Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States by Seth M. Holmes (review)

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is an extraordinarily moving ethnographic piece which portrays the experiences of precarity and human suffering of a group of undocumented indigenous migrant workers from Oaxaca, Mexico who live and work as fruit pickers in farms of Washington and California. It also documents with heart-rending lucidity the ways in which the radical precarity to which the Triqui farmworkers are exposed contributes to the deterioration of their physical and mental health, quite often in such a serious way that some of them end up living with incapacitating pains in their knees, back, hips, hands, and shoulders, as well as with migraines, gastritis, depression, and other health problems which are related to stress and excessive workload.

The book, however, does not limit itself to describe the hardship and suffering that the indigenous Mexican migrant workers experience while living and working in American farms and labour camps. It goes beyond that and analyzes the ways in which the migrant workers’ experiences are shaped, in the last instance, by an assemblage of economic, political, and ideological forces – all of them intimately linked to the despotic forms of capital accumulation in contemporary global capitalism – that make possible the existence of a food production system that provides healthy, fresh food to a small fraction of the world population at the expense of the exploitation of an extensive mass of laborers who provide to that system their subordinated, flexible, and cheap labour force.

The assemblage of structural forces shaping migrant labourers’ suffering has been historically instituted, the author shows in detail, by different types of violence that occur on both sides of the border and beyond. The first one is a political violence generated by struggles over land in Mexico which displaced the Triquis and forced them to live in geographic areas with no easy access to water for crops, limiting their possibilities for basic material subsistence. The second type of violence, the violence of neoliberal capitalism, transformed the Triquis into dispossessed, landless nomads who, as part of a desperate struggle for survival, had to leave their families and their homes and go to across the border and through the desert in search of new homes and jobs in the US. Finally, the third type of violence that shapes migrant workers’ suffering consist in a set of racial prejudices and labour hierarchies in the United States which, organized around lines of citizenship and ethnicity, positions the Triqui migrants at the very bottom, and assigns them the most precarious, risky, and physically-demanding jobs.

One of the greatest contributions of this book consists in providing an important methodological lesson that invites emulation. From the beginning to the end, it is clear that the insights and arguments offered by physician and anthropologist Seth M. Holmes are built on the basis of a profound knowledge of the lives and experiences of the migrant workers, as well as of the social forces that have shaped them. This understanding of the migrants’ experiences was born out of a radical ethnographic practice which consisted not only of “hanging out deeply” (32) with the “informants” or “participants” – as would be carried out by a conventional anthropological practice – but also of going with his Triqui companions to live in the same overcrowded, dirty, and uninsulated slum apartments and cabins, working with them bent over picking strawberries in a context of labour subordination and precarious labor conditions, as well as experiencing with his Triqui friends the inclement conditions of being persecuted, apprehended, jailed, and mistreated by the US border patrol while crossing the border “illegally” via the Arizona desert. This act of using bodily experiences as source of knowledge production seems to be at the basis of the author’s outstanding understanding of the suffering of the migrants. That would not have been possible to reach if the researcher had limited himself to observation from the outside.

Another outstanding contribution of this book is that the author does...