Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Updated with a New Preface and Epilogue

Seth M. Holmes

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520399457
• eBook ISBN: 9780520398641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

With a new preface and a new epilogue co-written with Jorge Ramirez-Lopez, this updated edition of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system.

Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a substantive update about the protagonists in the book, focusing on the ways in which they have been involved individually and collectively in movements for Indigenous immigrant rights, farmworker rights, and the right to health over the last decade.

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword, by Philippe Bourgois
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Updated Edition
• 1. Introduction: “Worth Risking Your Life?”
• 2. “We Are Field Workers”: Embodied Anthropology of Migration
• 3. Segregation on the Farm: Ethnic Hierarchies at Work
• 4. “How the Poor Suffer”: Embodying the Violence Continuum
• 5. “Doctors Don’t Know Anything”: The Clinical Gaze in Migrant Health
• 6. “Because They’re Lower to the Ground”: Naturalizing Social Suffering
• 7. Conclusion: Change, Pragmatic Solidarity, and Beyond
• Epilogue. We Provide Food for Your Table: Triqui Farmworkers Organizing for Change, coauthored with Jorge Ramirez-Lopez
• Appendix: On Ethnographic Writing and Contextual Knowledge
• Notes
• References
• Index