EPISODE 9: “Squid Lives: (Un)Making Ocean Ecologies in Peru”

00:00:00 Laura Montesi: Embodied inequalities of the Anthropocene. Building capacities in medical anthropology. A podcast series that analyzes the human and non-human health impacts of this geological epoch of profound transformations.

00:00:21 Rebecca Irons: Welcome to this episode of Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene. Today, we will be exploring the experiences of racialized fishermen in the Blue Anthropocene. For this purpose, I’m here today with Maximillian Viatori, professor and head of the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Maximilian has conducted ethnographic and archival research on inequality, neoliberalism and political ecology in Ecuador, Canada and Peru since 2001. He is the author of ‘One State Many Nations: Indigenous Rights Struggles in Ecuador’, which was published by the school for Advanced Research Press in 2010, and lead author of ‘Coastal Lives: Nature, capital and the struggle for Artisanal Fisheries in Peru’, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2019. His newest book, ‘The Unequal Ocean: Living with Environmental Change Along the Peruvian Coast’, was published by the University of Arizona Press in April 2023.

In this context, the blue Anthropocene refers to anthropogenic effects on multispecies coastal and maritime communities. The ocean has long been left out of conversations on societal inequalities, often seen as too vast and incorruptible. However, the recent development of the blue humanities invites us to rethink the ocean and the embodied inequalities experienced where those who live and work on and by the water. I’m Rebecca Irons, senior research fellow at the UCL Institute for Global Health. The blue Anthropocene is a key research focus for me, and I currently work with fishing communities and their relationships to sea lions in Peru. So I’m really excited to speak to Max today.

Hi Max, welcome to this podcast session and thank you for being with us today for what I’m sure will be a fascinating talk. I wonder if you could begin by describing for us who artisanal fishermen are and how this group is viewed by wider Peruvian society.

00:02:17 Maximillian Viatori: Hello, how are you? It’s a pleasure to be here talking with you today. Thanks so much for the invitation. I’m really looking forward to having an opportunity to talk about what’s been going on in Peru, coastal Peru, and also in the broader eastern Pacific Ocean.

In terms of artisanal fishers in Peru, there’s a lot of different ways, probably, to kind of think about and define artisanal fishers. Historically, there have been artisanal fishers up and down Peru’s coast. It really wasn’t until about the 1970s that the Peruvian government began to define artisanal fishers as being a sector of the country’s fishery that was distinct from the industrial fishery, which really boomed in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. So, there are actually some legal and regulatory definitions around artisanal fishers. But, you know, for the most part, I tend to think about, and I think within Peruvian society, artisanal fishers are conceptualized as people who are small scale fishers. They’re using primarily non mechanized means for fishing, and they’re using small wooden boats to capture fish that people are going to eat. So, this is the food fishery which is such a significant aspect of Peruvian society and also diet. Right? I mean people in Peru eat per capita a lot more fish than any other country in South America. So artisanal fishers are people who play a really critical role within food production and, you know, food sovereignty, if you want to think about it in that way, within Peruvian society. They’re the people who catch the fish that people in Peru eat. Whereas the industrial fleet, which are these mostly big metal boats, are capturing anchovy, Peruvian anchovy for processing as fishmeal, which is then mostly exported around the world for primarily for animal feed, right.

So artisanal fishers are the people who are playing this really critical role in providing food, providing fish for people to eat in Peru. But there’s this kind of interesting history, both socially but also, you know, from a kind of regulatory government perspective as well, in that while people play this really critical role within Peruvian society and economy, there’s also a long history of artisanal fishers and artisanal fishing communities being marginalized. And, as you were saying, being racialized and classed as these kinds of um, economic and social others. So, you know, there’s a kind of really long and interesting history of this, particularly in Lima, where I’ve done most of my research with artisanal fishers in and around the city and in some of the communities outside the city during the colonial era, the coast itself. And this is, I think, really interesting when we’re thinking about Peru and we’re thinking about how kind of race and class are specialized in different ways in Peru, and that, you know, we kind of think of, you know, within elite geographies of Peru, of Lima and the coast as being this kind of center of power and whiteness and kind of, Spanish like linguistic elitism, all of those kinds of things.

But when you kind of, you know, in contrast to Andean Highlands, which have always been kind of racialized as being, you know, indigenous, in contrast to the capital city of Lima, when, you know we kind of zoom down a little bit more into the coast and we zoom down to Lima, there’s some really interesting kind of nuances within that. And the immediate coastline itself is something that has always been marginal to the kind of centers of elite urban, quote unquote, national power influence, all of those kinds of things, because Lima as a city was really built on the river, and it was kind of built away from the coast a little bit. So there’s kind of long, interesting history of artisanal fishing communities being kind of within the city, but in many ways marginal to it. So the people who I worked with historically have been and this has been conceptualized in different ways because, as you know, racialization in Peru is this kind of set of like ever shifting, imagined and projected contrast, right. As opposed to, you know, where I’m from, the United States, where racialization is something that’s premised on this, this ideology of biological kind of purity, you know, that it really improves more through these sets of contrasts about geography and language and occupation and bodily comportment and class status. And all of those things are kind of set up in ways that, you know, through those kinds of ever shifting contrasts. You get categories and identities of, you know, whiteness and blackness and mixed-ness. You know, however we best would translate that in indigeneity. And so throughout Peru’s history and Lima’s history, artisanal fishers have been racialized as being indigenous in the 20th century as kind of being, you know, associated with ideas of blackness and, and mixed ness.

00:07:41 Rebecca: So that’s really interesting. Max, you mentioned here that industrial fisheries are supplying anchovies and mostly for export, but it’s the artisanal fishermen that are actually delivering those fish to the tables of Peruvians. And we know that Peru is really big on their gastronomic culture at the moment. So I’m just wondering, what’s your favorite fish dish in Peru?

00:08:01 Maximillian: That’s hard to say. I really enjoy eating fish when I’m in Peru. And of course, you know, I think a lot of people think about ceviche. Is this kind of like tossed, like raw fish kind of salad. I don’t know how else to describe it as being like the classic dish of Peru, but the thing that I always really look forward to, especially in the winter, are fried pejerrey, which is like a Pacific silver side. There are these kind of small fish that oftentimes will just get fried whole, and people will kind of eat those, or they’ll eat them in a sandwich. I love having a fried chicken sandwich. That’s got to be one of my favorites.

00:08:38 Rebecca: Yeah. Me too. I like pan de pejerrey. For me, it’s causa, though, a nice crab Causa is probably my favorite fish dish.

That’s really interesting what you said, Max, about fishermen being racialized. I wonder if for our listeners who maybe aren’t that familiar with the Peruvian context, you could just elaborate a bit more on what the specific Peruvian context of racialization is on the coast.

00:09:00 Maximillian: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Peru has a really interesting and complex history, and I think probably the most important context for thinking about what’s happening in Peru right now has to do with the 1970s and the 1980s and, you know, the Civil War that led to this large number of, you know, in many cases, impoverished indigenous people from the Highlands moving into Lima and moving into the city.

And at least for my work, that’s been a really important context, because that internal migration really reshaped Lima. And, you know, as, as a number of other anthropologists have shown, it really reshaped the way that people conceptualize space and identity and race within the city. So prior to that, really, you know, kind of prior to the mid 20th century, there was this kind of idea within elite national geographies that Lima was the kind of urban center of, you know, this kind of Spanish derived culture, you know, whereas the Highlands were, you know, kind of indigenous and largely Quechua speaking and impoverished and rural. And as a result of those migrations, you know, anthropologists have demonstrated that elites essentially had to rework those sorts of spatial relationships.

And so, you know, within Lima, there’s been much more discussion and concern about things like informality and formality in relation to, you know, the street economy in which a large portion of, you know, in many cases impoverished Peruvians are employed, but then also just in terms of things like settlement and regulation. And so within that arsenal, fishers are, you know, or have been increasingly racialized as being, quote unquote, informal. There’s been this kind of focus on them as being, you know, kind of associated with all of the negative qualities that are packed into that, you know, elite category of informality. So they’re oftentimes conceptualized as bureaucratically and economically informal, you know, as working in this industry that’s not really regulated and as an extension of that oftentimes being quote unquote, irresponsible environmental stewards or, you know, in many cases in Lima. And this is, of course, a structural issue that people there can control. You know, they’re working in fishing and having to deal with these heavily degraded environments in, you know, urban coastal areas. But the fact that they’re there and they’re working in these environments that everyone knows are environmentally degraded again, is kind of used as this subtle way of racialized people oftentimes, and classing them without openly classist and racist language.

00:11:46 Rebecca: Thank you. That’s so important to know in terms of how fisher people are treated by the wider public in in Peru and Lima specifically. So as you began to touch upon, living and working in coastal regions can heighten vulnerability to not just societal judgment but also climate change. So what are some of the environmental risks and impact that artisanal fishermen experience? And I wonder if you could speak a bit more about this view of them being perhaps irresponsible environmental stewards, as you mentioned?

00:12:19 Maximillian: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. And there’s various different aspects of this that I’ve explored in the last book. You know, I think when we’re thinking about heightened vulnerability and climate change and environmental risk, I think there are lots of different things that artisanal fishers and fishing communities in general are dealing with. When we think about this on a big scale, one of the things that I think is most prescient in terms of thinking about coastal Peru is El Niño and, you know, the broader El Nino Southern Oscillation. You know, we have these regular changes in the ocean conditions and atmospheric conditions in the Pacific Ocean. And Peru has been a really critical place for studying and understanding that and those fluctuations that happen.

You know, I think oftentimes, El Niños, which are the kind of warming component of that, that broader oscillation tend to happen once or twice a decade. And those really present some significant challenges for the, you know, fishing industry in general, but also for artisanal fishers, because when you get these warming periods, they tend to have greater quantities of certain kinds of fish, and they have access to kinds of fish that they don’t normally have, because the water tends to be cold off of that central coast of Peru. And so what ends up happening oftentimes is economically, this is actually very difficult for fishing communities because there’s essentially too much fish. And so oftentimes when I’ve been there during the warming cycles of El Niño, you have these situations in which fishers literally can’t sell the fish that they’re catching. They have to give it away for almost next to nothing. And then oftentimes once conditions switch, there’s very little fishing for sometimes a relatively long period of time. You know, a few months after that.

And the issue that, of course, you know, fishing communities are facing now is, you know, that there is growing scientific evidence that as a result of climate change, that those El Niño  events are getting more intense, right? So, you know, we also have, you know, issues of flooding. And of course, during the coastal El Niño  in 2017, particularly in the north, there were artisanal fishing communities, you know, mollusk farming projects that were totally wiped out and economically, infrastructure was damaged. People really had to start over in terms of the environmental risks. I mean, many of the kind of more local issues that people are facing in Lima have to do with growing plastic pollution, you know, which is something that coastal communities, I think in many places, but particularly in urban areas with multiple rivers, are really contending with and, you know, Lima has had this ongoing status, of having some of the most polluted beaches. Lima has had this unfortunate status of having some of the year after year, most polluted beaches in South America. So there’s a lot of plastic pollution and contamination that are affecting those ecosystems and food webs. But on top of it, you know, as Lima’s population grows, there are also just issues with coliform bacteria and other contaminants in the water, many of which are, you know, made worse by warmer and warmer oceans.

00:15:52 Rebecca: We know that El Niño  cycles can affect the different kinds of species that the Fisher people are able to catch. So on that note, in your book ‘Unequal Oceans’, you explore the rise of squid fisheries in Peru. So it’s really fascinating to read how adaptive fish of people and fisheries can be to the changing environment. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

00:16:13 Maximillian: Yeah, I’d be happy to. I’ve gotten to be a bit of a squid geek over the course of working on this book. And I think one of the things that, as a sociocultural anthropologist that has been so fun for me and in doing this work is having the opportunity to, you know, at least try to learn a little bit about things like, you know, marine biology and, and oceanography and climate, those kinds of things. Jumbo squid are really interesting.

And this creature that people essentially didn’t eat in Peru or really around the world before about 1990. And, you know, as a result of big changes in Pacific Ocean ecologies and particularly overfishing of squid populations off the coast of Japan and China, there’s this shift to looking for new sources of, you know, seafood, of ocean protein. And, you know, beginning in about the 1990s, the Peruvian government started looking into the possibilities of an industrial fishery for jumbo flying squid there, also known as Humboldt squid. They have a lot of different names. I mean, there’s always one of the issues with fish and seafood is, you know, that they get sold and, and, you know, exported under all kinds of different names. So they’re called jumbo flying squid because there are these two large fins on the side of their mantle. And so as they’re gliding through the water, it looks like they’re flying, because those two fins are kind of flapping up and down, you know, the way that a bird’s wings would.

So, you know, Peru now accounts for jumbo flying squid have become a huge industry. And there’s something that has been reserved legally in Peru for artisanal fishers. So this is something that Arsenal fishers successfully argued for. The industry really wasn’t interested in jumbo flying squid. During the 1990s, uh, the Peruvian government tried to encourage foreign boats to engage in the fishery. And just like all of you know, the kind of species improves waters, they tend to fluctuate. They tend to go up and down with the El Niño  cycle. So there was a down cycle in the 1990s at a point in which this was developing, and many of the foreign boats that were engaged in it got out because it just wasn’t economically profitable. And so it was something that increasingly artisanal fishers got into because in many cases, the boats that they had, especially the larger artisanal boats, could be adapted from fishing for species like bonito, which are an open ocean kind of tuna like species could be re adapted pretty easily to fishing for squid. You know the fish for squid at night using lights and jigs. And they were able to use more or less the same equipment and start capturing these squid. And so then in the 2000s, fishermen started to argue for special protections and basically said, if the industry gets Peruvian anchovy, then we should get squid. And this has become an increasingly significant aspect of artisanal fisheries in Peru, both for domestic consumption, because flying squid is still relatively inexpensive, but also for export. Oftentimes, you know, jumbo squid is processed and it’s exported, frozen, and then it gets eaten in other places as like imitation crab or calamari, you know, stuff like that. So this has become a really important economic driver for artisanal fishers, particularly in the North. But really throughout the country.

00:19:39 Rebecca: It’s jumbo flying squid, chicharron de pota. Is it that product?

00:19:45 Maximillian: Yeah, that’s right, it’s pota. So a lot of times there is a smaller squid that, you know, historically has been caught and eaten in Peru, Calama, which, you know, usually like when you eat calamari in, you know, North America or, you know, Italy, Western Europe, um, it’s that smaller squid, jumbo flying squid were not eaten because they have a higher ammonia content. So essentially new ways of processing the squid had to be developed during the 1980s and the 1990s to make them palatable and to get rid of the kind of fishy taste that comes along with them. They’re also bigger, so the meat tends to be tougher.

They’re everywhere. It’s something that you can just turn into anything. It’s like the hot dog of seafood. I mean, have you you’ve seen like the slabs, right? They come off of them where it’s just like this kind of white, nondescript ocean protein. You know, I guess it’s like shrimp, but just bigger.

00:20:43 Rebecca: Yeah. They remind me of Peru’s answer to fish sticks. You know, those creamy products. But I’m in Lima right now, so I can attest that every place I ever go to eat any seafood offers chicharron de pota. You know, everyone’s menu and everyone eats it. So Jumbo squid are definitely a popular product in Peru at the moment.

00:21:05 Maximillian: Yeah. And you know, when I started working there 12 years ago, it started to become, you know, you kind of saw it more and more in ceviche too.

00:21:14 Rebecca: It seems like artisanal fishermen have a really interesting relationship with jumbo squid. And the way that they’ve sort of taken over this part of industry is really fascinating and speaks quite a lot to their ability to adapt. So what do you think about that, Max?

00:21:29 Maximillian: Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the history of artisanal fishing in, you know, the 20th century, the second half of the 20th century, and the first part of, you know, the 21st century, I think what you see is this ongoing history of artisanal fishers having to constantly adapt to changes in the fishing industry and changes in oceanic conditions. And, you know, I think this is a combination of many of those earlier changes. So during the 1960s and the 1970s, artisanal fishers were largely pushed out of and excluded from the most profitable sector of the fishery. And that’s the Peruvian anchovy, the fishmeal industry. And that’s something that the industry has continued to protect and consolidate and increasingly monopolize.

And then you have all of these other climatic changes as well as, you know, changes in demand, in terms of consumption and then also localized environmental changes, degradation as a result of urban pollution. And throughout that, artisanal fishing, people have constantly had to find new ways of making a living find new ways of adapting to constantly changing ecologies. And I think within broader discussions about fisheries in Peru, that knowledge and the deep knowledge that people have that makes it possible to make those adaptations is consistently overlooked. And I think that’s because of, you know, the ways in which people are kind of racialized and they’re classed as, you know, people who don’t have important, significant knowledge about, you know, the ocean environments and ecologies that they’re involved in and engaged with and making a living from every day.

00:23:19 Rebecca: It sounds like artisanal fishermen are a key part not only of the Peruvian fishing industry, but also in Peru’s response to climate change and El Niño  intensification as well. So thank you, Max, for a fascinating discussion. I’m so grateful for talking with you today. Is there anything else that you might like to add before saying goodbye to our audience.

00:23:41 Maximillian: I thank you, it’s been a pleasure talking with you today, and I would just add that I think it’s really critical that artisanal fisheries are supported and fostered in Peru, because in a place that is characterized by regular climatic and environmental fluctuations and industrial fishery that is trying to, you know, meet industrial quotas year after year, it’s bad. I think it’s worth making the point that in terms of climate adaptation, you know, that artisanal fisheries that don’t just have that kind of like mono crop approach to fishing are really important for adaptation. And I hope that artisanal fisheries will be supported in Peru, because I think that artisanal fisheries are better poised to deal with climatic adaptations and the changes in ocean ecologies that are occurring and will continue to occur as a result of climate change.

00:24:38 Rebecca: Thank you. For my part, we’d like to thank you for listening and invite you to continue reflecting with us in the episodes to come. These other disciplines and themes will bring us new perspectives on the different challenges posed by the Anthropocene, and inequalities in the health of human and non-human populations.

00:24:58 Maximillian: This episode was recorded virtually between the UK and Peru. Rebecca Irons conducted the interview and wrote the script. Laura Montesi lent her voice for the jingles and Juan Mayorga took care of the audio and post-production. This podcast is an international collaboration between the University College London in the United Kingdom, the Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the Centro de investigations y Estudios Superiores in Anthropology, in Mexico.