Figure 35: Market, landing center, gathering place at the East End.
Other producers sell the fish at home, or at a specific location separate from the market. At Teague Bay a fisherman owns a shack from where he sells fish, mostly on Saturdays. He fishes for snappers on Monday and Thursday and spends all day Friday cleaning and gutting the fish. Although the place is open as a shop, it is not. He takes orders throughout the week. On Fridays and Saturdays customers can pick up their orders. On Saturday the ambiance in the fish market is that of a private feast. Valdés-Pizzini visited the site on a Saturday (around 1:30 p.m.) to find a large group of people with plates of food in their hands staring curiously at the visiting anthropologist. On that day, as on every Saturday, friends and customers gather to buy fish but people also bring food and drinks and have a great afternoon of camaraderie. This is one of the traditions of the local fish market, which is not necessarily mediated by the exchange of money or by impersonal transactions.27 During the boom period of the Hess refinery in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the fish market benefited from the large number of workers (and fish consumers) coming from the West Indies. One fisherman recalled that during those times, fishermen would take their catch in front of banks, where workers went to cash their checks. We discussed dispersion as a characteristic of the fishery and this example shows the adaptive character of dispersion. Fish were abundant and sold 27
Other interviews also attest to the role of giving away free food (e.g., fritters, conch, water) as a means to attract customers.
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