Rubén Alfonso Cruz Priego

Don Rubén's work boots stayed by the front door of the house in Ciudad del Carmen for forty years, still smelling of diesel and salt, because he said a man who forgets where his work comes from forgets where his bread comes from.

Born in Frontera, Tabasco, in 1947, the son of a fisherman and a cacao-farm cook, Rubén studied petroleum technology at the Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Madero and in 1970 signed on with Pemex. He spent thirty-five years working the offshore platforms of the Campeche Sound, rising to platform foreman in the Cantarell complex, where he taught three generations of young roughnecks to respect the gas, the weather and the safety manual, in that order.

Rubén worked fourteen days on and fourteen off, and the stories from his shifts became family legend: the winter norte storm in 1982, when he kept thirty men calm for two nights by organizing a dominoes tournament; the helicopter that landed on the wrong platform; the cook who mistook his hard hat for a pot lid. He never raised his voice, never cut a corner and never, his sons insist, lost a single game of dominoes.

At home he was a different man: a soft-spoken fisherman, a singer of boleros on the porch and a devotee of the Virgen del Carmen, patroness of the city and of all who work the sea. For twenty-two years he led the blessing of the fleet on her feast day in July, steering the first boat out into the Laguna de Términos with the statue lashed to the bow. He cooked pejelagarto better than anyone in Tabasco and fed whoever came to the door, including, once, a stray pelican.

Rubén died on 26 December 2019, aged seventy-two, at home in Ciudad del Carmen after a short illness, with his wife Elvia beside him and the sound of the sea through the window. He is survived by Elvia, his wife of forty-nine years; his children Rubén Jr., Carlos and Dalia; seven grandchildren; and a harbor of boats that flew their flags at half-mast the day he was buried.