The Fishery and Fishing on the Coast of Texas

The waters that were at the center of the conflict were some of the most productive waters in the world. In terms of appearance, grandeur, and beauty, however, the coastline of Texas is of little note. Generations of travelers to Texas bemoaned the monotony of the coast and mariners complained that the region’s featurelessness made navigation all the more difficult. The low-slung, sandy coastline would become an attractive feature for Vietnamese refugees in their search for a new home. One refugee, Pho Van Do, remembered decades later that he stayed in Rockport “because [it] look[ed] like South Vietnam.”Footnote ¹¹ But beneath the surface, coastal waters teem with the ingredients of life, providing a nursery for dozens of species of shellfish and finfish that have attracted human settlement for centuries.

It is a bit of a misnomer to speak of the Texas coastline. It would be more accurate to discuss the coastal bend in terms of coastlines—three of them, in fact. The Gulf Coast is outlined by a thin ribbon of low-lying islands. These barrier islands abut the Gulf with a monotonous face, obscuring river mouths and bays while confounding seaborne voyagers.

Seven islands stand sentry along the Texas littoral. From north to south voyagers find Galveston Island—the most populous—Follet’s Island, Matagorda Island, San Jose Island, Mustang Island, Padre Island—the largest—and Brazos Island. Padre Island, extending some 113 miles north to south, is the largest barrier island in the world and the second largest island of any variety in the continental United States. Despite such length these islands are incredibly narrow, most not more than a mile wide.Footnote ¹²

While one coast faces seaward, the other looks inland. Behind the chain of barrier islands exists a network of lagoons and bays, relatively calm waters shielded from the churn of the Gulf. The most prominent of these protected waters is Galveston Bay. Further south is found a quartet of bays—Matagorda, San Antonio, Aransas, and Corpus Christi—connected by narrow channels and passes. Furthest south, Laguna Madre finds shelter behind the graceful bend of Padre Island.Footnote ¹³ Shallow, productive, and calm, the estuarine environments of the bays give the coastline its character. The mixing of salty and fresh waters makes the bays an ideal home for a broad range of marine flora and fauna that successive generations of human inhabitants have made extensive use of.Footnote ¹⁴ Across the bays sits the final coastline. Found along the mainland’s fringe, this coastline reaps the same benefits of the barrier islands’ bayside and would, by the end of the nineteenth century, sprout numerous fishing villages, well positioned to take advantage of the ecological abundance of the bays. The successive bands of land and water that form the Texas coast owe much to the rivers running perpendicular to it. Waterways like the Trinity, Brazos, and Colorado carry the sediment that forms the barrier islands along with nutrients from far inland that serve as the basis for the estuarine ecosystem.Footnote ¹⁵

Waters along the coast are relatively shallow. This shallow sea allows sunlight to penetrate the depths to stimulate the primary product that feeds a diverse and dynamic food chain.Footnote ¹⁶ The fresh water that flows into the bays and lagoons is a necessary ingredient that turns the coastal bend into a haven for marine flora and fauna. Rivers discharge far more than the fine sediment that accretes into the barrier islands; they also carry nutrients that, when mixed into the salty tide, create a brackish soup that nourishes a complex ecology built on microscopic organisms. Behind the protection of the barrier islands, the calm waters of the bays allow phytoplankton and algae to turn nutrient-laden fluvial discharge and abundant sunlight into life. The tiny life forms feed increasingly complex organisms as they constitute the main diet of bivalves like oysters and scallops and crustaceans like shrimp and crab. These shellfish are, in turn, eaten by small fish, that are, in turn, eaten by big fish, that are, in turn, eaten by humans. Replenished by river and tide alike, the estuaries of the Texas coast are self-sustaining factories of biodiversity.Footnote ¹⁷

This interplay of salty and fresh water, land and sea, is crucial for the formation of estuarine environments. These conditions are found in abundance not just along the Texas coast but along the entire Gulf Coast stretching from Florida to Mexico, making the entire region a destination for Vietnamese refugees looking to rebuild their lives on the water. More than two hundred estuaries dot the coastline where dozens of rivers meet the sea, ranking the Gulf of Mexico among the densest collections of estuaries in the world. These watery landscapes brim with life, plant, animal, and human alike. As historian Jack E. Davis writes of such environments, “cosmopolitan, industrious, and purposeful, estuaries are bustling communities of the sea and shore, and among the world’s most productive habitats.”Footnote ¹⁸

The most important members of this community were, and remain, shrimp. Shrimp are a diverse lot ranging from blood-red scarlet shrimp to otherworldly ghost shrimp. There are more than two thousand species of shrimp out there, only about thirty of which are commercial fished.Footnote ¹⁹ In Texas waters, though, just three species matter—to humans at least: brown, white, and pink. All three are part of the warm-water-loving Penaeid family. In form, all three look similar, pointed heads sprouting thread-like antenna atop segmented bodies.Footnote ²⁰ Over the course of their lives, brown, white, and pink shrimp all make a migration from Gulf to bay and back. After spawning in the Gulf during the fall, post-larval shrimp retreat to the nursery waters of the estuarine bays where ready food sources and protected waters allow the shrimp to mature. By May or June the shrimp, if they survive the spring fishing season in the bays, make their way to the Gulf to begin the cycle anew.Footnote ²¹

Their very biology makes shrimp the subject of controversy. The fact that shrimp are so migratory, living part of their lives in near-shore estuarine waters and the other part of their lives in the open Gulf, has meant that Gulf and bay shrimpers, two very different groups, have often blamed each other for depleting the fishery. Shrimp tend to shoal with finfish like sea trout and red snapper, species targeted by recreational anglers. Those sportfishermen have often been at odds with commercial fishers who sweep up those prized quarries as by catch.Footnote ²² And their reliance on the muddy bottoms of the estuaries for reproduction has put fishers of all kinds at odds with industrial developers and dredgers that have spoiled and polluted those bottoms for economic gain. And by the end of the 1970s, the Vietnamese would become embroiled in controversy over shrimp as accusations of overfishing and exploitation turned simmering conflict into an outright war on the coast.

The reason the Gulf Coast fishing industry was so attractive to Vietnamese refugees was the fact that many of those refugees, like Ba Van Nguyen, were fishers in Vietnam. Bringing those skills and experience on the water was an advantage as these people rebuilt their lives in the United States. But those skills and that experience also primed the pump of conflict with existing fishers. How the Vietnamese fished put them at odds with their new neighbors.

Fishing on the Gulf Coast of Texas, like in fisheries around the world and across time, was governed by certain rules and expectations. Some of these rules were formal laws enacted by the state legislature and enforced by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department that told fishermen when, where, and how they could ply their trade. But perhaps more important, at least to the fishers on the water with decades of experience, were the informal codes of conduct that had grown up around the business.Footnote ²³ These expectations, like where a fisherman placed his crab traps, what direction he dragged his nets, and how he took care of his boat, could be used to determine who was in the community and who were outsiders. Policing the line between those inside and outside the community became an obsession for white fishers faced with, what they saw as, a foreign invasion.

Established fishers in Seadrift—the small Texas town that would become the epicenter of the conflict between white and Vietnamese fishers—wore an aversion to outsiders with a kind of perverse pride. “Clannish,” as Texas Monthly writer John Bloom described them. “Dallas and Houston are almost as foreign to them as Vung Tau and Saigon.”Footnote ²⁴ Elsewhere, the fisherfolk of Seadrift were characterized as a “people reluctant to trust newcomers from across the bay.”Footnote ²⁵ But to think that this dislike of outsiders was consistent overlooks the intense xenophobia of coastal residents. “They do tend to judge competitors by their surnames and places of origins,” Bloom reported.Footnote ²⁶

These informal codes of conduct aimed to keep the peace on the fishing commons and represented a kind of vernacular knowledge handed down from one generation to the next. As outsiders, the Vietnamese had difficulty, at least initially, recognizing and following these informal rules. The language barrier only made it harder for the Vietnamese to understand their new homes and new neighbors. Violations of these unwritten rules led to some of the most violent clashes between the two groups and were proffered as evidence by white fishers that the Vietnamese would remain woefully unintegrated and unassimilated into American and Texas culture. These clashes exacerbated the already-high tension engendered by the economic competition between white and Vietnamese fishers.

With a reputation for being antagonistic to outsiders of any kind, shrimpers and crabbers along the Texas coast approached their trade with a kind of blunt territorialism. Fishers have always been tight-lipped about the most prolific waters. After all, divulging too much about a particular location might give competitors and outsiders the advantage. Information about where best to drag for shrimp or to place crab traps was neither obvious nor quickly learned. Instead, this kind of environmental information required a laborious trial and error process, the fruits of which were only shared among a limited number of insiders. The Vietnamese wanted to skip this process and piggyback off the hard work of established fishers—or so those fishers alleged. When white fishers hit on particularly good shrimping grounds, Vietnamese boats would rush to the scene. Following dangerously close, Vietnamese shrimpers would net shrimp white fishers saw as their own. White fishers also observed their Vietnamese competitors fishing in the “wrong” direction, that is pulling their nets perpendicular to what was customary. One observer dismissed the difference as just a cultural misunderstanding, remarking “they like to shrimp from north to south like they did in Vietnam, while around here the boats traditionally move from east to west.” This particular fisher noted that while “this caused friction with the locals and still does,” he had faith that “they’re getting the hang of it fast … [and] we’re learning to live and let live.”Footnote ²⁷ But this sentiment was not widely shared as such fishing practices had the potential to cause nets and trawl lines to tangle, leading to the loss of fishing time and perhaps even damaging equipment.Footnote ²⁸

Similarly, white crabbers criticized Vietnamese practices. Unaware of productive crabbing grounds, the newly arrived Vietnamese would merely copy what they saw their white counterparts doing. The Vietnamese placed their pots near those of established crabbers in what was seen as an infringement on waters that were customarily reserved for this or that fisher.Footnote ²⁹ Like shrimpers who followed in the wake of successful boats, crabbers who placed their traps too near to others were seen, in essence, as thieves poaching the catch rightfully belonging to white fishers. These practices seemed to further reinforce the antipathy white fishers and many in the white community held for the Vietnamese, seeing them as economic competitors gaming the system.

The Vietnamese were also identified with a host of other activities that drew negative attention. From poorly maintained boats to an absence of lights and life jackets on board, to excessive speed in harbors, to even clogging marine radio bands with talk white fishers dismissed as senseless chatter, it seemed as though the Vietnamese flouted the customary rules that governed how fishers on the Texas coast operated. Local fishers were quick to attribute malicious intent to what were in all likelihood misunderstandings. Viewed from the water, these two groups merely brought different approaches to and understandings of the fishery. This clash of water-based differences became more severe as those differences were linked to deeper cultural and racial differences.

As outsiders, the Vietnamese were simply unaware of the customs and rules that governed fishing in the region. Those who had experience fishing in Vietnam before coming to the United States were accustomed to a fishing culture with different gear, different customs, and far fewer regulations.Footnote ³⁰ While the waters of Texas and waters of Vietnam share some ecological similarities, the fishing communities that developed around them were far different. While fishing in Texas was mechanized, petroleum dependent, and focused, almost exclusively, on a single species, fishing in Vietnam was, by those standards, primitive, relying on traditional technologies like sail-powered vessels that targeted a much larger number of finfish and shellfish species.Footnote ³¹ Established fishers had little desire to explain these rules to the newcomers and would have found it difficult to do so had they wanted to, given the language barrier that existed between Texans and many if not most of the refugees.

Much, it seems, of the difference between how Vietnamese and local fishers operated was the result of cultural differences. But the social context of coastal Texas was more complex than two monolithic groups of long-time white residents and newly arrived Vietnamese. Further down the coast, Mexican Americans predominated, and Mexican nationals had fished Texas’s offshore waters for years. The Vietnamese were hardly even the first immigrant group to fish the state’s waters. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most fishers in Texas were southern European immigrants who had brought with them a taste for fish and experience working on the water from the Mediterranean. Even to speak of white Texans as a group in the 1970s overlooks those in that community who supported the Vietnamese, worked with Vietnamese fishers, and were happy to help fulfill the nation’s moral obligation to America’s former allies. But such attitudes were in the minority. Much of the white community took these differences on the fisheries as proof of avarice on the part of the Vietnamese. Similar cultural differences also fed into white-held stereotypes of the barbarity of the Vietnamese refugees.

Trawling for shrimp is an indiscriminate process. While fishers hope to net as many of the valuable crustaceans as possible, they inevitably pull up plenty of other marine species. Some reports indicated that more than 60 percent of shrimp trawl hauls are bycatch, much of which is discarded.Footnote ³² Lobbying efforts by environmentalist and sportfishing groups have led to the imposition of laws—largely reviled by fishers—requiring the use of bycatch excluder devices and levying steep fines to discourage taking prized species like sea turtles, spotted trout, and red drum.Footnote ³³ The problem of bycatch was, and remains, a prominent issue in commercial fisheries and also insinuated itself in the conflicts between Vietnamese and white fishers. While white fishers customarily threw back bycatch since it possessed little commercial value, Vietnamese fishers often sold such fish cheaply, gave it to family members, or consumed it themselves. Much of this catch was composed of species white fishers would never eat yet that was acceptable to the different palates of the Vietnamese.Footnote ³⁴ To the Vietnamese, the very idea of bycatch—worthless fish—was wasteful and inefficient. While this was proof of the resourcefulness of the Vietnamese community along the coast, white observers saw it as evidence of their barbaric tastes and traditions. Combined with stories of Vietnamese fishers catching and eating seagulls and Vietnamese families doing the same to neighborhood cats and dogs, consumption of bycatch was, to white observers, more proof that the Vietnamese were unassimilated and uncivilized.

For white fishers, this consumption of bycatch was part and parcel of what was indisputably their biggest complaint against the Vietnamese: overfishing. By not returning bycatch to the ecosystem, white fishers argued, it would permanently damage the bay.Footnote ³⁵ Never mind the fact that most bycatch was dead before being swept back overboard. But the charge that the Vietnamese were ruining the fishing commons was deeply ingrained; it brought together their opposition to Vietnamese resettlement and fear for their own economic security without resorting to overt racism.

The attitude of many coastal residents was summed up by Seadrift city councilman Francis Cunningham: “There is only one way to solve this problem … and that’s to get the Vietnamese off the water. It’s not that they’re Vietnamese,” Cunningham continued, “it’s that this bay was overfished before they ever got here, and they never have learned to follow the common-courtesy rules of fishing.”Footnote ³⁶

Vietnamese Fishing and the Fear of Running Out

Perhaps the strongest, or at least the most frequently cited, criticism that white fishers had of the Vietnamese was that the estuaries, the water, were overfished. The fisheries, allegedly, could not sustain the fishing pressure of the new arrivals and this added pressure threatened to destroy the fishery for all. This accusation followed wherever Vietnamese refugees turned to fishing. As far away as Manitowoc, Wisconsin, disputes between Vietnamese and white fishers flared over fishing practices. Elsewhere on the Gulf Coast, conflict over fishing in Pensacola, Florida, pushed a state legislator to charge that the Vietnamese were “raping the waters.”Footnote ³⁷ In the volatile days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was taken as fact that coastal fisheries were being pushed past their breaking point.

At the time, reporting on the conflicts between the two groups of fishers up and down the coast privileged the perspective of white fishers and their professed concern for sustainability. “Shrimpers in the area,” the Palacios Beacon observed, “have argued that the increasing influx of Vietnamese into the industry will ultimately deplete the resource to the point where all will be adversely affected.”Footnote ³⁸ A year later, the same paper reported as fact that “the large number of refugee shrimpers, combined with the Americans already in the trade has led to over shrimping and have curtailed the incomes of both sides.”Footnote ³⁹ National publications similarly detailed the alleged threat Vietnamese fishers posed to the state’s coastal ecosystem. The New York Times reported that “the problem” at the root of the conflict between white and Vietnamese fishers “is that their [white fishermen’s] livelihood is jeopardized because the shrimp fishing hereabouts will simply not support everybody.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Whether or not this was true was debatable. Reconstructing historical ecologies is a fraught process and may, ultimately, be of dubious value. For fishers, ironically, the reality of scarcity is perhaps not as important as the perception of scarcity.Footnote ⁴¹ And for fishers in Texas, the perception certainly was that the bays were running out. There was some evidence to support this idea that the bays were changing and for the worse.

The year 1980 was symbolic for the fishing industry in Texas. The state legislature inaugurated it as the “Year of the Coast,” a time to take stock of the problems facing coastal Texans. A functionary in the governor’s office penned a report on the fishing industry and came to the conclusion that “The Texas Shrimping Industry is one which is beset with economic problems.” Chief among those was that from 1964 to 1978, “the number of shrimpers has grown each year,” but “the proportionate share of shrimp taken by each individual operator is decreasing, resulting in more effort at higher costs to catch fewer shrimp.”Footnote ⁴² Texans were, simply, spending more time, money, and effort to catch fewer fish. The Vietnamese contributed to this growing number of fishers but were hardly the cause of these problems. This report was describing what in fisheries management parlance is known as catch per unit effort (CPUE), a way to calculate how much work it takes to catch a certain amount of fish. In fisheries the world over, decreasing CPUE is a sure sign of an ecosystem in distress and an industry on the brink.

Another report published in early 1980 indicated that the month of February had set a new record low for the shrimp industry in Texas. According to an agent of the National Marine Fisheries Service, “Shrimp landings were not only a record February low, but the poorest monthly volume reported since detailed records were begun in 1956.”Footnote ⁴³ February 1980 was perhaps the worst month for Texas fishers in the nearly-century-long history of commercial fishing in the state.

There was, however, some conflicting evidence. Studies from the Texas Bureau of Coastal Fisheries indicated that over the course of the 1970s, the shellfish population remained constant, indicating that added fishing pressure from the Vietnamese was not materially affecting the ecosystem. Yet more fishers did mean individual catches declined. As a representative of the Coastal Fisheries Bureau observed in 1981, “the problem has been that the number of boats continues to increase, while the shrimp crop generally stays the same.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While the health of the ecosystem was difficult to determine—perhaps the shrimp crop was steady, perhaps it was declining—there was no question that the shrimping industry was in trouble as the pie was getting sliced into smaller and smaller pieces. Each fisher took home a smaller and smaller paycheck. White fishers responded to this threat to their livelihoods with calls to protect the waters by banning the Vietnamese, calls justified by accusations of overfishing.

But true or not, these claims about overfishing were nothing new for Texas fishers. From its earliest decades, the fishing industry in the state seemed to imperil the coastal waters it depended on. Rarely, however, have claims of overfishing gone uncontested. The debate over whether or not the fishing industry could or did change the sea was often tied to other conflicts, like those between conservationists and scientists, fishers and the petrochemical industry, and white and Vietnamese fishers. The primary argument offered by white fishers against their Vietnamese competitors foregrounded the water. It was a tactic that tapped into decades of concern among Texas fishers and other industry observers about the health of the coastal ecosystem.

Overfishing has been a tricky problem to diagnose. After all, the size of a given fish population is determined by many factors beyond the fisher’s control or influence. Natural forces like fluctuations in ocean temperature or chemistry and human forces like pollution and erosion can all work to the detriment of a fishery. The marine world is a complex system, extraordinarily so, making it all the harder for scientist or fisher to speak with any degree of certainty that one factor out of the many is the factor determining the size or health of a population of fish.

As early as the 1880s, around the time of the birth of commercial fishing in Texas, a Fisheries Commission report first suggested that Gulf fisheries were imperiled. Writing about the decrease in hauls of red snapper, sheepshead, mullet, and salt-water trout, one ichthyologist speculated that “the cause of the decrease is probably partly overfishing in particular localities.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Subsequent decades would see occasional mentions of overfishing and even more occasional calls for restraints as the industry expanded after the First World War. A 1926 report indicated that “the idea that it will not be long before the fish supply of Texas … will be exhausted” was “fast gaining recognition.”Footnote ⁴⁶ But in the face of greater hauls and growing profits, occasional calls for caution were easy to ignore.

By the 1920s, shrimp had emerged as the most valuable species targeted by Texas fishers. The first couple decades of the twentieth century had seen a fishing revolution as the introduction of the otter trawl and the widespread adoption of gasoline-powered engines mechanized and industrialized a fishery that had been using gear that had changed little over the previous centuries. The introduction of the otter trawl, in the words of a 1948 report, “completely revolutionized the shrimp industry.”Footnote ⁴⁷ As early as the 1880s, American fishers experimented with trawling. The earliest trawls—beam trawls as they were called—were conical nets with a wooden or metal beam holding the mouth of the net open. Towed by ships, these nets dragged over the sea floor scooping up any fish in their way. By the end of the nineteenth century, trawling was a common practice among Atlantic fishers. The advent of the otter trawl, which used a pair of flat plates on either side of the net instead of a beam to keep the net open, allowed nets to grow even larger. Combined with gasoline engines to haul in the massive nets, fishing became extraordinarily more efficient, not to mention indiscriminate. As fishery historian Callum Roberts contends, “the spread of trawling caused the greatest human transformation of marine habitats ever seen, before or since.”Footnote ⁴⁸

During the 1910s the otter trawl came south. Agents from the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries demonstrated the new gear in Beaufort, North Carolina, in 1912 and again in 1914.Footnote ⁴⁹ The trawl came to Florida in 1913.Footnote ⁵⁰ Soon fishers across the Gulf eagerly embraced the revolutionary gear. By 1917 most shrimpers in Texas were using otter trawls. World War I would hasten the adoption of this technology because it demanded less labor. The bay seines that had previously dominated the fishery required multiple two-person crews in small dories tending to and then hauling in the enormous nets. By contrast the otter trawl was merely towed behind a vessel. A study of the shrimping industry in 1930 observed that “trawling brings a greater revenue to the fishermen as the average catch per man per day is considerably increased. This was particularly important during the war while the shortage of labor was acute, as one or two men could often take the place of fifteen or twenty.”Footnote ⁵¹ During this same period, the coast of Texas was more fully integrated into the national economy with the expansion of rail lines. Now cities like Rockport and Port Aransas could ship freshly caught shrimp inland, reaching cities like Chicago and Denver.Footnote ⁵²

Armed with more efficient gear and the ability to reach more markets across the nation, Texas shrimpers saw their landings skyrocket during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1918, shrimpers in the state landed 164,067 pounds of the fleshy crustacean. By 1923 that number had jumped to 3.5 million pounds, and then just four years later, shrimp production reached its peak for the decade with 12 million pounds. In 1931, Texas shrimpers set another record with 14 million pounds landed.Footnote ⁵³ By some accounts, Port Lavaca would lead the nation in the tonnage of seafood exported in 1928, most of it shrimp.Footnote ⁵⁴

The dramatic growth of the fishing industry was fueled by one species: the inshore-dwelling white shrimp. After a couple decades of exploitation, however, Texans feared there would no longer be enough shrimp to go around. It was clear that the white shrimp was harder and harder to find—likely because fishers had taken too many. In 1941, the director of the Texas Game and Fish Commission, J. B. Arnold, gave warning that some kind of reckoning was coming, a reckoning of the fisher’s own making. “The fish supply of our coastal waters,” the fisheries administrator announced, “had decreased alarmingly.”Footnote ⁵⁵

This reckoning, however, would be delayed. By the end of the 1940s, the white shrimp’s scarcity would force more fishers into Gulf waters where brown and pink shrimp proliferated. Texas fishers built bigger boats and used more sophisticated gear to exploit the newfound shrimping grounds of the Gulf. These fishers were part of a worldwide expansion of fishing effort in the decades after World War II. A technological revolution in fishing vessels and fishing gear, along with a growing demand for food around the world, fueled a global fishing boom.Footnote ⁵⁶ Soon enough, though, the fear of overfishing began to rise again.

After about a decade of brown shrimp driving catches ever higher for Texas fishers, the headline “Upset in the Shrimp Fishery” appeared in the pages of Texas Game and Fish. The title struck a discordant tone, coming amid a record-breaking stretch for the Texas fishing industry, when catches regularly surpassed 50 million pounds annually. But the article’s author—Texas Game and Fish Commission executive secretary Howard D. Dodgen—made it clear that these numbers were not necessarily something to celebrate. “Nature pretty well takes care of its own problems,” Dodgen observed, but, “when man does start dabbling … things that are natural get a setback.” Catching millions of tons of shrimp certainly counted as dabbling. Dodgen reported that “the industry is becoming alarmed at the prospects of a decreased shrimp harvest.” The problem was not a result of natural environment fluctuations or pollution—it was, simply, too much fishing. Dodgen was clear: “Our harvest is depleting our stock. If we are to continue to have ample shrimp … we must do a better job.” That “better job,” the fisheries administrator predicted, would come in the form of regulations. “Undoubtedly,” Dodgen hoped, “some sane legislation for the protection of the shrimping industry will come along.”Footnote ⁵⁷

A couple dozen pages after Dodgen’s sober words, another article about shrimping appeared in the game and fish magazine. This one, titled “Shrimp Bonanza,” celebrated the massive expansion of the Texas shrimp business over the past decade without a hint of the restraint Dodgen prescribed.Footnote ⁵⁸ Caution and optimism lived alongside each other as industry observers disagreed about whether or not the fishery was overfished and who was to blame for the problems, if any, fishers faced.

Gordon Gunter, one of the most respected voices on fishery matters in the state, waded into the murky waters of the overfishing question. Few in the state could match his resume. Earning a Ph.D. from the University of Texas (UT), Gunter worked for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Texas Fish and Game Commission before a decades-long run as director of UT’s Institute of Marines Science and the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory. It would not be a stretch to say Gunter was the leading authority on Gulf fisheries.

During the midcentury fishing boom, Gunter was certainly aware of the problems that dogged the Gulf. “Changes have taken place,” Gunter observed, “in Texas marine waters in the past fifty years and they have damaged marine life.” The marine biologist counted erosion; “harmful structural changes,” like the Intracoastal Waterway; and that “canker of civilization,” industrial pollution, as all contributing to the considerable decline of fish on the coast. “Shrimp are not seen in large schools any more,” Gunter despaired. Quoting a colleague, another marine biologist, Gunter concluded that Texas is “the most rapidly degenerating region of the Coast of the United States.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Noticeably absent from Gunter’s list of offenders were fishers. He dismissed the idea that the fishing industry in the state was to blame for the problem: “The overall reduction,” which Gunter did recognize, “has not been caused by overfishing by commercial fishermen.” He went on, “no fisheries biologist, who has ever worked or spent any time on this coast, and there have been a round dozen of them in the past twenty years, has been of the opinion that overfishing was a problem of conservation of the Texas Coast.” The scientist put enormous faith in the ability of the natural world, a world he was more familiar with than most, to check the abuses of humanity, or at least its fishers. “If all but a remnant of Texas marine life was destroyed by some sudden catastrophe it would replenish itself in about three years, if the environment remained in good condition.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Years later, another fisheries authority, Milton Linder, a functionary of the Fish and Wildlife Service, echoed Gunter’s words. He noted that “all indications are that environmental factors,” which is to say, not fishing, “are much more important than man in determining the number of shrimp that will be produced from a spawning season in any one locality.”Footnote ⁶¹ During the 1950s, as fishing escalated, evidence mounted that man, the fisher, was indeed a contributor to a growing crisis. It would take activists and observers outside Gunter’s and Linder’s coterie of ichthyologists to make the case most forcefully, however.

One of those outsiders was John Beasley. Beasley was the founder and only member of Texas Coastal Research for the Common Good, an independent organization dedicated to fighting commercial interests like shell dredging and coastal developments that threatened the life of the coastline. In his decades-long conservationist career, Beasley corresponded with politicians, government agencies, scientists, fishers, and journalists who had any connection to or interest in what was happening on the coast of Texas. One of his interlocutors was Betty Allen, a newspaper columnist at the center of the fishing business in Texas. Writing for the Port Isabel Press, Allen saw firsthand the transformation of the industry in the decades after World War II. Port Isabel, previously on the far periphery, became one of the biggest shrimping ports in the nation thanks to its location in South Texas, nearer the prolific waters of the Bay of Campeche that Texans began resorting to en masse in pursuit of brown shrimp. Her column, “Shrimp Tales,” tracked the maturation of the fishing industry, and Allen became a defender of this marine resource.

More than a decade after Arnold’s dire warning, Allen declared that the Texas coast was “facing a permanent decline of shrimp” that resulted from “indiscriminate, irresponsible regulations based on self interest rather than biological facts.”Footnote ⁶² For his part, Beasley predicted that should fishing efforts continue to expand, a trend dating back more than seven decades, it would constitute a “calamity” for the fishery.Footnote ⁶³

In the late 1950s, as concerns mounted, Beasley shared his misgivings with none other than Gordon Gunter. But the scientist dismissed Beasley’s handwringing about overfishing. “I can tell you one thing,” Gunter wrote to the activist in the summer of 1959, “you are not going to change the face of nature by fishing.” He continued, “you could make the whole Gulf barren to ten miles offshore and in five years time it would come right back.” Gunter had faith in the regenerative powers of nature—he termed it a “cyclic affair”—so there was no need to worry about overfishing or even to regulate it.Footnote ⁶⁴

But behind this confident assertion, this declaration that certainly science had unlocked the mysteries of nature, Beasley sensed something nefarious. It was not careful scientific study of the marine environment that led Gunter to his conclusions, but instead an unwillingness to see the damage wrought by the fishing industry. Writing to Betty Allen, John Beasley complained that biologists like Gordon Gunter and Milton Linder dismissed shrimp shortages in the late 1950s as just a result of a significant drought that ravaged the state for most of that decade. Such conditions were, and are, detrimental to shellfish production; the lack of freshwater inflows into the coastal estuaries created a hypersaline environment that proved damaging to shrimp’s reproductive cycle. But for Beasley, placing blame on this process alone, and not decades of intensive fishing pressure, was “just another illustration of what these Texas scientists can rig up in the way of alibis.” Looking to protect industry, Gunter and his colleagues mobilized “the name of science” to “publish anything amounting to ‘I,’ which is to say fishermen, ‘didn’t do it.’”Footnote ⁶⁵

Despite the confident assertions of scientists like Gordon Gunter, fishers during the 1950s, decades before the Vietnamese came to Texas, grew more and more alarmed at the prospects of the fishing industry cannibalizing itself by overfishing. This fear would motivate the state legislature to step in, with the backing of industry leaders, to pass the first significant law that would regulate when, where, and how shrimpers in Texas could fish.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Shrimp Conservation Act of 1959 was aimed at preserving this valuable resource for generations to come and would be on the books in the 1970s when the Vietnamese entered the industry. White fishers would use Vietnamese violations of the law’s stipulations—fishing at illegal times and taking too many shrimp—as further proof of why they should be removed from the industry. But the legacy of this period in the 1950s, when the future of the industry seemed in doubt and imperiled by overfishing, was that many of those fishers in the 1970s who raised the threat of Vietnamese overfishing remembered it. White fishers knew how alarming and galvanizing allegations of overfishing could be because they lived it two decades earlier. In the 1970s, however, they could not count on politicians in Austin to help them out, so they took matters into their own hands.

Concern for the waters impelled fishers to take action. After all, should the waters fail to produce robust and sustainable stocks, fishers would, themselves, pay the price in the form of smaller catches, and thus smaller paychecks. For much of the history of commercial fishing in Texas the greatest threat to the waters was overfishing. At two critical junctures, in the 1950s and the 1970s, concern for the waters and the fear of overfishing impelled fishers to do something. In the former case, fishers, many but not all, supported the unprecedented expansion of state power into the fishing business with the implementation of rules and regulations to guard against overharvesting. In the latter case, many, but not all, fishers responded to the growing fear of overfishing by opposing, at times violently, the presence of Vietnamese refugees in the industry.

Making the Coast Toxic

The deep-rooted sense among white fishers that the fishery in Texas was imperiled and their livelihoods in danger directly fed into their disdain for the Vietnamese newcomers. But overfishing, real or imagined, was not the only threat to the waters. Pollution was, too. During the first half of the twentieth century, the coast of Texas became home to one of the largest collections of petrochemical facilities in the world. From its cradle at Spindletop, the petroleum industry would expand its footprint along the coast, making the Texas coastal bend from Corpus Christi to Beaumont one gigantic industrial site. Drilling sites extended into the bays, the estuaries were ringed by oil refineries and chemical plants, and shipping channels were dredged, allowing tankers to more easily transport the hydrocarbons from Texas to the world. All of this development transformed the coast and brought Texas, if not the entire world, into the modern age. As historian Benjamin Heber Johnson notes, “oil made Texas a factor in the daily lives of … pretty much everybody on planet earth.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The petrochemical industry would leave its mark on the coast beyond the miles of pipelines, the towering drilling rigs, and the refineries that looked like small cities unto themselves. An iridescent sheen would spread over coastal waters as pipes leaked and tankers spilled, leaving oil’s greasy mark on the coastal ecosystem. By the 1970s, decades of runoff and spills would leave the waters of Texas polluted and fishers, scientists, and conservationists of the state worried about the future viability of those waters. This pollution exacerbated the feeling among some Texas fishers that the waters could not provide for all. While, unlike with overfishing, it was impossible to blame this problem on the Vietnamese, it contributed to the urgency in the calls from white fishers to limit their access.

Commercial fishing and the oil industry were, and remain, curious neighbors on the Gulf Coast. While it may seem that they would be antagonistic to each other—the oil industry looms as a threat to the ecological balance the fisheries depend on—historically that has not been the case. As historian Tyler Priest argues, both fishing and oil production share similar, utilitarian views of the coastal environment. Fishers and those in the oil industry alike mine the natural abundance of the coast for economic gain. The existence of Louisiana’s Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, celebrated every year since 1967 in Morgan City, attests to the cultural similarities of these two industries.Footnote ⁶⁸ At times it is hard to even draw too sharp a distinction between fishing and oil in many Gulf Coast communities as oftentimes the workers are the same people. During the offseason, it’s not unusual for fishers to find stable employment in oil refineries or chemical plants to make ends meet. As the fishing business became more precarious in the 1960s and 1970s, more fishers resorted to employment in the petrochemical industry.Footnote ⁶⁹

Despite these parallels, it was clear from early on in oil’s history on the Texas coast that the drilling and refining of petroleum was harmful to the waters. When the Spindletop gusher came in, it was the state’s first spill. The thousands of gallons of crude that spewed skyward were a symbol of triumph, but one that also left its mark as the sticky stuff coated trees, seeped into the soil, and ran into creeks for miles around. Early efforts to control the viscous liquid were naive in their simplicity; earthen pits dug near the multiplying derricks served as the first storage tanks. Heavy rains or high waters washed untold gallons into waterways across Southeast Texas, waterways that led to coastal estuaries that soon became slicked with petroleum. Drilling sites became noxious affairs as drilling unleashed sulfurous gasses that settled in low-lying areas, held in place by the heavy, moist air of the coast. Those in the oil industry learned early just how difficult it was to corral the liquid gold.Footnote ⁷⁰

In subsequent decades, drilling for, moving, and refining petroleum became more sophisticated, but the industry has never been able to create an entirely closed system—wells blew out, pipelines dripped, tanks failed. It was difficult for drillers and refiners to prevent these harmful chemicals from entering the water and air, harming people and wildlife alike. By some estimates, more oil “seeped back into the ground or sluiced off into creeks and streams and bays than went into barrels.”Footnote ⁷¹ As drilling rigs and refining operations extended over the waters of coastal Texas, it became easier and easier to spoil these watery environments.

The impact of all this free-flowing oil on the avian and fish species of the coast did not go unnoticed. In 1926 the U.S Bureau of Fisheries published a report detailing the effect of oil production on marine and coastal wildlife along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States. Less than a generation after Spindletop, the report’s authors noted that such an investigation was needed because “so many complaints and reports were received relative to the deleterious effect of the oil pollution and marine and wild life.” No place was untouched by the scourge of oil pollution: “Adverse conditions … were widespread, practically every important coastal water being affected to some extent.” The nation’s fishing industry suffered as “pollution by oil not only imports an obnoxious taste [to fish], unfitting them for the market,” but also “the gear used in the fishing industry is befouled and injured.” Coastal birds suffered, too, as the accumulation of oil and “tar like substances” on the feathers made flight impossible, leaving birds immobile and at risk of predation and starvation.Footnote ⁷²

Oysters were particularly imperiled by oil production. As drilling extended into estuarine waters, oyster beds were subject to physical destruction. But beyond that, the oil that was flushed into the bays posed a much more widespread risk. The U.S. Bureau of Fisheries report noted that oil “by spreading a film over the surface of the water or by coating animals and plants with an impenetrable layer, ultimately kills them … by preventing free interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. It is stated that a film of oil on the surface of the water will kill molluscan larvae within a few hours.”Footnote ⁷³ A decade later, another report published by the Fish Commission noted that continued development of “new oil fields in the inshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico creates a new difficulty to the oyster industry” as “crude oil in the water decreased the rate of feeding of the oyster and adversely affects the propagation of diatoms which are used by the oyster as food.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Even as Texans became more aware of the threats that oil pollution posed to organisms and ecosystems of the coast, the petroleum industry generated so much wealth and became so entrenched that coastal residents just had to deal with the drawbacks. World War II would not only affirm the place of the oil industry in the life of nearly every Texan, but it would also normalize the industry’s destructive impulses. As Texans overseas during the war dreamed of returning to their favorite hunting spots and fishing holes, the Game and Fish Commission warned that their lives, lands, and waters were forever changed. “Industrialization in Texas,” the Commission’s monthly magazine observed in the summer of 1945, “has gotten a great impetus from the war … Industrialization is inevitable and there’s no use going beyond the fact that it will result in fewer wilderness spots … the waters of the streams will be less productive of fish due to some degree of increased pollution. Without a concerted effort this increase in pollution might completely ruin many of our fishing streams.” The magazine continued with its despairing predictions, “New oil fields are being developed daily. Each new operation increases the pressure on wildlife. Only under the most favorable conditions can our enforcement division protect the wildlife in the vicinity of an oil field … the great profits to the landowners, [and] the lack of enough game wardens make the problem almost hopeless.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The shrimp fishery, the jewel of Texas’s commercial fisheries, could not escape the harm caused by petrochemicals and other pollutants flooding into the estuaries the crustaceans relied on for reproduction. The placid waters of the state’s bays allowed pollutants to concentrate, multiplying the harm in the nursery waters that sustained not only the shrimp fishery but also every other commercially valuable fishery in the state. The refineries and petrochemical plants that grew enormously during the war—the facilities that the Texas Game and Fish Commission told Texans they were “hopeless” to rein in—were not the only offenders. Municipal waste and sewage fouled waters as populations around the bays skyrocketed and a prolonged drought that devastated the state for much of the 1950s meant less freshwater flowed into the bays to dilute the pollutants. Galveston Bay, the site of the oldest and most intensive industrial development in the state, got the worst of this industrialization. The Houston Ship Channel was the beating heart of Texas industry, but also the vein through which industrial runoff flowed into the bay. By the mid-1940s, the damage done to Galveston Bay in the span of just a couple decades was affirmed by one of the leading marine scientists in the state, Gordon Gunter. Gunter had dismissed the possibility that fishers could alter the coastal ecosystem, but thought other human industries and the resulting pollution could harm those waters. He surveyed the state of the coast and what he saw was troubling.

“Pollution,” the scientist related to the readers of Game and Fish Commission’s monthly magazine, “is one of the cankers of civilization” that has “grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.” Galveston Bay suffered “heavily from pollution” as the “most heavily industrialized region on the coast.” Gunter counted “effluent of industrial wastes,” “oil field brines,” and “chemicals of all kinds” as contributing to the degradation of the bay and its marine life. And it was not just the trained eye of the scientist that perceived these changes. “Men of long experience on the coast,” Gunter told readers, “are agreed that the amounts of marine life has declined.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The state’s fishers had responded by moving south to other bays. As the fishing industry was poised to enter into the post-war fishing boom the waters of Galveston Bay were no longer productive enough to sustain the fishing industry. “As one part of the environment degenerated,” Gunter observed of Galveston Bay, “and no longer produced fish the fishery moved on. Fifty and sixty years ago over three-fourths of Texas commercial fishing was around Galveston. As the fish producing capacity of this sea declined, the industry moved down the coast.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Matagorda Bay, Lavaca Bay, San Antonio Bay, Aransas Bay, and Laguna Madre beckoned fishers. They beckoned petrochemical companies, too.

“DEADLY POLLUTION IN BAY HERE!” the front page of the Texas City Sun screamed in the summer of 1950. The waterfront, the paper continued, was “so grossly polluted … that in parts the oxygen content has dropped to a point where the existence of marine life is impossible.” Officials noted that the deoxygenation of the bay “hits shrimp first and hardest” and will “eventually wipe out all shrimp.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This was a sobering possibility. In the span of a single human lifetime, Galveston Bay, one of the biggest and most productive estuaries in the world, was on the brink of dying.

During the 1960s and 1970s, fishers and their supporters became more and more aware of the threats posed by the petrochemical industry’s pollution and more and more urgent in their calls to protect the waters. In an era of growing environmental activism it was hard to ignore the worsening situation on the coast. While the Houston Ship Channel never grabbed headlines for catching on fire like Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River did in 1968, Texans were well aware of the problem and the threat it posed to the state’s fishers.

One of those Texans was Houston-area Representative Bob Eckhardt (D-TX), who became a champion of fishers whose livelihoods were imperiled by the pollution threat. Speaking before a conference on pollution in Galveston Bay in 1971, Eckhardt pilloried “the Goliaths along the Ship Channel,” as Eckhardt dubbed companies like Rohm & Haas, Diamond Shamrock, Armco Steel, U.S. Plywood, and other Houston-area industrial giants that regularly flooded the Ship Channel and other waterways along the Gulf Coast with toxins harmful to human and animal lives.Footnote ⁷⁹ When state leaders considered closing polluted waterways, like Galveston Bay, to fishing because of the dangers posed by consuming tainted fish, Eckhardt implored them to think of the fishermen. “Let me remind you,” Eckhardt told his audience, “that when you are talking about closing [Galveston Bay] to oystering and to other commercial fishing, you are preparing to put a lot of little men out of business. It is grossly unfair to say to the little man, ‘You must close down your business’ while at the same time permitting giant corporations to continue to dump their hydrocarbons, their mercury, lead, arsenic, zinc, and chromium into those waters that belong to every citizen of Texas—not just the corporations.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Fishers, too, knew that their waters were under assault. Joe Nelson, a commercial fisherman from Chambers County, along the eastern shore of Galveston Bay, took aim at the oil and gas industry, the Goliaths of the Ship Channel, as Bob Eckhardt called them. Nelson saw the bigger problem was that “our estuaries are drying up. They’re being dammed off, dug out, backfilled, bulkheaded, rivers blocked, pollution. We’ve got more factories that kill more shrimp in one given day than what every shrimper here will catch in a given day.” As urban and industrial development had enveloped much of the shoreline of Galveston Bay over the preceding decades, the freshwater inflow necessary to maintain the productive balance of the estuarine ecosystem was cut off. In the process, Nelson concluded, “You’ve changed nature.”Footnote ⁸¹

But the damage ran deeper. The bay waters, while cut off from the nourishing inflow of fresh water, were regularly poisoned by a range of toxic compounds that began their lives as part of the petroleum feedstock emanating from the Ship Channel. Nelson counted “crop dusting … fertilizers … chemicals … mosquito controls … arsenic … Those things come into our watersheds.” And actual oil drilling in the bay left behind its own toxic footprint: “Every oil well that goes into this bay is going to have a certain amount of chemicals that goes back overboard into where it’s drilling mud into the bottom.” While some shrimpers may have seen fishing and the oil industry as comfortable, even supportive, neighbors, Nelson knew that “we’re losing more fishing ground every year” to the oil industry and its toxic effluence.Footnote ⁸²

The effect of industry on bays was near catastrophic. “They’ve done their damage,” Nelson lamented, “and we’ve suffered from it ever since.” After decades of industrialization, Galveston Bay, once one of the largest and most productive estuaries in North America, if not the world, was now, in the words of fisher Joe Nelson, “just a wide-open ditch.”Footnote ⁸³

Fishers knew that their waters were in danger and their way of life was on the line. The twin crises of overfishing and pollution could not be ignored in the 1970s; these were existential threats for the fishers of the coast that were decades in the making. While some, like Joe Nelson, knew that it was major corporations responsible for much of the pollution and it was decades of intense fishing that seemed to push the fishery to the brink of destruction, the answer to these problems was not to rein in big business or limit how much they fished. Instead, the problems were blamed on the Vietnamese. The urgent threat to their waters along with a deep-seeded antipathy to outsiders explains why white fishers in Texas opposed the arrival of Vietnamese refugees and why some even responded with violence.

A Hurricane Warning

In the mid-1970s, a crab fisher in Seadrift knew the fishing industry was changing in ways that threatened the livelihoods of fisheren like himself. He sensed that his declining catches and dwindling profits indicated that the waters he relied on were changing, too. After finding numerous deformed shrimp and misshapen crabs among his hauls, he thought the culprit was obvious: the chemical plants at Point Comfort that had, for years, been fouling the waters of Lavaca Bay with toxic runoff.

This crabber wanted to warn his fellow fishermen of this existential threat to the industry, posting a “NOTICE TO FISHERMEN,” at the Seadrift docks. The notice read, “I am a commercial fisherman and, as such, an independent businessman. The reason I write this is to EXPOSE the dangers presently threatening commercial fishing, which threaten the family security of individuals like myself whose livelihood depends on harvesting seafood. I am a victim of industrial pollution. The WATERS I fish have been POISONED. My ability to make a living, to feed, clothe and educate my children has been RUINED by toxic wastes and biproducts [sic] … being released into Texas coast waters … to be indifferent to this threat is like ignoring a hurricane warning.”Footnote ⁸⁴

The man who wrote these words, the man who was compelled to take action because the waters he knew, the waters he relied on, were in peril, was Billy Joe Aplin. He portrayed himself as the victim of the corporations and big business that were responsible for the pollution that had turned his bay into a toxic pool. His waters were poisoned by the same “Goliaths of the Ship Channel” Bob Eckhardt had identified. Aplin knew something had to be done to protect himself, his livelihood, and his waters, and his first instinct was to sound the alarm for his fellow fishermen. But it would not be the last time he was compelled to act to protect his waters.

Years after issuing this “hurricane warning” of industrial pollution, Aplin shifted his focus to another threat, the Vietnamese newcomers, specifically Sau Van Nguyen. For months Aplin bullied and harassed Nguyen, actions motivated by his racist disdain for the Vietnamese but also by his desire to protect his waters from the threat the newcomers supposedly posed. Alone, these concerns, for the water and about the arrival of a foreign people, may have had little impact on Aplin. But together they impelled him to carry out a campaign of harassment that culminated in his own death, which ignited a war for the future of the coast.

While fishers struggled over shrimp and crab, they also struggled over different visions of what the nation stood for. This story, when viewed from above, appears to be one of racism. But when seen from the water, this conflict is not just one of racism but a clash of different culturally constructed relationships with the sea and different technological approaches all exacerbated by long-standing feelings of scarcity and economic competition. Violence between these groups—newcomer refugees and established white fishers—in tucked-away fishing towns like Palacios, Rockport, and Port Lavaca was a result of the intersection of the two most important trends in the twentieth-century United States: the nation’s growing diversity through immigration and the nation’s growing reliance on extractive and environmentally damaging economic activities. This story exudes contemporary relevance as these trends continue to define the modern United States. In this way, this history may be a guide for the future. As these trends show no signs of abating, the kind of violence and confrontation seen in the late 1970s might be a precursor to what is to come. This history shows how a focus on the maritime environment and the competition for marine resources exposes these trends and makes the case for why American historians should, indeed must, turn their histories toward the water.