TABASCO, Mexico — Flooding caused by rapid sea-level rise and increasingly intense storms has decimated the coastal town of El Bosque in Tabasco, Mexico. Between 2019 to June 2024, at least 70 homes in the community were destroyed by the sea.
Most of its residents have been relocated to a site further inland by the government—but starting a new life comes with a catch. Most of their livelihoods depend on fishing, but the new site is 12 kilometers (7.4 miles) away from the sea and residents cannot fish as easily.
This video follows members of the climate-displaced community as they grapple with an increasingly common question: how do you rebuild a future when your past has been erased?
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Transcript
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.I heard noises at the door
and I thought
someone was knocking.
I didn’t have time
to grab my things.
Within 15 minutes,
the water
was already here.
About six days
after it happened,
we came back.
To see the house like this,
already destroyed,
it breaks you to pieces.
Our roots are here.
Our memories are here.
Right now, there are
about 51 houses
that the government
has given us
to relocate to.
What would this be, Rubi?
That… that’s Calchoco,
and this is the farmland.
This was the community.
And the rest was
pure vegetation.
From my house to the sea,
there was easily a kilometer
and a half of coast.
All of that was farmland.
All that was solid ground.
Now look at the
school in the sea.
This didn’t happen
overnight, either.
The process was slow,
but progressive.
The Inter-American
Court of [Human] Rights
said that we were
climate-displaced.
We’re 11 kilometers
from the sea.
Right now, we make a bit less
money from fishing,
because you have to pay
for transportation.
Yes, there are new
job opportunities [here],
but there are not enough
[educational opportunities] to say
“I’m going to go find a job.”
Most of us are 100%
dependent on fishing.
That’s all.
Don’t you have a girlfriend?
Ahh, he says he does!
Oh, brother.
I’m coming.
It can be fried
or cooked with tomatoes,
or made into soup.
This fish can be cooked
in all kinds of ways.
This used to be
my little house.
My bag, where I kept
my fishing bait.
We only took what we could.
This is my daughter’s dress.
Oh, God!
Look at those dresses
I bought for her.
The other day
when the sea was calm,
I counted 15 oil rigs drilling.
Out here, there are more.
And over there,
you can see others over there.
They weren’t even letting us
go within 100 meters of a platform.
They would chase us away.
That was our fishing area.
In many places, climate change
is already happening,
and there are people already
being displaced by it.
Yes, it’s true that the sea
took away our land,
but it also feeds us every day.
There are times when you
don’t catch enough
to earn money,
but you catch
enough to eat, at least.
I’m 30 years old
and ever since I was a kid,
like my son, I’ve been fishing.
I love fishing
because of the air —
you’re in the sea breeze.
But I’ve always told him that,
as new horizons open up,
you have to adapt
to whatever comes.
There will be new beginnings.
We may not have
the past we once had.
We have a past
without memories.
I have plans that
I hope God can fulfill.
I want my children
to not need
to dedicate their
lives to fishing.
The plants that I’ve
planted in my yard now
are some that I was able
to rescue from El Bosque.
They survived and I’ve been
planting them here,
little by little.
They’ll bear fruit soon.
I’m sure of it.
Credits
