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
Possibilities for Hope and Change. During his fieldwork, Holmes started to question whether the U.S. agriculture industry’s social hierarchy can ever change. Even the people it harms tend to normalize, naturalize, and internalize it. Doctors don’t understand the social inequalities that make migrant workers sick, and even well-intentioned farmers have no choice but to exploit their workers. This shows that the political, social, and economic forces that cause structural violence are extremely powerful. These forces justify the inequalities they create through symbolic violence and don’t let people really choose whether to participate in the system. This is why Holmes struggles to find hope.
Holmes returns to his primary research goal as a physician and anthropologist: to heal migrant workers’ suffering and prevent it in the future. But structural violence is very difficult to stop because it implicates nearly everyone in a social hierarchy as both victim and perpetrator. If they want to improve migrant workers’ labor conditions, medical care, and legal rights, activists have to fight widespread distorted thinking—or symbolic violence—before they can ever hope to change policy. Therefore, they have to fight both structural and symbolic violence, which means both educating the public and organizing people to push for policy change.
Themes
Holmes cites the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who explained how unequal social structures reproduce themselves through structural and symbolic violence. Specifically, social structures give people certain kinds of bodily habits (or habitus) and certain systems of symbolic meaning (including “metaphors, stereotypes, meanings, connotations”). Then, these habits and systems of meaning reinforce the unequal society that created them. However, this means that by changing any of these three elements—social structures, bodily actions, and symbolic meanings—we can also affect the other two.
Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction also includes a theory of social change. In his research, Holmes hopes to address all three of the factors that Bourdieu emphasizes: meanings, social structures, and bodily habitus. He hopes to change the “metaphors, stereotypes, meanings, [and] connotations” through which people discuss migrant workers by portraying their experiences in his book. He tries to change social structures by fighting for policy change. And during his research, he exposed the people around him to migrant workers’ plight by briefly putting himself in their shoes, feeling some of the suffering that largely defines their lives, and showing white Americans how normalized racial hierarchy has become in the U.S.
Themes
Holmes argues that social scientists’ job is to disrupt the symbolic meanings that allow social inequalities to continue. Specifically, they can do so by “denaturaliz[ing]” inequalities and showing how symbolic violence creates suffering. Holmes hopes that his research can help fight the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and health professionals’ complicity in structural violence.
Because social scientists are trained to understand symbolic meanings and social inequalities, Holmes argues that they can help people let go of their prejudices and thereby reverse symbolic violence. In order to do so effectively, however, they need to speak to the public and actively shape political conversations about the issues they study.
Themes
Im/migration Studies, Binaries, and Meanings. While the public often assumes migration involves people freely choosing to move between two separate places and communities, Triqui people have to migrate to survive, and they belong to one interlinked, international community. Similarly, although the public often assumes that immigrants should “assimilat[e]” into mainstream white culture, in reality, immigrants “both maintain[] and transform[]” their native cultures in their destination countries.
The language people use to talk about immigration matters because it shapes policies that in turn determine how immigrants live and work. The conventional assumptions that Holmes discusses here are the core of U.S. immigration policy. For instance, based on the assumption that people migrate once and for all, cutting contact with their home places to set up new homes in their destination countries, the U.S. public assumes that giving immigrants legal standing really means giving them permanent residency leading to citizenship. Instead, Holmes thinks that workers like the Triquis could benefit from legal status as guest workers. Similarly, the assumption that they make individual decisions to migrate based on risks and rewards leads U.S. immigration policy to focus on securing the border in an attempt to dissuade people from migrating. But in reality, this militarization only makes migrants’ lives more dangerous—it doesn’t prevent them from crossing.
Themes
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The U.S. public also uses specific terms—like “farmworker,” “migrant,” and “unskilled labor”—as a coded way of talking about poor nonwhite immigrants. In reality, the white administrators who run the farm are also “farmworkers,” wealthy white “international businesspeople” are also migrant workers, and berry pickers’ jobs require incredible skill and dexterity. Similarly, so-called “illegal aliens” even though they commit far fewer crimes than U.S. citizens and prop up the Social Security system. Holmes also rejects the false dichotomy between “political” refugees and “economic” migrants—people like the Triquis are essentially economic refugees. Finally, he notes that Indigenous languages like Triqui and Mixtec shouldn’t be confused with “dialects” of European languages.
In reality, the only thing separating “unskilled migrant labor” from “international businesspeople” or European “languages” with Indigenous “dialects” is social hierarchy. Prejudicial terms reinforce this social hierarchy by attaching positive connotations to those on top and negative connotations to those on the bottom. Accordingly, when the U.S. public uses prejudicial terms to talk about migrants, this is a form of symbolic violence—by dehumanizing migrants, terms like “illegal alien” prevent the U.S. public from sympathizing with migrants or recognizing U.S. immigration policy’s devastating effects on them.
Themes
The War of Position Through Words. Holmes cites the philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony—the ruling class’s domination of political, economic, and symbolic life. Gramsci argues that people can fight hegemony either through weapons or through words. Scholars are particularly suited to fight through words. They can represent oppressed people like migrant workers more positively in the public sphere.
The concept of hegemony is related to those of structural and symbolic violence, which is why the war of words that scholars can use to fight symbolic violence is also a way for them to fight hegemony. Namely, structural violence refers to how a hegemonic hierarchy functions: in a society dominated by a ruling class, everyone else has to both obey the ruling class’s power and enforce that power on those below them. This is similar to how everyone on the Tanaka Brothers Farm, from its owners to its berry pickers, has no choice but to participate in the rigid labor hierarchy and is forced to help pressure anyone below them to work harder for less pay. Meanwhile, symbolic violence comprises the ideas that the ruling class uses to convince everyone else to buy into that hegemonic structure. When Holmes talks about the ruling class, he is specifically talking about the class of political and economic elites who run governments and major transnational corporations.
Themes
Pragmatic Solidarity and Beyond on the Farm. Holmes argues that scholars and readers should also actively join oppressed people’s struggles for justice. During Holmes’s research, this meant helping pickers learn English and communicating their grievances to management. These efforts briefly made a small difference, but weren’t enough and didn’t last. Rather than just taking the most obvious and practical steps in the short term, scholars should also look for ways to build lasting solidarity. For instance Holmes introduced a local white woman to some of his Triqui friends and their children, and the white woman began writing articles defending the Triqui workers in the local newspaper.
Thus far, Holmes’s conclusion has focused on the way scholars can help migrant workers through words. (Concretely, he was talking about strategies like research, publication, and media appearances.) But in this section, he argues that it’s also essential for social scientists to become political activists and get involved in movements to change the issues they work on and care about. In making this argument, he’s implicitly responding to the common assumption that scientists and scholars are supposed to stay neutral and objective about the topics they research. Instead, Holmes has a competing vision of scholarship’s purpose: he thinks it’s supposed to heal suffering, just like medicine. This requires scholars to involve themselves in politics in a meaningful, enduring, and dedicated way.
Themes
Critical Public Health and Liberation Medicine. Holmes reiterates that health professionals wrongly blame Triqui workers’ symptoms on medical problems with their bodies, rather than the social, economic, and political problems in their lives. Holmes argues that medical professionals must be trained to see and treat all the causes behind illness, not just biology and individual behavior. Medical schools should teach their students about social inequalities and their effects on health. Moreover, the U.S. must create a universal healthcare system to replace its profit-based system, which gives the poorest and sickest people the worst healthcare and the highest prices. Finally, doctors must stop assuming that immigrants’ “traditional” cultures are incompatible with “modern” medicine.
Holmes is both an anthropologist and a doctor, so he reiterates that both of his fields can make an important contribution to ending migrant workers’ suffering. As a doctor, he hopes that he’s proven that structural violence causes real and significant suffering, just like the biological problems that doctors usually treat. Therefore, if doctors’ are to prevent and heal suffering, they must learn to sometimes put aside their medical gaze and view patients on their own terms, as complex individuals caught between powerful social and cultural forces. However, Holmes also reiterates that the profit-based U.S. healthcare system significantly constrains doctors, who need long-term policy reform in order to truly meet their professional calling to the fullest.
Themes
Solidarity from Society to Globe. Holmes clearly lays out how his readers can help migrant farmworkers. They can buy fair-trade produce, campaign for more inclusive immigration laws, and fight for universal healthcare. They can work with organizations like the United Farm Workers, Physicians for a National Health Plan, and the Border Action Network. Currently, the U.S. benefits from migrant workers’ hard work, while paying them back with “criminalization, stress, and injury.” Readers should fight to give them legal status as temporary workers. Readers should also strive to support ethical local industries and fight predatory multinational agribusiness corporations. In conclusion, large-scale political organizing is crucial to build a better future for migrants like the Triquis.
Like Holmes himself, readers of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies might struggle to see what they can do as individuals to change the massive inequalities that cause millions of people like the Triqui migrant workers to suffer in North America. In fact, Holmes argues that they shouldn’t try to act as individuals, but rather as members of a community: they should join the organized campaigns that are already fighting for justice. This is the only way to create lasting policy change and heal the suffering caused by U.S. immigration, health, and agriculture policy in the long term.
Themes
Appendix On Ethnographic Writing and Contextual Knowledge. Holmes explains why medicine’s rigorous, formulaic, impersonal methods clash with anthropology’s in-depth presentation of experiences and interpretations that often can’t be quantified. He has chosen to write this book in an anthropological style, by interweaving people’s stories with analysis and theory. This allows him to show how data collection and analysis were really interwoven during his fieldwork, and it allows readers to interpret the data he presents on their own terms.
Holmes’s brief appendix is designed primarily for medical practitioners and students who might not be familiar with anthropological methods or communication styles. Holmes again points out that medicine and anthropology clash over key methodological issues, even though they’re ultimately trying to do the same thing: end human suffering. By choosing an anthropological style for this book, he’s not arguing that anthropology’s methods are superior in general to medicine’s—rather, he’s showing that they’re better suited to explaining structural violence and collective suffering, which makes them more appropriate for this project.
Themes
