Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Social Hierarchy and Violence
Global Pressures and Individual Choices
Labor and Immigration Policy
Bias in Healthcare
Anthropology and Activism
Summary
Analysis
Samuel, one of the Triqui workers, explains that he and other migrants sacrifice their families, bodies, and identities in order harvest produce in the U.S. Meanwhile, Holmes does a different kind of field-work: as a doctor and social scientist, he’s researching migrant workers’ experiences in order to help reduce their suffering. This requires him to explain the American agriculture industry’s racial-ethnic hierarchy, then demonstrate that hierarchy’s harmful effects, and finally show how people normalize and perpetuate that hierarchy.
Holmes draws a direct connection between U.S. residents’ access to inexpensive fresh produce and the mistreatment that migrants like the Triquis endure. This is no coincidence: the produce is cheap and fresh because farms exploited the workers who picked it. By pointing out that both he and the migrants do “fieldwork,” Holmes highlights both the similarities and differences between his experiences and his Triqui companions’. Namely, while he worked and lived alongside them, he only did so temporarily—he didn’t fully experience their pain, fear, or poverty. He also didn’t share their position on the racial-ethnic hierarchy, which he later argues defines how this pain, fear, and poverty are meted out. Finally, Holmes also suggests that doctors and social scientists share the same fundamental mission: reducing human suffering. They just use different tools (doctors use medicine and social scientists use scholarship, teaching, and public-facing activism).
Themes
Explaining and Being Explained. Holmes notes that anthropologists use a specialized vocabulary and often struggle to explain their work to non-anthropologists. This is because they use long-term participant observation to try to understand social phenomena that can’t be fully understood through other methods. Still, most of the people Holmes met during his fieldwork didn’t fully understand his job. As a middle-class white man alongside Indigenous Mexican migrant workers, Holmes looks out of place to many people. For instance, when he goes to the laundromat with his Triqui friend Samuel, another migrant assumes that he’s Samuel’s boss. Samuel and many of the other migrants explain Holmes’s research by saying that “he wants to experience for himself how the poor suffer.”
Because he doesn’t adopt the same place in the farm’s labor hierarchy as most white men—who are executives and managers, not berry pickers—Holmes confuses people who have internalized the racial-ethnic hierarchy he mentioned above. He also points out that there’s a class and education divide between him and all the people who surrounded him during fieldwork. However, unlike anthropologists of the past, he does not assume that his class, education, and whiteness mean that he will automatically understand the people he studies better than they understand themselves. Rather, he views the difference between anthropology and his audience as a communication problem: anthropologists fail to effectively communicate what they do to people who aren't anthropologists. Therefore, while it’s not how Holmes would explain his project to his academic colleagues, Samuel gives a reasonable summary of Holmes’s project when he says that Holmes “wants to experience for himself how the poor suffer.”
Themes
Embodied Anthropology. Holmes notes that many anthropologists view themselves as “invisible” objective observers, while ignoring the role their bodies play in fieldwork. Instead, Holmes wants to emphasize the experience of being and feeling in his body. This is why he highlights sights and sounds, aches and pains, and sensations of anxiety and exhaustion.
Holmes’s attention to the body reflects his training as a doctor. Importantly, it also bolsters his argument that social inequity and violence should be understood as akin to physical violence: as a harm inflicted on the body that produces pain and suffering.
Themes
While Holmes shares many experiences with the Triqui migrants, there are also significant differences. For instance, he chooses to sleep alone in a cramped closet rather than share a spacious living room with others because he specifically values privacy over comfort. This illustrates how people’s social and economic groups influence their habitus, or the ingrained bodily dispositions and preferences they learn and adopt throughout their lives.
The concept of habitus is another way of explaining how social and cultural forces shape people’s bodies. Because Holmes grew up in a culture that values privacy over comfort, his choice to sleep in a closet looks strange to the migrants, whose culture generally values comfort over privacy. Throughout the book, Holmes also depicts many moments when this works the other way around: white Americans view Latinx migrant workers as culturally inferior because of the way they use their bodies.
Themes
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Similarly, people treat Holmes differently because he’s a white man. Farm supervisors and community members treat him as an equal, while looking down on Indigenous workers. Whereas Burger King workers wouldn't correct an error with Samuel’s order, they immediately do so when Holmes asks. While medical staff ignore Triqui workers’ questions and give them the wrong bills, they immediately resolve any issues Holmes raises. Facing the constant risk of deportation, the Triquis maintain their cars perfectly so they won’t be pulled over, whereas Holmes doesn’t worry about his. In short, U.S. society values white male citizens like Holmes more than undocumented Indigenous Latinx people like the Triquis.
Holmes’s white privilege shapes his experience working on the farm because it allows him to avoid many of the problems and dangers that Triqui migrants face. As a white U.S. citizen, Holmes is higher on the racial-ethnic hierarchy than the Triqui workers. When he works and associates with the Triquis, however, this disorients those around him, because they are so used to living within this hierarchy and have forgotten that migrant workers are fundamentally equal to white people. This applies both on and off the farm—police, medical staff, and even service workers also look down on Triqui people. This shows that the racial-ethnic hierarchy is really a general feature of life in the U.S., and it suggests that most U.S. Americans have learned to view the systematic abuse of nonwhite immigrant workers as normal, natural, or at least inevitable.
Themes
Next, Holmes explains how the friendships he built with Triqui workers during his fieldwork remain important in his life. He still visits them regularly, helps them navigate U.S. bureaucracy, and brings food, documents, money, and possessions across the border for them. In addition, Holmes’s research has transformed his personal feelings about fresh fruit, rural landscapes, and chronic pain. It has also made him an activist for migrant workers’ rights.
While many academics briefly meet the people they research and then drop out of those people’s lives forever, Holmes considers it essential to form a lasting bond of friendship and solidarity with the Triqui migrant workers. In particular, he helps them with things that he can do more easily as a white man, U.S. citizen, and native English speaker. This fits with his view of social science as a way to heal suffering, not just a way to understand social problems. Of course, healing suffering requires policy change, which requires committed long-term activism.
Themes
The Importance of Migrant Farmworkers. Holmes points out that migration is rapidly increasing across the globe. For instance, 95% of U.S. agricultural laborers are Mexican migrants, most of whom are undocumented. Nevertheless, the U.S. deports and detains them in large numbers while denying them access to public services. Economic policies like NAFTA are the migration crisis’s true root cause: they have created the rural poverty and violent conflict that people from southern Mexico are now fleeing. Researchers have frequently studied the global problems linked to migration, but seldom studied migrants themselves.
Holmes lays out the political stakes of his research: it speaks to central issues in global migration policy, the U.S. agriculture industry, and North American trade policies. Crucially, these policies caused Triqui people to migrate in the first place, which bolsters Holmes’s argument from the previous chapter that migration should be seen as a collective structural phenomenon, not just an individual decision. While this means that current public and political conversations about migration are missing an important element, it also means that policy changes can directly solve the problems Holmes studies.
Themes
Triqui people started migrating to Washington state to pick berries in the 1980s. They visit Oaxaca whenever possible, but it’s too expensive to go every year. At least a million Indigenous Mexicans now live in the United States. Many of their families have suffered generations of violence and displacement by Spanish, American, mestizo, and other Indigenous groups. Their stories are important for many reasons, including the fact that they literally touch much of the fresh produce that U.S. Americans eat every day.
Triqui people’s history of migration is central to their identity as a group. Although the current phase of this history began with their migration to the U.S., they have also been historically oppressed and forced to migrate in Mexico, where they are also considered inferior and subhuman because of their ethnicity. By pointing out that Triqui and other Indigenous Mexican workers touch much of the produce that Americans eat, Holmes reminds his readers that structural violence is all around them in the world, even if it’s often hidden.
Themes
The Violence of Migrant Farmwork. Holmes wants to show how migrants suffer because of a combination of structural violence and symbolic violence. Structural violence is the way that social inequalities physically injure and degrade people’s bodies. Symbolic violence describes how people perceive the world in ways that justify inequality—in particular, dominant groups paint social hierarchies as natural hierarchies, which strengthens those hierarchies.
Structural and symbolic violence are the two core concepts in Holmes’s book. In a nutshell, Holmes wants to understand why social inequities and hierarchies persist (such as the racial-ethnic hierarchy in the U.S. agriculture industry). His answer to this question is based on how structural and symbolic violence work together. Structural violence harms those at the bottom for the benefit of those at the top. (For instance, the agriculture industry’s unequal structure inflicts debilitating physical pain on migrant workers, while allowing executives to profit and the public to eat fresh fruit.) Hierarchies also disempower those in the middle, such as farm administrators and small business owners who feel powerless to improve undocumented laborers’ working conditions. As a result, everyone participates in the hierarchy, even though nobody chose it. Symbolic violence—a set of stories, explanations, and cognitive distortions—helps people justify their participation in this hierarchy. This allows hierarchies to continue and often gain strength (for instance, when people blame poor migrant workers for their poverty and then institute more punitive immigration policies).
Themes
