so that each zone has time to recover and restore itself.
“We’ve begun to speak a new language,” De La Rosa Pérez explains, “a cross between the language of the professionals, of technicians and scientists, and the language of the community. That’s what made us grow and be able to reach the place that we all are in today.”