Traditional fishing and tourist development in Bays of Huatulco. A reading from the oral history of local fishermen.

The Bays of Huatulco is a tourist resort located on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. It was created in 1984 via a presidential decree that made more than 21,000 hectares expropriated from the municipality of Santa Maria Huatulco available to the National Fund for Tourism Development (FONATUR), to develop a resort aimed at high income earners. After the expropriation decree’s implementation, the local population’s fishing activities began to decrease as tourism increased. This article details information concerning the individual-collective memory of Huatulco’s fishermen, obtained through oral history, with the intention of answering the following questions: how was the fishing industry developing before the resort’s creation? What was the fishermen’s situation during and after the tourist development? And, how has the fishermen’s group cohesion been used to face the challenges presented by tourism? The research findings enable us to identify a different version of tourist development (to the official one, which is narrated in terms of investment, number of rooms and guests) in which fishermen acknowledge conflict between activities promoting fishing and ones promoting tourism. Finally, it’s noted that any conflict has ended up strengthening group cohesion a well as the search for alternatives to survive as traditional fishermen in the middle of an area globalized by tourism.