Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Updated with a New Preface and Epilogue Volume 27

By Seth Holmes

Book Overview

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system.

Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This "embodied anthropology" deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a substantive update about the protagonists in the book, focusing on the ways in which they have been involved individually and collectively in movements for Indigenous immigrant rights, farmworker rights, and the right to health over the last decade.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520398637
• ISBN13: 9780520398634
• Release Date: November 2023
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

I will recommend this book to anyone

Even though this book is technically a thesis, Seth Holmes has written an incredible account of indigenous Oaxacan migrant workers in the United States. I would recommend it for anyone to read but as a piece of literature it must be taken seriously to have any effect, should be in the curriculum for more school programs.