Overview

A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico. The ""shrimp ladies,"" locally known as changueras, of Mazatlan, Mexico, sell seafood in open-air markets, forming an extralegal but key part of the economy built around this ""pink gold."" Over time, they struggled to evolve from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, even as they continue to work at an open-air street market. Pink Gold documents the shrimp traders' resilience and resourcefulness, from their early conflicts with the city and forming a union, to carving out a physical space for a seafood market, and even navigating conflicts with the Mexican military. Drawing from her two decades of fieldwork, Maria L. Cruz-Torres explores the inspiring narrative of this overlooked group of women involving grassroots politics, transborder and familial networking, debt and informal economic practices, personal sacrifices, and simple courage. She argues that, amid intense economic competition, their success relies on group solidarity that creates interlocking networks of mutual trust, or confianza, that in turn enable them to cross social and political boundaries that would typically be closed to them. Ultimately, Pink Gold offers fresh insights into issues of gender and labor, urban public space, the street economy, commodities, and globalization.

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9781477328026

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Pink Gold is a splendid narrative about how a Mexican underclass, the subaltern Changueras of Mazatlán, forged a union and created a market based on a local commodity, local social processes, and public space. Pink Gold refers to the commodity 'shrimp,' but it also embodies the women changueras (shrimp vendors) who persevered despite global and neoliberal processes impinging on their livelihoods. . . . Perhaps the most enduring aspect of Pink Gold is the heart underlying the social science, as evident in the descriptive elegance in tales of these women. Pink Gold is full of corazón and care. It is a tribute to the changueras, but also the work of María L. Cruz-Torres. * American Anthropologist * Through a close understanding of the lives of these women, Cruz-Torres addresses interconnections between gender and labour as well as the politics of resistance and survival in an industry traditionally understood as male-dominated....provides a valuable account of women’s participation in informal economies in the Global South....This work [is] both original and ground-breaking. * Latin American Review of Books *

Pink Gold is a splendid narrative about how a Mexican underclass, the subaltern Changueras of Mazatlán, forged a union and created a market based on a local commodity, local social processes, and public space. Pink Gold refers to the commodity 'shrimp,' but it also embodies the women changueras (shrimp vendors) who persevered despite global and neoliberal processes impinging on their livelihoods. . . . Perhaps the most enduring aspect of Pink Gold is the heart underlying the social science, as evident in the descriptive elegance in tales of these women. Pink Gold is full of corazón and care. It is a tribute to the changueras, but also the work of María L. Cruz-Torres. * American Anthropologist *

Author Information

María L. Cruz-Torres is an anthropologist and associate professor at Arizona State University's School of Transborder Studies. She is a coeditor of Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America and the author of Lives of Dust and Water: An Anthropology of Change and Resistance in Northwestern Mexico.

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