THE LAND AND THE FISHERMEN

THE LAND AND THE FISHERMEN

THE LAND AND THE FISHERMEN: (1) 

Last Thursday I read about the Government of Santa Fe giving landback to its original owners:  different aboriginal groups living in Cayastá, San Javier, San José del Rincón, and other little towns which I got to know in  my childhood.  These lands are located in the middle of wetlands, swamps, islands, and other humid environmental accidents, and have belonged to them for centuries, before Hernandarias came to the point and bloodily slaughtered people all around.  (By the way: Hernandarias… the name of the Sub fluvial Tunnel. We tend to honor the wrong people , I think).

I had observed the situation when I was a kid, since my parents used to have aquinta near the little San José del Rincón.  I had seen that the primitive dwellers of the land used to live in the outskirts of the town, and their job was to fish Sabalos and Dorados which abounded in the brook. (For them, it was a brook, and for people living in San Luis, it would be an enormous river).  Men were tall and thin. They were quite poor.

They wore ragged clothes. These shallow aspects are the ones I observed as a little girl. They had thin canoes lying over the river waters.  Men were quite skillful in the use of nets and fishing sticks.

My mother used to go to their huts in order to buy fish.  She and I would see the swarm  of kids, busily playing in the mud.  They had happy faces, which were burnt by the sun, framed by bunches of chocolate, sticky hair. The wife of one of the fisherman once expressed her admiration to my mother:  How was it that my mother had only one kid! How was it possible?  Was it that my mother was a widow and my father had dead, perhaps??  In fact, my mother had had me at the age of 42, with no opportunities to breed another child after that. She used to laugh at the anecdote a lot. It was a funny, sweet joke.

All in all, I used to know those persons living by the river. At least, I used to know some of them.  I knew well about their poverty and necessity. I also witnessed their way of life, so closely connected to nature, and particularly connected to the profound, dark waters of that brook which was an affluent to the Colastiné River.  A brook which at those times was the habitat of all sorts of fish strains, before the industrial man introduced his hand and spoiled the environment. I do not know what they live on, nowadays, since so many species have [a5] receded. 

This is the people the Government had return the land,  today.  Perhaps it is too late to recover their former lives. Certainly it is impossible to get back to the times when they lived freely, as original peoples.  Nevertheless, it is a sound decision, the one the Government has taken, and I am happy with it. Once I read the news, I remembered immediately the fisherman and his wife.  And their cheerful kids who would be the ones receiving the land, today.  At last. 
(1)  Source: http://newsmatic.com.ar/conectar/245/102/articulo/3532/Tierras-entregadas-en-Santa-Fe.html

Publicado por Adela Perez del Viso en 10:27