Abstract: Following their establishment by the central government in 1933, Mexico's inshore Pacific fishing cooperatives enjoyed great prosperity. Today, however, they are marginal entities, and many are failing. The inshore cooperatives of south Sinaloa state are examined as a case in point. Their decline was brought about by a multiplicity of factors-corruption, counter-pro- ductive technological innovations, natural catastrophe-and especially by an underlying struc- tural flaw in their organization: as State-instituted and controlled entities, they are not autono- mous. Thus, as the central government developed economically more viable offshore shrimp- producing cooperatives, the inshore cooperatives were unable to respond competitively, and de-clined.

     Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 1, Special Issue: Maritime Anthropology (Jan.,1980), pp. 39-47

　　Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research