The Sea Commands

Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village

Paulo Mendes

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789209129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Azenha do Mar is a fishing community on the southwest coast of Portugal. It came into existence around forty years ago, as an outcome of the abandonment of work in the fields and of propitious ecological conditions. This book looks at the migration processes since the founding of the community and how they relate to the social inequalities for property and labour which prevail today. The book also reflects upon the personal experience of the ethnographer in the field balancing the importance of methodology on the one hand and fieldwork as a research process on the other.

1
A Monographic Overview

Azenha Do Mar’s Place in Space and Time

‘What I can tell you won’t be of much interest to you . . . or maybe it will. Go and talk to my father instead . . . although I’m not sure if you will manage to get anything out of him anyway, because if you talk with A. he’ll tell you something different . . . you’ll notice this is a fishermen thing, each one has their own story . . . it’s not like everything is a lie, maybe it is all true, but they never tell you everything, only what they want. . .’

These words appear related to the (inter)subjectivity and relativity of the information collected during fieldwork. What I would hear, the fisherman reminded me, would not necessarily correspond to past events. It would not necessarily be a lie either. Instead, it would be an expression of compromised memories with a present that would be (re)making the past. Therefore, it would be good to recall, as we begin this chapter about Azenha do Mar, the words used by Bilo Kasi, the Orung Ulu elder, to prelude her narratives: ‘They lie, we lie’.¹

I’m sure they did not lie to me. And so I believe I will not be lying either. It is worth recalling, however, that memory is always a construction that reconstructs, and that oblivion is a part of it. Hence, the picture I am presenting to you of the place of Azenha do Mar in space and time is an exercise in similarity and verisimilitude, more than truth.

Azenha do Mar belongs to the parish of S. Teotónio, one of the eleven administrative units that make up the municipality of Odemira.² Its existence, as will become evident throughout this work, is intimately connected to nature’s whims and the consequent formation of a natural bay open to the Atlantic. Obviously, other conditions were essential to allow a group of people to settle there in the mid 1960s. If the search for a source of livelihood was one of those conditions, no less relevant was the search for a space of individual freedom and a better future. This freedom and future were consolidated in what the first migrants believed they would find by the sea: work without an employer, an uncertain but freely accessible income, and a no man’s land. Coastal artisanal fishing, limited to groups of two, the absence of a boss or employer, and clandestine building on the shore satisfied and seduced, as I heard many times, those who were in a situation of almost total dependence on a major landowner. Hence, an individual motivational picture was built with conditions of ecological and/or environmental possibility.

First of all, however, it is important to outline the underlying geographical, social and historical contexts of Azenha, a place that is made up of a little over 150 inhabitants and around fifty houses, occupied mainly by nuclear families, and where virtually everyone is involved in fishing.³ If we follow a north–south direction, we find the neighbouring town, also by the sea, of Zambujeira do Mar, and after that, about two kilometres from the shore, Brejão, and south of there, Odeceixe, already in the municipality of Aljezur, in the Algarve.

Both Zambujeira and Odeceixe, unlike Azenha and Brejão, are nowadays strongly affected by tourism. The easily accessible beaches, the beauty of the surrounding landscape, along with the search for alternative routes by tourists, have favoured the development of an economic activity that, until the mid 1980s, was centred forty kilometres south, on the coast of the Algarve. With the increase in tourism and the consequent new source of income for the local population, the small fishing port in Zambujeira do Mar suffered a decline in activity and is now being used almost exclusively to supply local restaurants. The fishermen, like the majority of the population in these places, have other sources of income connected to tourism, the most common of these being the renting of rooms and apartments. This income allows them to live comfortably during the low season.

Odeceixe, being a place of residence for a large number of foreigners, most of them German, has become a place where commerce has acquired a much greater dynamic compared to neighbouring villages. This commerce, along with tourism and real estate business, thus replaces agriculture as the main source of income. In 1992, for the first time, people began looking for summer homes in Brejão. Nevertheless, in this place, located in the parish of S. Teotónio, agriculture remains the main source of livelihood, both for those who own land and for the majority of employees from the different transnational agricultural companies that exploit a significant part of the croplands surrounding the village.

Within the neighbouring area, where tourism or its dependent activities are a constant, Azenha appears to be an exception. Tourism does not cease to be a reality, and it is a determinant of daily life in the summer, but not in a way that is immediately perceptible, having only the two restaurants/cafés as its most visible aspect. However, with fishing and marriage covenants with foreigners reaching distinct levels, the importance of tourism is not to be belittled. In fishing, demand and the consequent increase in prices follow the touristic activity cycle. Marriage covenants or bonding between locals and foreigners are a result of population movements caused by tourism. This coming and going of tourists has also allowed for greater self-awareness, as seen in Chapter 5.

In the late 1960s, each of these places – Zambujeira do Mar, Brejão and Odeceixe – had little more than three hundred inhabitants. Zambujeira was a population core, where subsistence agriculture, livestock farming and fishing in summer months ensured survival. In Brejão, work on the land was the only possibility for those living there. Of all these places, Odeceixe⁴ was the first to suffer the changes brought about by tourism. However, until then, agriculture was also the only source of income in a region of the country where cash movements were frequently replaced by direct exchange, both of goods and labour.

Thus, all of these places were made up mainly of rural workers without land. Landowners – addressed as farmers by the workers – gave small portions of terrain to some of the workers, where they would allow them to build or grow their own food. This implied an annual rent and manual labour on the owner’s lands. There was no other income, apart from the products extracted from the land. Even the wages the workers could earn were not fair. Some of the families currently residing in Azenha are witnesses to those times and ways of living, as will be discussed later.

Vila Velha, a rural parish studied by José Cutileiro in the 1960s, although far inland from the coast and from Azenha do Mar, represented a social and economic framework similar to those seen in the villages from which the current inhabitants of Azenha migrated. Consequently, it is a good reference that helps us to understand the situation of economic dependency suffered by villagers in the Alentejo:

Their employment conditions [those of the rural workers] are inferior to those offered to any other group. They do not earn wages attributable to Sundays, which is a day off, and to rainy days, in which they are unable to work. . . . Their wages are pretty low when compared with industrial wages or even agricultural wages offered in other regions. (Cutileiro 1977: 75–76;⁵ for a previous time period, see Picão [1903] 1983)

In another knowledge production context, a text by Eugénio Castro Caldas deserves to be quoted. In a single paragraph, he clarifies the state of poverty and dependency suffered by the ‘landless employees’ from the Alentejo and his amazement at a reality described as follows:

. . . [the landless employees of Alentejo are at the] zero value of the organogram of the occupation and employment in agriculture in the cereal estates of the Alentejo, our respondent [the individual he wanted to interview, but had no courage to] and his family, wife, and two children of four and six, were lying on the wooden bed with a bucket of water by their side. (Caldas 1991: 552)

This social overview had already been observed by an English traveller in the late nineteenth century in the region that includes Azenha do Mar, the southwest of Portugal. It is worth mentioning.

In 1818, George Landmann, lieutenant-colonel in the British Corps of Royal Engineers, published a work entitled Historical, Military and Picturesque Observations on Portugal. In it, the traveller wrote that the roads, almost always ‘simple routes’, were generally bad, that the land had very few inhabitants, that the individuals and their families he found lived, with few exceptions, in the most absolute misery and in poor health and hygiene conditions, that malaria was common, that the crops were rare and the soil was barren, that the sand blown by the north and north-westerly winds would extend ‘several leagues’ into the interior, and that marshes were frequent between Vila do Bispo and Aljezur (cf. Quaresma 1991: 10–21).

It should be noted that the roads travelled by Landmann would rarely take him to the coast, which is probably why we do not find any reference to beaches in these records. Consequently, there is also no mention of ‘beach fashion’ or the preference for accommodation near the sea, which was then being instituted throughout Europe (this is, nowadays, the main tourist magnet in southwest Portugal). The only reference made by Landmann concerning the sea and the exploitation of its resources appears in relation to Sagres. The traveller wrote that this place was no more than a ‘simple fishing village, located at the end of a small bay’ (Quaresma 1991: 19).

It is also appropriate to add that, curiously, in Baldaque da Silva’s monumental work, O Estado Actual das Pescas em Portugal,⁶ published in 1891 but dating back to 1886, a fishing village called Sagres is never mapped.⁷ When Baldaque da Silva collected these data for the southwest coast of Portugal (understood as an imaginary line stretching from Sines/Porto Covo to S. Vicente/Sagres), he referred to the existence of fishermen in Porto Covo (or Porto Covo Bandeira, as it was known then because of the noble landowner); in Vila Nova de Milfontes (the oldest port, with two natural shelters, one being the mouth of the Mira River and the other the oceanic Porto das Barcas); in Calheta do Sardão (near Cabo Sardão); and in Arrifana (between towering cliffs, in the province of the Algarve).

One century after the mapping of Baldaque da Silva, Carlos D. Moreira brings together in his book, Populações Marítimas em Portugal (1987), data on the following southwestern fishing ports: Porto Covo, Vila Nova de Milfontes (still with the two natural shelters referenced by Baldaque da Silva), Lapa das Pombas (near Almograve), Entradas das Barcas (in Zambujeira do Mar), Azenha do Mar, Zimbreirinha and Forno (both near the village of Carrapateira) and, contrary to what was mapped by the eighteenth-century scholar, Sagres appears already as having a port central to the fishing flow in the Costa Vicentina and the southwest of the Alentejo.

Going back to Azenha do Mar and the socio-economic and fieldwork conditions, and taking into account the interviews I conducted, the rural workers from this moorland⁸ consider that working conditions on the coastline are better than those found in the inner Alentejo, at least until the building of the Santa Clara dam and the irrigation system it instigated, a period when many migrants arrived from the north of the country and the Algarve and, consequently, daily wages became more frequent. Until then, in the mid 1960s, most plots were leased to a domestic group (generally a nuclear family) for a fee paid in goods corresponding to half of the produce. Apart from that, it was common (as already mentioned) for farmers to give their tenants (as well as those who worked for daily wages) small portions of land for the building of houses, which would not happen with the same frequency on the plains of the inner Alentejo.

However, such was the poverty, hunger and economic dependency that the word ‘slavery’ came up many times in the accounts I heard. Thus, migration, whether abroad or to the major cities, presented itself as the only solution to increase income. This solution then became a necessity for people deprived of any economic power, allied to a high illiteracy rate and the severe pressure exerted by the central political power to restrict emigration, as the text by Eugénio Castro Caldas (1991) concludes. For this author, the policy of the central government then aimed to keep the people in the fields, managing the workforce from the urban industrial belts.

Moving to the coast, and fishing, started happening in this context as a plan B, attractive because people could, in this way, avoid emigration and wage employment within industries in the major urban centres. Nevertheless, in order for this activity to become an important or even a primary means of livelihood, people needed the funds to acquire a boat, as well as the know-how and the technology required for the fishing business. These funds and knowledge were not held by those who first came to the place that is nowadays known as Azenha do Mar.

With the purpose of understanding the different migratory movements that led to the creation of Azenha, I find it relevant to point out a selection of important moments in the lives of a few current residents. The aim is not to construct life or family stories in a generational perspective, through which we can delineate life journeys that ‘follow’ a generational logic of transmitting cultural, social and economic capital. Instead, the purpose is to understand how these individuals managed to correlate with their surroundings (natural, social and economic) in an intentional and conscious way, as opposed to a perspective that sees lineage as a determinant of life paths. As will be discussed later, the paths of each family and of each adult individual are a result of the relation between two essential vectors: surrounding environment and intention. Simply put, the stories that follow emphasize that the differences and/or the similarities of the paths taken by the individuals throughout their lives are a result of the relationship between the environment in which life unfolds and intents (motivation and choice).

Thus, in the framework of this proposal, the family portraits and the life paths that follow are illustrative of the migration process that led to the creation of Azenha do Mar, the contexts of repulsion and attraction, the successful agency of the individuals considered in these contexts, and they reflect the (dis)continuity of a relational process between people who today reside in the village and the natural environment that surrounds them.

In the aforementioned context of obvious shortage of resources, a man from Odeceixe, along with his family, here under the pseudonym of Ms.,⁹ has fishing as his main source of income.¹⁰ Without any land, renting a small property by the sea and the mouth of the River Seixe, they took advantage of the conditions offered by the mouth of the river to fish with a small boat of forgotten origins and improvised nets. The sea, despite being so close, was not regularly frequented, whether for lack of trust in the safety of the boat, or for the treacherous currents at the mouth of the river.¹¹ The small quantities of fish were sold mostly in the village of Odeceixe. Sometimes, ‘if luck was plentiful’, the ‘woman’, with the help of a donkey, would take small trips to the nearby villages in order to sell every last fish. It was on these occasions that the desire grew to ‘leave the work on shore’ and go out to fish even more. ‘That seemed to work. . .’, said the ‘father’. ‘If I could go out into the sea, I could bring more and better fish. . .’

The lands that surrounded the house were widely known. The work on the farms, the herding of goats and cows, the ‘harvest of algae’¹² that they also completed in the summer, the mill where they would go to grind cereal, or simply wandering across the cliffs by the sea, caused Ms. (father, mother and children, for the day-to-day routine almost always included the whole family, since ‘no one could stay with the children. . .’) to become aware of the existence of a little cove just north of their house. This cove was of easy access, whether by land or by sea, and offered good conditions to go out into the sea and to shelter the boat. In addition, the plots that ended at the shore belonged to an unknown absentee landowner,¹³ which made it easier to occupy part of that terrain. The eldest son, M., remembers, some forty years past:

‘My father came here because he had a place to keep the boat and make a caseta, he could go out to sea every day and store his gear. . . Then the others came, saw this worked and starting hanging around’.¹⁴ (09/1992)

Old M., as everyone calls him to distinguish him from his eldest son, started by staying only during the summer. He built a shack made of reeds¹⁵ (an endogenous and abunda...