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
The Skagit Valley. Holmes describes the stunningly beautiful agricultural region located north of Seattle. The Skagit Valley faced hard times in the 1990s and 2000s, when its small factory farms could no longer compete with midwestern agribusiness or overseas farmers.
Globalization created problems for Skagit Valley farmers in the 1990s, just like it did for Triqui people during the same time period. This shows how, first, nobody is exempt from the pressures of globalization, and secondly, these forces affect different places unequally. In this case, Skagit Valley farms managed to survive, while Triqui people’s small corn farms did not.
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Migrant Farmworkers in the Skagit Valley. Holmes explains that thousands of Mexican migrants work on Skagit Valley farms every spring and summer. They live in nearby shacks, cars, and labor camps. In fact, the camp where Holmes lives with the Triqui migrants is really just a collection of tiny, dilapidated shacks. His shack is barely 100 square feet, but normally it would house a whole family.
The Triqui migrants’ labor camp defies the common assumption that people migrate in order to improve their quality of life. But as Holmes shows, these shacks are at least as bad as (and usually worse than) Triqui people’s living conditions in Oaxaca. The disparity between the labor camp’s conditions and local white Americans’ larger, more comfortable homes reflects the Skagit Valley’s racial, ethnic, and citizenship hierarchy.
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The Tanaka Brothers Farm. Holmes describes the farm where he works alongside the Triqui migrants. The Skagit Valley’s largest, the farm employs 500 people from May to November. It mainly produces strawberries, which it sells to major corporations, but also grows raspberries, apples, and blueberries. The workers live in three ramshackle labor camps, while the Tanakas live in larger houses nearby. While the farm’s mission statement claims that the whole staff works together harmoniously, the farm is actually strictly segregated into a hierarchy defined by “race, class, and citizenship.” This chapter focuses on this hierarchy, which Holmes will trace down from the top.
The Tanaka Brothers Farm is both family owned and relatively large-scale. While not run by a massive corporation, it does sell to massive corporations. Therefore, the farm is plugged into the globalized agriculture industry and subject to that industry’s pressures. The farm’s mission statement acknowledges the staff’s diversity while conveniently omitting its hierarchy. This is an example of symbolic violence: the mission statement misrepresents an oppressive and exploitative labor situation as though it were amicable to everyone involved.
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Farm Executives. The executives at the top of the farm’s are the Japanese American Tanaka brothers and the white agribusiness professionals who consult for them. It’s easy to blame these managers’ greed and cruelty for their migrant workers’ terrible living conditions, but in reality, it’s far more complicated. Due to overseas competition, the managers can’t afford to pay their workers better or invest in remodeling the labor camps. This, Holmes says, is a clear example of structural violence.
Even though they’re at the top of the local hierarchy on the farm, the executives are relatively low in the hierarchy of the global agriculture industry. Accordingly, they face the same kind of downward pressures—or structural violence—as everyone under them (and most of the people above them) in this massive global hierarchy. They’re not exploiting their workers out of greed; rather, they feel that they’re doing it out of necessity.
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In fact, the Tanakas genuinely care about their workers and ask Holmes for advice about improving their living conditions. The farm’s president is the longtime army officer, local nonprofit leader, and avid churchgoer John Tanaka. He works from 6:00 a.m. to the late afternoon, including weekends, mostly from his desk. He focuses on the business’s finances; he hopes that his children can take it over someday.
John Tanaka clearly doesn’t meet the stereotype of someone who would ruthlessly exploit undocumented immigrant labor. However, using the concept of structural violence, Holmes explains how noble, hardworking, upright community members like John Tanaka can perpetuate severe structural violence. Namely, because of the social structures they’re involved in (like the global agriculture industry), people like John have no choice but to exploit workers. Because of pressure from above, John Tanaka has to increase the pressure he puts on those down below. He is both a victim and a perpetrator of structural violence—just like everyone else in the hierarchy.
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At a community meeting, John Tanaka explains his feelings about his migrant workers. He admits that it’s difficult to pay Washington’s high minimum wage of $7.16 per hour while staying competitive with farms in other countries, like China and Chile. He also notes that migrant workers’ children generally avoid farm work, which creates a generational cycle: he is always looking for new groups who are willing to do farmwork. Over the years, these have included Cambodian refugees and Indigenous Canadians. Holmes points out that even though there’s a pattern—first-generation immigrants suffer, their children find better jobs, and then another group replaces them on the farm—this doesn’t make farmworkers’ suffering natural or justifiable.
The pressures of international competition show how structural violence acts on John Tanaka and other U.S. farm owners, but the poor working conditions John creates show how he inflicts this same structural violence on his workers. The fact that most workers leave after a generation is a clear sign that their conditions are undesirable, and John’s speech makes it clear that the U.S. agriculture industry would struggle to survive if it couldn’t rely on desperate, poor laborers like undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, to Holmes, John’s belief that first-generation immigrants always suffer for their children is an example of symbolic violence. Specifically, John presents exploitative labor arrangements as the natural order of things, which allows him to absolve himself of guilt for the way he treats his workers.
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John Tanaka’s brother Rob Tanaka oversees all the fruit production. He tells Holmes that he worries about labor, weather, government regulations, and the sprawling suburbs eating up nearby land. To maintain their profit margins, the Tanakas constantly have to innovate and cut corners, for instance by trying out new crops. Rob is frustrated that other farms put shareholder profits first, which forces him to do the same. This makes it harder to be “fair and consistent” to his family, workers, and community. Similarly, a white executive who negotiates with produce buyers tells Holmes that it’s getting harder to sell the Tanakas’ famously juicy strawberries, as food companies are increasingly replacing them with cheaper alternatives.
Just like his brother, Rob Tanaka has a difficult job and faces legitimate challenges at work. However, his worries and working conditions don’t compare to the berry pickers’. Rob worries about losing money and compromising his values, while the berry pickers risk losing their health and lives. Rob works long hours, but he’s not doing physical labor in the fields like his berry pickers. This shows how social hierarchies inflict structural violence on everyone, but that they do so unequally: the people near the top (like John and Rob) suffer, but those at the bottom (like the berry pickers) suffer much more.
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Holmes summarizes how farm executives’ place atop the hierarchy determines their jobs, lifestyle, and worries. They struggle to cope with difficult trends in global agricultural markets, while trying to balance profitability with ethics. They live comfortably and mostly control their own work schedules.
Holmes’s description of the executives’ work situation might seem obvious or overly simplistic. However, he’s providing this description because it will allow him to compare different farm employees’ working conditions later on and show how structural violence affects different groups differently. Therefore, in order to eventually compare one group of workers in the hierarchy to another, Holmes summarizes a few key factors to compare across groups. These factors include people’s main preoccupations at work, their freedom to set their work schedules, the body positions they work in, their long-term job security, and the negative physical or psychological consequences of their work.
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Administrative Assistants. The next category in the labor hierarchy are administrative assistants. Mostly middle-aged white women, they work in an open office and take various attitudes toward the farm’s Indigenous migrant workers. The receptionist is kind to them, whereas the bilingual assistant Samantha believes that they are “‘dirty’ and ‘simple.’” Another assistant, Maria, is Mexican American and picked berries for four years, before getting promoted for her bilingualism. Holmes notes that the administrative assistants work long hours for minimum wage, with little privacy.
Although they have much less power over the farm than the executives, the administrative assistants share many of their privileges, like working sitting down (rather than in the fields) and enjoying relative job security. Samantha’s attitude toward the berry pickers suggests that she considers herself superior to them; this justifies her position above them in the farm’s labor hierarchy. In contrast, Maria’s promotion shows that the hierarchy is not totally fixed and can change over time.
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Crop Managers. Next in the hierarchy are the crop managers, who oversee fruit growing and harvesting. They control their own schedules but work long hours, splitting their time between their offices and the fields. They have significant power over the field workers. One crop manager tells Holmes that he wishes the farm hierarchy were clearer and admits that he can’t distinguish between Latinx workers from Texas and those from Oaxaca.
The crop managers are halfway between the executives and the field workers, in terms of both their place in the hierarchy and the nature of their work. They have some of the executives’ luxuries (such an office and control over their time) but also have to work in the fields and deal with day-to-day farm business that the executives avoid. This particular crop manager’s inability to distinguish between different groups of Latinx workers suggests that, in order to oversee the workers, he does not need to view or treat them as individuals.
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Scott, a crop manager in charge of apples and strawberries, tells Holmes that he often struggles to find enough workers. Scott believes the Tanakas treat their workers well and points out that they personally investigated working conditions when their strawberry pickers went on strike. Aware of the enormous risks migrants run in crossing the border, Scott also thinks the government should make it possible for them to migrate legally. He strongly discourages Holmes from crossing the border. The crop managers’ dilemmas show that there’s always a tension between treating workers ethically and keeping the farm profitable.
Scott is under no illusions about the difficult conditions facing everyone in the agriculture industry, from the executives to the workers. His difficulty finding people to hire suggests that the work is so undesirable that few people are willing to do it—indeed, the Triquis only work on the Tanaka Brothers Farm because they are extremely desperate for work. Nevertheless, Scott also sees how U.S. immigration policy unfairly punishes people like the Triquis for no reason besides their poverty and believes in the same structural policy changes that Holmes calls for. This shows that it’s possible for people in different parts of the hierarchy to work together for political change, if they all understand how structural violence constrains them.
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Supervisors. Next, supervisors, or crew bosses, oversee pickers and report to crop managers. They are mostly Latinx U.S. citizens and work outside all day. Some respect the Indigenous workers, while others bombard them with racist insults. But the Indigenous pickers can’t complain about this treatment, or they’ll get fired. They also can’t attend the farm’s nightly English classes. Mateo, a Oaxacan employee who learned English and became a crew boss, tells Holmes that the work often harms pregnant women and their babies. He also complains that wages are going down, not up. Mateo’s perspective shows that many of the crew bosses understand the injustice in the farm’s structure and strive to be as fair as possible.
The crew bosses are one step below the crop managers and one step above the field workers in terms of their position on the farm’s labor hierarchy, as well as its racial-ethnic one. Namely, they have to work outside, but their jobs aren’t particularly physically difficult. Crew bosses have direct power over them, but they have direct power over field workers. Crucially, while the Latinx U.S. citizen crew bosses are below white U.S. citizens in the hierarchy because of their race, the crew bosses are above the field workers because of their citizenship and ethnicity (as “mestizo,” not Indigenous). Again, this shows how the race, ethnicity, and citizenship hierarchy determines the labor hierarchy on the Tanaka Brothers Farm, just like throughout the U.S. agriculture industry.
Themes
However, other crew bosses are more openly racist, notably Rob Tanaka’s wife, Shelly, a white woman who supervises the crews of white teenagers. Shelly tells Holmes that she prefers “traditional [mestizo] Mexicans” to Oaxacans, whom she considers filthy, disrespectful, lazy, and not family oriented. Holmes points out that the Oaxacans get dirty because they spend all day working in the fields, and the other stereotypes are demonstrably false. He shows that Shelly made a judgment about Oaxacans’ humanity based on physical dirt and the language barrier, which are really the effects of their low status in the farm hierarchy.
Holmes compares Shelly’s firm beliefs about Indigenous Oaxacans against his empirical observations as a social scientist. He concludes that Shelly’s beliefs reflect her own racism—meaning her belief in a hierarchy of some groups above others. But this makes sense, as the farm’s whole labor structure is based on a racist hierarchy. While the Oaxacan workers are physically covered in dirt, Shelly clearly sees this as a problem with them, not with their jobs. This is an example of symbolic violence, or a belief that excuses and justifies social inequities. It’s a circular process: the racial labor hierarchy forces Oaxacans to get dirty at work, but Shelly decides that they are dirty because they are inferior people. She then uses her belief that they’re inferior people to explain why they have the worst and dirtiest jobs. Accordingly, Shelly mixes up cause and effect, and her way of thinking lets social hierarchy justify itself.
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Checkers. Next, the checkers are white teenagers who record pickers’ hours and weigh their harvests. Actually, the checkers just mark the same start and end time for all the pickers, which significantly undercounts their hours. Checkers spend their days hanging out under umbrellas, chatting, and occasionally yelling racist insults at the pickers (who are as old as the checkers’ parents). In fact, they learn to view themselves as inherently superior to Mexican people. They also undercount pickers’ berries, while admonishing pickers for being “lazy.” By constantly disrespecting pickers, they enforce the farm’s racial hierarchy and help others view it as natural, which is an example of symbolic violence.
More than any other group, the checkers show how the farm’s labor hierarchy is based primarily on race, ethnicity, and citizenship. The checkers’ only qualification is their whiteness: they’re young, inexperienced, and unprofessional, but none of this prevents them from securing and keeping their jobs. Meanwhile, the pickers’ jobs require far more skill, energy, and experience. Therefore, it’s deeply ironic that the checkers spend all day doing nothing but still call the workers “lazy.” Like Shelly’s belief that Oaxacans are dirty, the checkers’ belief that the workers are the lazy ones shows that they measure white workers by one standard and Mexican workers by another. Similarly, although most white teenagers would probably feel uncomfortable insulting white adults of their parents’ age, the checkers consider it acceptable to yell racist slurs at Mexican workers of the same generation. These examples show why Holmes concludes that checkers both internalize and spread the farm’s racial hierarchy.
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Field Workers Paid Per Hour. Next, there are the field workers, who make minimum wage and are paid hourly. They are mostly mestizos who do farm tasks besides fruit-picking, like driving tractors and spraying pesticides. The raspberry pickers, who harvest raspberries by machine, are from Texas and also make minimum wage.
Just like Latinx U.S. citizens get to work as crew bosses (while Latinx migrants pick fruit in the fields), “mestizo” migrants get the most desirable fieldwork, while Indigenous migrants do more dangerous, lower-paying work. This is why Holmes ultimately concludes that the farm’s hierarchy is based on ethnicity as well as race and nationality.
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Field Workers Paid by Weight. Finally, there are the pickers, or the field workers who are paid by weight. There’s a “White Crew” of local teenagers who pick berries on summer vacation from school. The white crew can work as much or as little as they want, while Mexican workers have to meet a daily minimum or else they’ll get fired. Still, because of the white crew, local white residents believe that farm work is “not that bad.”
Like the checkers, the teenagers on the white crew have special privileges on the farm simply because of their whiteness. They contribute to symbolic violence in two ways. First, they normalize the idea that inexperienced white teenagers’ labor is worth more than experienced Latinx adults’ labor. Secondly, they encourage the surrounding community to underestimate and overlook migrant workers’ suffering. Therefore, they make the racial hierarchy stronger while helping conceal its effects.
Themes
The Mexican Crew. Most of the farm’s workers belong to the “Mexican Crew,” who work in the dilapidated work camp, far from the farm. If they miss the daily minimum weight twice, they lose their jobs. A few Mixtec and mestizo workers pick apples. But the 350–400 strawberry and blueberry pickers are nearly all Triqui people from San Miguel. They make 14 cents per pound of strawberries and have to pick 51 pounds per hour to meet the minimum wage. This is extremely difficult: they have to work incredibly fast and can’t take breaks. They work seven days a week and suffer severe health problems. In fact, from working just two days a week, Holmes experiences severe pain that “[feels] like pure torture.”
In comparison to the rest of the farm’s employees, the Indigenous berry pickers work in the poorest conditions for the least money, with the least job security. In this passage, Holmes implicitly asks his readers to consider whether saving a few cents on strawberries is worth this degree of suffering for migrant workers. Using his own experience of pain (after just two days per week of picking) as a measuring stick, he also asks his readers to imagine the Triqui workers’ symptoms after picking for months straight, year after year. The other employees’ suffering is mostly psychological, and it simply doesn’t compare to the field workers’ severe physical pain. This pain is a direct result of structural violence: the Triquis work in such poor conditions due to a combination of the farm’s hierarchy, which puts them at the bottom, and the economic forces that force the farm’s managers to impose a rigid and unusually exacting work schedule on them.
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At a conference on migrants’ issues, a picker named Marcelina explained that she can’t support her children on such low pay. The checkers undercount her harvest and throw rotten berries at her. She hasn’t returned home to see her son for four years, and she can’t get better farm jobs in California because she doesn’t speak Spanish well.
Marcelina’s testimony demonstrates farm work’s human cost for migrant workers. The farm never pays her enough to fulfill her fundamental goal—supporting her children—but she also has no way to leave or find other work. In part, this is becuase racism and language-based discrimination inflict structural violence on her. Accordingly, Marcelina ends up stuck in this degrading job becuase of the social structures and forces that surround her and make her labor profitable for the U.S. economy.
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Similarly, Samuel tells Holmes that he only really gets paid $20 a day, which comes out to $3,000–$5,000 per year. But the pickers will get fired or deported if they complain about the pay or the degrading conditions, like the way supervisors call them “dumb donkeys” and “dogs” and complain if the Triquis work too slow or too fast. In contrast, they sympathize with Holmes (who picks very slowly) and promote another picker because he has his own apartment.
Samuel’s actual pay is far less than the minimum wage that he’s technically supposed to earn. But the fact that he can’t complain shows how U.S. immigration policy makes migrant workers easier to exploit by denying them legal protections. In other words, farm owners have an incentive to employ undocumented workers over legal residents. U.S. immigration policy therefore protects this advantage for business owners, even at the expense of migrants’ wellbeing.
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In summary, the Triqui pickers’ situation shows how “marginalization begets marginalization.” They can’t get better work on the farm because they can’t get afford apartments, but can’t get apartments because they can’t get better work. This helps show how “poverty, education level, language, citizenship status, and ethnicity” are all interrelated.
“Marginalization begets marginalization” because of symbolic violence. When others wrongly blame marginalized people’s marginalization on their own inferiority, this justifies marginalizing them further. This shows how social hierarchies reproduce themselves: they teach citizens to reward privileged people and punish disadvantaged people.
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Out of Place. Holmes explains how the managers treated him favorably. He never meets the weight minimum but keeps his job. The executives consult him about management decisions, and the supervisors add berries to his bucket to boost his pay. Meanwhile, Triqui workers think he’s a spy or criminal, and they point out that he works very slowly. Others admire him—Samuel even jokes that Holmes could become the mayor of San Miguel. But Samuel also knows that Holmes will eventually leave the farm to go “be rich and live in a luxury house.” (He means one with indoor plumbing.)
Much like the white teenage crews and checkers, Holmes receives favorable treatment simply because he’s white. Others pity him because he’s choosing to work below his place in the racial-ethnic hierarchy, but they disdain migrant workers who do the same jobs. Ironically, then, Holmes gets rewarded for his privilege even when he tries to temporarily step out of it. Samuel’s admiration for him suggests that, to some extent, the Triqui people also internalize the ethnic-racial hierarchy.
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California. Holmes remembers driving from Washington to California’s Central Valley with Samuel and his family. For a week, they sleep in their cars and struggle to find an apartment. When they manage to rent a three-bedroom apartment, 19 of them move in. But like in Washington, they’re at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy here, which means they struggle to find work. They make just $10 a day, but also have to pay for rent and childcare (unlike in Washington).
Because they lack legal residency, the Triqui migrants are again forced to live outside the law, on the margins of society. Excluded from the ordinary housing market because of their immigration status, they end up in substandard housing that exacerbates their marginalization. Similarly, because they are marginalized and lack legal status, they end up making far less than the minimum wage. This also shows how restrictive immigration laws are highly profitable for the U.S. economy: by denying legal protections to undocumented migrants, the U.S. government essentially allows U.S. business owners to illegally exploit migrant workers.
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Hierarchies at Work. Holmes analyzes the Tanaka farm’s labor structure. Everyone is constantly worried about something and vulnerable to losing their job, but those at the top of the hierarchy have much less to lose and much more freedom at work. (For instance, they can take breaks.) This hierarchy is explicitly ethnic: white and Asian American citizens are at the top and undocumented Indigenous people at the bottom. Latinx Americans and Mexican mestizos are in the middle. Among Indigenous people, Mixtecs are above Triquis, who are seen as “more purely Indigenous.” Citizens are also above noncitizens.
Now that he has introduced his readers to all the people on the Tanaka Brothers Farm, Holmes summarizes the clear labor hierarchy that he observed based on race, ethnicity, and citizenship. These three factors work together to create a complex vertical ranking system, in which certain groups are considered superior to others, receive better treatment as a result, and ultimately experience better outcomes in life and work (which in turn feeds the belief in those groups’ superiority). Crucially, Holmes points out that this ranking isn’t random. Instead, it's closely connected to long tradition of white supremacism in the U.S.
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Holmes compares this social hierarchy to a zoom lens. By zooming out, one sees that the farm is really embedded in the agriculture industry’s much larger global hierarchy. By zooming in, one can see sub-hierarchies within each category (like different Indigenous groups). This hierarchy determines what kind of “labor, respect, and suffering” that different people receive. Gender also affects people’s status: men are sometimes promoted above their place in this hierarchy, and because Triqui women are less likely than Triqui men to speak Spanish well, they have fewer work opportunities.
Holmes’s zoom lens metaphor captures the way hierarchy is both fine-grained and widespread. In other words, it affects everyone differently, but it still affects virtually everyone. By zooming in and out, it’s possible to understand how global forces have local effects. Zooming in shows the immediate causes behind a certain hierarchy (like management’s decision to assign harder work to Triquis than Mixtecs), while zooming out shows the more distant causes that make certain hierarchies necessary (like the global agricultural policies that make it necessary for small farms to exploit their workers to survive). Conversely, focusing on just one or the other makes it easy to forget the broader context behind individual decisions, or else the way broad political and economic forces ultimately affect people’s lives by shaping their day-to-day decisions.
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In conclusion, Holmes points out that the hierarchy doesn’t come from the farm owners: rather, everyone on the farm must accept the hierarchy to survive. To avoid recognizing this reality, people on and around the farm frequently use bad faith, or self-deception. For instance, white adults who picked berries for a summer in high school pretend that they understand Mexican migrants’ lives. Through this self-deception, people start to justify and defend social hierarchies.
The “bad faith” Holmes discusses here is one version of the symbolic violence he focuses on in Chapter Six. Notably, here he suggests that it’s perfectly understandable for people to use bad faith: they have to participate in the hierarchy and don’t want to feel like they’re harming others just by doing their jobs. However, Holmes knows that it's necessary to show people this ugly truth in order to convince them to undo inequities and structural violence.
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