Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Study Guide

Physician and anthropologist Seth M. Holmes grew up in eastern Washington. After studying Ecology and Spanish at the University of Washington, he earned an MD and PhD in Medical Anthropology from the combined program at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. He went on to complete his internship and residency at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has also held fellowships at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Rochester. He is currently a professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley, where he also directs the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and the same joint MD/PhD program that he graduated from. Holmes has conducted in-depth research into health inequalities, immigration, and physician training across Mexico and the United States. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies was based on Holmes’s dissertation research and has won numerous prizes, including the 2013 New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology. Holmes also won the 2014 Margaret Mead Award for his research’s public significance, and he has appeared in several popular news outlets and radio shows. His more recent research focuses on the way that doctors-in-training learn to understand social inequality in clinical settings. However, Holmes is also studying political representations of refugees in Europe and young Latinx people’s experiences growing up in California.

Migrant labor has been the foundation of the American agriculture industry since its beginnings in the slave trade and indentured servitude system of the 17th century. But Mexican workers have largely driven the U.S. agriculture industry since the 1920s. The Bracero Program allowed numerous Mexican men to work on farms in the United States from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, but the U.S.-Mexico border was also increasingly militarized during this period, through joint efforts between the United States and Mexican governments. However, illegal immigration only became a prominent political issue in the United States in the 1980s, and immigration policies have become increasingly punitive and militarized ever since. Many thousands of migrants have died crossing the border since the early 1990s, and as the Border Patrol increases its reach in more populated stretches of the border, migrants are increasingly pushed to more remote and treacherous areas. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers have tried numerous times to pass a new guest worker policy and give agricultural workers legal permanent residency since 1997, but all have failed. The total number of undocumented migrants living in the United States has started falling since 2007, a few years after Holmes finished his research. The Triqui people Holmes lives with in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies were specifically forced to migrate because of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which eliminated most barriers to trade between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. This included tariffs on corn, without which cheap, industrially produced American corn flooded the Mexican market. Triqui people’s traditionally produced corn crop then became uncompetitive. This is not an uncommon story in Mexico: although NAFTA was touted as a likely source of new job opportunities and explosive economic growth, in reality it created few jobs and devastated the Mexican agriculture industry.

Throughout Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes relies heavily on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and concept of symbolic violence, as presented in books like Masculine Domination (2001). Holmes also frequently cites the work of influential medical anthropologists Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Bourgois is best known for his ethnography In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (2002), and Scheper-Hughes is known for Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (1993). Other influential contemporary works of medical anthropology include Didier Fassin’s When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007) and Paul Farmer’s Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (1999). Jason De León’s The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Sonoran Desert Migrant Trail (2015) is an influential recent anthropological study of the U.S.-Mexico border. Luis Alberto Urrea’s bestseller The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2008) follows a group of men who tried to cross the border in 2001, with deadly consequences. Finally, David Bacon’s The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (2004) documents NAFTA’s crushing effect on border workers and those workers’ attempts to organize for justice.