Book Review: Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Book Review:  Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies 

Photo credit: Seth M. Holmes.
Source: www.sethmholmes.com

On this occasion, I was able to read Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, a book based on ethnographic knowledge applied by the physician, anthropologist, and professor Seth M. Holmes. The book published on 2013, is the result of 15 months of immersion in the migratory process of Triqui farmworkers from Oaxaca to the United States, including the states of California and Washington. Holmes provides a cultural analysis about migration, social hierarchy, racism, and health; exposing the suffering of agricultural migrants that bring fresh fruit to the tables of American homes.

        In this book, Holmes wants to discover and demonstrate a dynamic that arises because of the naturalization of racialized hierarchies. The author begins the book with a sensational and controversial account of the crossing of the United States border with a group of indigenous migrants originating from northern Mexico. He also emphasizes the importance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that left Mexico at a disadvantage by not being able to subsidize its rural production, encouraging immigrants to leave their country in search of work and money. Holmes shows how the disease, characteristic in farm working conditions, is explained by blaming the victims, while the effects of work on the body are the expression of political, symbolic, structural violence and a manifestation of resistance.

    

Seth M. Holmes at a conference.
Source: www.sethmholmes.com

Personally, I believe this book is highly recommended, it's an ethnographic and committed journey to understand the political economy of migrant work and its human cost, that can help us recognize the change required by the companies that hire migrant laborers and the structural policies that result in their inadequate situation and conditions in the labor camps. 

I share with you a short video of Seth Holmes' TED Talk in which he talks about his book and his experiences:

IN CASE YOU'RE INTERESTED...

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is available in English, Spanish (eBook and paperback), Portuguese and as an audiobook.

Works Cited

Holmes, Seth M., and Philippe Bourgois. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Volume 27) (California Series in Public Anthropology). First Edition, University of California Press, 2013.