Extractivismo marino-colonial. Apropiación asimétrica de recursos marinos en el golfo de California (México) siglos XVI-XXI
Identificadores
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/67942Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemAutor
Ortega Santos, AntonioEditorial
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Materia
Historia Ambiental Extractivismo Marino-Costero Apropiación Asimétrica Baja California Sur Estudios decoloniales Environmental History Coastal-ocean extractivism Asymmetric appropriation Lower California Decolonial studies
Fecha
2021Referencia bibliográfica
ORTEGA SANTOS, Antonio (2021). “Extractivismo marino-colonial. Apropiación asimétrica de recursos marinos en el golfo de California (México) siglos XVI-XXI”, Relaciones Internacionales, nº 46, pp. 99-117. [https://doi.org/10.15366/relacionesinternacionales2021.46.006]
Resumen
En la península y en el golfo de California, el proceso de conquista colonial impuso un proceso de
antropización-colonización de la relación sociedad-naturaleza a lo largo del tiempo moderno y
contemporáneo. Desde el siglo XVI, este cambio se implementó mediante la inserción de los recursos
naturales terrestres y marinos disponibles en el territorio sudcaliforniano en el marco de la Economía
Mundo. La península y el golfo de California se vieron sometidos a un proceso, a largo plazo, de saqueo
y despojo territorial que denomino “Apropiación Asimétrica” (que se traduce en una línea temporal de
cuatro momentos históricos, algunos coetáneos, desde el siglo XVI al siglo XXI). En el primer momento
de esta línea temporal, se describe en el texto cómo la Corona transfirió, mediante diversos sistemas de
cesión territorial, el control de recursos (perlas, acuacultura, guano, sal, etc.) hacia empresarios privados
encargados de extraer el capital natural para comercializarlo en mercados globales entre el siglo XVI
y el siglo XX. Esta capitalización/privatización de recursos costeros-marinos a lo largo del siglo XX
se evidenció en un proceso de especulación financiero territorial, orientado al desarrollo del turismo
de masas como eje del modelo de desarrollo económico (tercer y cuarto momento histórico de la
Apropiación Asimétrica que se analiza en el texto.
La propuesta de metodología de investigación parte del trabajo que desarrollamos en el campo de la
Historia Ambiental, entendida como estudio sobre las relaciones entre sociedad y naturaleza a lo largo
del mundo moderno y contemporáneo, estudiado mediante el análisis de los documentos archivísticos
y bibliografía de coetáneos, viajeros o documentos institucionales. Esta propuesta metodológica supone
el estudio de los cambios territoriales, ambientales y socioeconómicos junto al impacto de los mismos
en el capital natural del territorio sudcaliforniano, procesos que generan conflictos y luchas contra el
extractivismo y despojo como modelo económico. Desde el campo de la Historia Ambiental, el concepto
de extractivismo es definido como transferencia de bienes naturales de manejo comunitario hacia la
esfera del mercado, enajenados los pueblos y beneficiados sectores empresariales con este proceso de
privatización. De igual manera, el concepto de apropiación asimétrica implica la identificación de cómo
la transferencia verificada mediante el extractivismo y despojo territorial impacta sobre la arquitectura
del modelo de desarrollo económico generando episodios y realidades de injusticia ambiental, dando
lugar a importantes desequilibrios territoriales. Estos desequilibrios territoriales tienen una matriz
histórica que la Historia Ambiental permite narrar como un contínuum, pero que como práctica de
colonización del territorio llega hasta inicios del siglo XXI como demuestra el estudio del impacto del
capitalismo financiero en Baja California. 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 socioenvironmental
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.