Book Review
Elizabeth Kuroyedov
Triqui strawberry pickers at Tanaka Farms. Image from Seth Holmes, Research Gate.
As both an anthropologist and a physician, Seth Holmes delivers a politicized analysis on migrant labour in America from an anthropological perspective, combined with the objectivity of a medical practitioner. Fresh Fruit Broken Bodies is an intimate examination of the livelihoods, resilience, and suffering of Mexican migrants whose labour is indispensable to the contemporary food system in North America. The ethnographic approach links structural violence inherent in the American labour system, to the continuing normalization of racial hierarchies. Holmes then explains how these hierarchies produce bodily sickness among Indigenous Triqui people from Oaxaca, Mexico. He draws from extensive fieldwork in Oaxaca, the farms of the Skagit Valley, and a harrowing trek through the Sonoran Desert.
Holmes works multiple seasons alongside the Triqui in Tanaka Farms, Washington. Fluidly mixing personal tone with academic, Holmes explores the implications of everyday practices that normalize inequality through in-depth theoretical engagement with Marx, Bordieau, and Foucault. Ultimately, Holmes argues the modern agriculture system that produces relatively cheap, fresh fruit is dependent on symbolic violence and its related physical and emotional sufferings.
Fresh Fruit Broken Bodies is imbued with gripping field notes from crossing the U.S. – Mexico border with his Triqui friends, constantly on the move through pitch dark, dodging rattlesnakes and border security patrols. The book is an unfolding narrative, incorporating Holmes’ italicized field notes with the major chapters of theoretical analysis. Rather than detracting from the book’s academic credibility, this format intimately follows everyday suffering of migrant workers through different spheres of their life.
Holmes critiques the external, structural factors affecting food and how we eat at every level of the supply chain. He looks at both Indigenous and non-Indigenous pickers, lower-level farm employees, and farm owners to see how they are influenced by the behemoth of agribusiness. In the Tanaka Farm, “Everyone…is structurally vulnerable, although the characteristics and depth of vulnerability change depending on one’s position within the labour structure” (p.83, 2013). Pickers are the most marginalized, lacking lunch breaks, protection from the elements, and generally basic freedom of movement and choice. Local laws allow wages to remain low, and migrants are legally banned from receiving welfare and adequate healthcare.
Ironically, Triqui migrate to Tanaka Farm because they were previously structurally vulnerable in Mexico. Unfair trade deals like NAFTA damaged Oaxacan economies, and U.S.-funded military troops instigated violence in San Miguel in the name drug prevention, creating a context where crossing the militarized border was both necessary and life-threatening.
Strawberry picking is physically straining, involving a constant deep bend. Image from Daily Kos.
However, farm owners, crop-overseers, and desk clerks are less vulnerable in the labour structure: they have the benefit of taking breaks, dependable wages, and sitting or standing throughout their work day. Unfortunately, Holmes describes how even ‘ethical growers’, in their fight for survival, are forced by an increasingly harsh market to participate in labour hierarchies which generate suffering. The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and growing international markets mean farms are vulnerable to increasing competition in countries like China and Chile. Therefore Holmes’ major argument is that macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.
The book closely analyzes the acute social impacts of global environmental changes, rather than large-scale land systems changes or biogeochemical flows in agriculture. Leach et al. discusses this complimentary nature of environmental boundaries with social aspects, commonly referred to as ‘social boundaries’: thresholds that uphold basic human rights and dignities (2013). According to Holmes’ socio-ethnographic critique, migrant labourers are not living within social boundaries: “American society gains much from migrant labourers and gives little back beyond criminalization, stress, and injury” (p.197, 2013). This racialized poverty continues in the name of globalized agriculture.
Pickers' lodgings on Tanaka Farms.
Politically imposed suffering on migrant farm workers generates profit for transnational agribusiness, yet at the same time, produces cheap, fresh produce for local consumers. This complicates environmental issues like food security: generally, globalizing markets increase food security by increasing access and affordability to food.
Food security is a condition when all people at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food (IFPRI). Yet the very people who produce this food do not have access to it themselves, and additionally suffer physically and emotionally to produce the food. If the food security of an average American exists at the cost of intense suffering of Triqui workers, part of the social boundary framework is missing for a segment of the population. This fresh fruit market niche has been transformed by the U.S. into a profitable system through violent immigration policies and ‘biopower’: the states’ regulation of people through diverse techniques to subjugate their bodies and control the population. Thus, the book politicizes and complicates traditional notions of what it means to be food secure.
A teenage counter checks pickings.
The most significant link between migrant labourers’ suffering is the mass production of food for a globalized market. Thus, the author excludes a critical discussion on U.S. global agriculture markets and multi-national corporations. He frequently alludes to their existence, and level of control, but does not dedicate any research to these topics. Many issues discussed in Fresh Fruit Broken Bodies tie back into the overarching socio-economic structure of capitalism that American society is built on. For example, are the Tanaka Farm owners to blame for poor working conditions? They have to compete in a hyper-globalized market. Similarly, medical practitioners providing healthcare in mobile migrant clinics are also not solely at fault. They are understaffed, and perform extra work because of the broken healthcare system. A review of the current debates of neo-capitalism, pro-profit systems, or the global value food chain, would complement Holmes’ holistic approach, and benefit readers’ understanding of what causes social vulnerabilities. Admittedly, the purpose of the book is to examine the everyday lives, suffering, and resilience of Mexican migrants and Holmes successfully does so, but he could have ventured to draw more probable correlation between inequalities and global systems.
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is a seminal piece of work that greatly contributes to environmental, anthropological, sociological and political fields of research because of its deeply critical and holistic approach. Holmes’ analysis of institutionalized racism and violence prove that social norms and structures are deeply enmeshed in America – and that the effects of this are detrimental on Indigenous Mexicans’ mental, cultural and physical health and safety. Any of his oversight in excluding an academic critique of multi-national corporations/capitalism is far outweighed by his rich ethnography. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies successfully tied agribusiness and migrant labour into a heart-breaking expose of the fragile global capitalist system.
*All images courtesy of Holmes' public Research Gate Profile
*A longer version of this review was originally submitted for the course
DVM 4153 at uOttawa.
References
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). “Food Security”, n.d. accessed 7 Oct., 2016 from http://www.ifpri.org/topic/food-security
Leach, M., Kate R., & Rockström, J. (2013). Between social and planetary boundaries: Navigating pathways in the safe and just space for humanity. ISSC/UNESCO, World Social Science Report 2013: Changing Global Environments. OECD and Unesco Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264203419-10-en
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