Ocean Colonial Extractivism. Asymmetric Appropriation of Marine Resources in the Gulf of California, XVI-XXI centuries

Abstract

Since the arrival of the Jesuits to the Baja California Sur Peninsula, the conquest and colonization of the territory involved an intense process of anthropization of the area. This process involved the insertion of natural resources within the framework of the World Economy, the conversion of agricultural land under forms of missionary colonization, and, what is less well known, a process of commodification of the peninsula, initiating a cycle of extractivism of land and marine assets under state or private concession forms. If, in the first missionary phase a territory of manifest agricultural vocation was woven with the "architecture" of agroecosystems of orchards (called Oasis under a Eurocentric perspective) with the arrival of the Mexican Nation State -throughout the 19th century- the Peninsula and The Gulf were subjected to a process of looting that we come to call Asymmetric Appropriation. This accumulation by dispossession was implemented on a series of goods held in common by the inhabitants of the Peninsula and the Gulf, oriented to local or national businesses.  However, since the mid-nineteenth century it would be inserted in the framework of global marketing circuits. As the first phase gave way to the arrival of new episodes of accumulation by dispossession during the “discovery” of the Baja California Peninsula as a land of promise for extractive fishing activity (pearls, aquaculture, etc. ), it also gave rise to the last episode of gentrification of the territory through mass tourism. This last phase of the rupture allows us to speak of the Baja California Peninsula as an "Exceptional Space" in which high levels of looting of natural resources for global accumulation have been witnessed over two centuries.  In this context, the Jesuit missions were installed as not only ways of semiotic and evangelizing conquest of the space and its inhabitants, but as true units of production and consumption.  This moves towards a hybridization of Mediterranean garden crops, arriving at biotypes typical of the orchards and Mediterranean agroecosystems, together with existing plants. A first milestone of our work is to decipher and catalog the entry of these crops and the “creation” of new agricultural production spaces. Oriented to subsistence, these represent a productive optimum that extends their life for much of the 19th century and beyond the departure of the different religious orders- this is not attended to in this paper, but connected with the Europeanization of the agroecosystem in lower California. ..

The methodology and objectives stem from the perspective of environmental history of the GoC, from the 16th century to the present, and in order to identify the changing forms of perception and constants of asymmetric appropriation of the coastal marine space through the use and management of resources. As a general hypothesis, for future investigations, the GOC's biocultural wealth is threatened by an historical extractive regional economy. Only the territorial re-appropriation of the region by the inhabitants will allow for a movement towards local socio-ecological sustainability, reconsidering the production of its space through community appropriation of the marine-coastal territory based on the principles of sustainability. In this perspective, tools and methodologies have been used both from the field of archival documentary information (General Archive of the Nation, Pablo López Martínez Archive, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Travel Notebooks, Official Reports of Institutions) together with the enormous quantitative and qualitative value of the information obtained from other publications (official reports, travellers’ books, etc.). With this sum of information from historical archival sources typical of Environmental History (either primary or secondary), together with the research matrix with a profile attended to socio-environmental changes, a narrative of the looting / pillaging of the Gulf of California has been structured with two case studies: the history of pearl extraction in the Gulf of California (which occurred in the first two periods of asymmetric appropriation and is explained in Section 2 of this article) and the impact study of the tourism model and gentrification of the territory in the coastal areas of the Peninsula thanks to international financial speculative pressure, especially since the global financial and economic crises of the last ten years (from 1980s until the present).

With these two examples it is possible to mark a historical matrix, a timeline of the historical process of plundering, of colonial appropriation of the Gulf of California, until today. This historical line allows us to assume that colonial practices have survived beyond the independence processes of the first third of the 19th century, until today. Coloniality comes hand in hand with the design of a program of oligopolistic appropriation of natural resources that has multiple episodes as evidenced in section 2 Table 1. The dynamics of the conversion of this territory into a place of multiple extractivist economies is implemented (already addressed in other personal and collective publications) to satisfy the sociometabolic requirements of the World Economy; that is, of capitalism.

This proposal entails a necessary, albeit rarely seen, look at the processes of maritime extractivism with a colonial profile - emerging in European contexts in recent years - that break with the hegemony of territorial studies in an academic context in order to understand the coexistence between human societies and the environment. For socio-environmental studies, new lines of investigation are opened that must be supported by both quantitative –the design of tools on socio-environmental metabolism in community fishing environments- and qualitative information -understanding that the conflicts and resistance to these economies of plunder are nothing more than evident phenomena of the new cycles of struggles for life, of struggles with a decolonial matrix-. The field of Environmental History thus plays as a meeting point, an ecology of knowledge and an interdisciplinary arena to create socially committed knowledge in the face of the ecological and civilizational crisis in which we are immersed. From the field of Environmental History, the concept of extractivism is defined as the transfer of natural assets from community management to the market sphere and the capitalization of nature. Similarly, the concept of asymmetric appropriation implies the identification of how the transfer carried out through extraction and territorial dispossession impacts on the architecture of the economic development model, generating episodes and realities of environmental injustice, and giving rise to important territorial imbalances. These territorial imbalances have a historical matrix, which Environmental History allows us to narrate as a continuum.  Moreover, understood as a practice of colonizing the territory, this reaches the beginning of the 21st century, as is seen in the study of the impact of financial capitalism in Baja California.