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Samantha
Shelly is a white manager at the Tanaka Brothers Farm who is married to one of its owners, Rob Tanaka. One of the farm’s more egregiously racist workers, Shelly supervises the white teenagers who weigh berry pickers’ baskets while chatting and hanging out in the shade. In a particularly horrendous incident, when a group of workers stands outside her office to shelter from the rain, she yells at them to “Shoo! Shoo! Get, get!” Whether she realizes it or not, she treats them as subhuman animals. Shelly shows how racist ideas and the racial-ethnic hierarchy of the U.S. agriculture industry reinforce each other. Because Indigenous Oaxacan workers are at the bottom of the hierarchy, Shelly and her peers consider them subhuman—but because people like Shelly consider them subhuman and unworthy, Oaxacan workers can’t rise in the hierarchy.
Shelly Quotes in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
The Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies quotes below are all either spoken by Shelly or refer to Shelly . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3 Quotes
The physical dirt from the labor of the indigenous pickers had become symbolically linked with their character, and at the same time the limited possibility of relationships between Shelly and the indigenous workers because of the language barriers had become symbolically projected as assumed character flaws onto the indigenous pickers themselves. In addition to bringing into relief the "de facto apartheid" on the farm, the profiles of the supervisors exemplify the range of responses to ethnic and class difference within an exploitative system.
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Shelly Character Timeline in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
The timeline below shows where the character Shelly appears in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: Segregation on the Farm: Ethnic Hierarchies at Work
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...
(full context)
Chapter 6: “Because They’re Lower to the Ground”: Naturalizing Social Suffering
...physical labor in uncomfortable conditions. The white workers often treat berry pickers like animals—for instance, Shelly yells at a group of workers to “Shoo! Shoo! Get, get!” In short, by treating...
(full context)
