Interview: Manuel, October 29, 2022

My name is Jose Manuel. I've been in the fishing industry for 35 years and I'm sitting here to express my feelings and what I want to say.

We noticed that the fishing industry had been going to decline. And years before, we never had any trouble to survive, but now these years the past and the future we seem like we're just struggling.

In my opinion it's the pollution from the plants. The plastic plants that are in next to our bays and refineries and also in agriculture are the chemicals that they use and throwing the water in the air.

The future is not very promising. A lot of us have been selling our fishing license because we know that the future is now going to be promising.

I wanted to help my my children go to the university and I was helping them but ever since a couple of years we've been struggling and I couldn't help them anymore in their studies make a living.

It's very limited. It's not like before, where you can be able to save money and have have something to save for the future. Now it'a living day by day.

So, for the co-op we we do see something good coming out of Co Op, because we see everyone uniting and with more money coming in and we're all going to get to help each other with the co-op. Right now we don't have the experience to show how a cooperative works but we're trying to get the knowledge and experience to help each other and work together. We have Ideas about what to do, we are just not experienced. We hope that it'll work.

First of all, they're not going to be able to run us off from the docks or scare us. And that's one of the best advantages of having your own dock and not being scared to get run off.

Someone like me that didn't go to school, or didn't have too much study knows that they're trying to manipulate the system and affect the fisherman with the closures. So even he knows that they're going against us, our own state agency.

So like Texas Parks and Wildlife, they're willing to take those three days from us to give it to recreational fishing. And we like them they don't make a living off recreational fishing and

And the reason that is because they move a lot of everything that happens moves on with money. And we think that that's the reason they're closing these days not because of the sanctuary Park will allow you to survive

We realized that united is the only way that we can beat people like them and the Co Op is to help everyone get together and make us more powerful so we can have a word and everything that's going onSo this protest is for so Texas Parks and Wildlife know that we can stand up to them and those that we're going to fight every time they try to bring you regulations or new laws and and this won't be the only time that we protest.