Previous
Chapter 3
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
Social Suffering and the Violence Continuum. Holmes discusses the severe stomach, knee, neck, and back pain he felt from working two days a week on the Takana Brothers Farm. The Triqui workers have it much worse: one says that she can’t feel anything at all in her body, and another reports that he can’t run anymore. This is example of structural violence, or the way social hierarchy creates physical suffering. Anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois argue that there is a continuum among different kinds of violence—physical, structural, and symbolic. Bourgois argues that anthropologists must seek to explain what causes violence. In this chapter, Holmes wants to do so by examining the injuries of three men: Abelino, Crescencio, and Bernardo.
Bourgeois discusses structural violence in order to connect the racial-ethnic hierarchy he discussed in the previous chapter to the berry pickers’ severe pain, the focus of this chapter. Namely, because of the hierarchy, Triqui people end up with the worst jobs, which cause them severe pain. This shows why such hierarchies are unjust and should be eliminated. Holmes emphasizes that this structural violence is just as real as than ordinary physical violence: even though it’s indirect, structural violence also causes significant, measurable, and preventable physical and psychological suffering. Symbolic violence, or the ways of thinking and viewing the world that justify and normalize structural violence, is even more indirect but also still has real-world effects.
Themes
Abelino and the Pain of Picking. Holmes explains that Abelino lives with his wife and four children in a shack on the Tanaka Brothers Farm’s labor camp. Unable to find work in Oaxaca, he could barely afford to buy shoes or clothing. But life in the United States is only slightly better. Crossing the border is incredibly dangerous, and migrants make far less than Americans for far more strenuous work. While they look for other jobs, nobody will hire them except the berry farm, where they are crouched down and bent over forwards essentially all day, every day.
Like many of the Triqui workers Holmes meets, Abelino has to migrate because he’s born into poverty and has no economic opportunities at home. He will cross the border regardless of the dangers there, which means stricter immigration enforcement won’t stop him and his fellow Triquis from going to the U.S. (It will just worsen the structural violence they experience by making their journeys more perilous and their lives more difficult.) Similarly, Abelino has no tangible work opportunities besides picking berries, which means he has to endure the grueling conditions that farm management imposes on him in order to keep the farm profitable. In sum, Abelino experiences structural violence both at the border and on the farm because powerful forces outside his control force him into a subordinate social position that causes him physical and psychological suffering.
Themes
One day, Abelino has such severe knee pain that he can’t move his foot and feels like something is rattling around inside his joint. But he has to keep working, and because he’s slower than usual, he nearly gets fired. He reports the pain, but his supervisor ignores him. He then goes to several doctors and gets diagnosed with tendonitis. Clearly, it’s a result of his physically traumatic job. This shows how structural violence functions: economic policies forced Abelino to migrate, put repeated stress on his joints, and live in constant fear of dying in the border region, getting deported, or becoming homeless. So despite his pain, he has to continue working.
In addition to causing Abelino’s pain, the farm’s social hierarchy also leads his supervisors to downplay and ignore it. On the farm, migrant workers’ suffering isn’t considered a significant problem because migrant workers aren’t considered fully human. Although he’s able to get medical attention, the doctor only diagnoses the immediate cause of his injury, his knee’s inflammation, while ignoring the underlying cause that would have to change for his pain to truly go away: his job and the social hierarchies that force him into it.
Themes
Suffering the Hierarchy. Holmes argues that the ethnic-citizenship hierarchy of farmworkers also creates “a hierarchy of suffering.” Namely, being “more Mexican” and “more ‘indigenous’” means suffering more physical and psychological pain. For instance, executives worry about profitability and heart disease, assistants worry about disrespectful bosses and carpal tunnel syndrome, and berry pickers worry about survival and face severe chronic pain and pesticide poisoning. Triqui people are at the very bottom of this hierarchy.
Most directly, the hierarchy of race, ethnicity, and citizenship is a way of determining people’s jobs. However, it ends up indirectly affecting all the things that people’s jobs usually determine in a modern capitalist society: their power, income, freedom, day-to-day worries, and bodily practices. As Holmes emphasized in the previous chapter, everyone on the farm suffers pressures from this hierarchy—even the farm owners feel they have to structure their business in a certain way to meet the market’s demands. But everyone also participates in the hierarchy and therefore perpetuates it to some extent—the executives employ everyone else in poor conditions, for instance, and the field workers frequently internalize and reinforce the hierarchy between Mexican and Indigenous workers.
Themes
Get the entire Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies LitChart as a printable PDF.
Crescencio and the Anguish of Insult. After a health fair for migrant workers, a Triqui worker named Crescencio approached Holmes to ask for help with his severe headache, which he had been suffering every day since he left Oaxaca seven years before. Specifically, the headaches came on when his supervisors insulted him, and he worried that he would take his anger out on his family. Treatments in Oaxaca helped temporarily, but the only thing that consistently relieved Crescencio’s pain was drinking more than 20 beers at night.
Crescencio’s headaches show that the farm doesn’t just physically injure its workers through the labor it makes them perform. Rather, racism itself also causes physical injury: Crescencio feels pain whenever others remind him that he’s at the bottom of the hierarchy. This is similar to the anguish Holmes felt when the Border Patrol apprehended him and he realized they dehumanized him and his migrant companions, viewing them as criminals worthy of abuse. Therefore, the hierarchy’s very existence causes suffering, in addition to the way it distributes work, wealth, and power.
Themes
Holmes points out that structural and symbolic violence are working together in a cycle to cause Crescencio’s pain. Crescencio suffers because he is at the bottom of the labor hierarchy and his bosses disrespect and insult him. In fact, this disrespect leads him to drink and might lead him mistreat his family, which inadvertently confirms his bosses’ racist stereotypes about Mexicans. Of course, such stereotypes are part of symbolic violence because they in turn justify the ethnic hierarchy.
The cycle of structural and symbolic violence ultimately strengthens hierarchies over time. Structural violence causes hierarchies and injuries, and symbolic violence portrays those hierarchies as natural and those injuries as signs of the injured people’s natural inferiority. This justifies people with power in making the hierarchy even more rigid and punitive, which worsens structural violence and calls for worse symbolic violence as a result. Holmes’s fundamental goal is to figure out how to break this cycle—either to heal the suffering caused by structural violence or prevent symbolic violence from covering up that structural violence.
Themes
Migrant Farmwork and Health Disparities in Context. Holmes explains that migrant farmworkers—largely young Mexican men—get sick much more often than the rest of the population (even though it’s difficult to collect accurate statistics). Latinx people suffer certain health problems at higher rates that non-Latinx people, and immigrants’ health tends to worsen the longer they stay in the United States, including from generation to generation. The dangers of crossing the border, stress of being undocumented, and difficulties of living under the poverty line all affect migrant farmworkers’ health.
Abelino and Crescencio’s health problems accurately represent the broader trend that Holmes hopes to address. This trend shows how social hierarchies and political, economic, and health policies cause disease on a mass scale. Therefore, addressing these problems requires healing society as a whole, not healing individuals. This requires changing policy and social hierarchies. However, most people aren’t used to thinking of illness this way—as Holmes goes on to argue, even most doctors tend to view illness as an individual problem, with individual causes and individual solutions.
Themes
As a result of all these pressures, compared to other workers, migrant farmworkers are much more likely to face severe injury at work and suffer chronic illnesses ranging from hypertension to sterility, acute problems like kidney infections and heat stroke, and infectious diseases like tuberculosis and HIV. They are generally excluded from labor laws and struggle to unionize. They can barely access social services, even those specifically designed to help them, and they are overwhelmingly unlikely to have insurance. These effects are generally worse for indigenous workers than mestizo ones.
By specifically listing farm workers’ long-term health problems, Holmes shows that structural and symbolic violence are real, concrete problems, not just abstract theoretical concepts. Notably, farmworkers don’t just experience negative health effects because of their jobs—they also suffer because of the broader social hierarchy in U.S. society, which denies them access to services and protections which are considered basic rights for U.S. citizens. Therefore, it’s not enough to change the racial-ethnic labor hierarchy at workplaces like the Tanaka Brothers Farm; rather, truly improving farmworkers’ lives requires changing the hierarchy in society as a whole.
Themes
Bernardo and the Damage of Torture. Holmes introduces Bernardo, a Triqui man who received U.S. residency in the 1980s. He now divides his time between work in Alaska and home in Oaxaca. Holmes first met Bernardo after driving 3,000 miles from Washington to Oaxaca with his relatives. Bernardo has left his hometown, San Pedro, because of a long conflict between the government and an armed Indigenous militia. Bernardo tells Holmes that many of his acquaintances were killed in San Pedro and he was too afraid to leave his home at night.
Unlike most of the Triqui migrants Holmes meets, Bernardo legally resides in the U.S. In fact, the 1980s residency program shows how U.S. immigration policy has become stricter and more antagonistic towards immigrants over time. However, even with his residency, Bernardo chooses to return home to Oaxaca as much as possible—like most Triquis, he doesn’t want to build a home in the U.S., but rather just make enough money to build himself a home back in Mexico. The violence he witnesses in San Pedro is really the product of a centuries-long conflict between Mexico’s Indigenous people and the people who have sought to control them and take their land: Spanish settlers and their descendants. This shows that the social forces and hierarchies that cause widespread suffering often operate on a grand historical scale, for instance over the course of centuries.
Themes
Bernardo also tells Holmes that he’s had a horrible stomachache for eight years straight. It sometimes improves with injections from the doctor, but in general it hurts so much that he struggles to eat and is losing weight. He initially blames this on having worked constantly his whole life, then adds that the federal police kidnapped him eight years before, beat him mercilessly, left him without food for days, and then locked him in prison for several months.
Bernardo’s stomachache is also a clear example of structural violence, but it’s not an obvious result of farmwork, unlike Abelino’s and Crescencio’s pains. Rather, in his explanation, Bernardo connects economic and political forces (his lifetime of hard work and his torture at the hands of the police). This reminds readers that migrants like the Triquis face multiple overlapping forms of hierarchy and violence, at once social, political, and economic.
Themes
Holmes explains that Bernardo’s suffering is also the result of structural violence: global economic policies impoverished Oaxacans and led to the local conflict over land, and then the U.S. funded the Mexican police in order to help them repress poor Indigenous people’s movements.
While global forces are responsible for Oaxacans’ poverty, these global forces aren’t some abstract or intangible concept: rather, they’re specific policies that created political and economic advantages for some people at the expense of others. In Bernardo’s case, the culprit was specifically U.S. policy. This makes it all the more ironic that U.S. immigration policies now prevent people like him from gaining legal residency in the U.S.
Themes
The Impossibly Heavy Statue. Holmes retells the Triqui people’s origin story: a family got kicked off their native land and had to carry a heavy statue of Jesus to a new place, where they briefly settled but were kicked out again. This process repeated many times, until the family got to the mountains of Oaxaca, where little grows. Of course, this is similar to how Triqui people frequently migrate to flee violence and make a living today.
Structural violence is central to Triqui people’s long-term history and ethnic identity: they have always been displaced and oppressed by other, more powerful groups. Their origin story also breaks conventional assumptions about migration—namely, that people originate in one place and then leave that place for another. Rather, Triqui people have always been on the move and been treated as unwelcome everywhere they have gone.
Themes
Holmes views the pervasive violence among Triqui communities as the indirect product or “mirror image of” all the violence they have suffered. This includes violent armed conflicts as well as structural violence, like the implosion of Oaxaca’s rural economy due to economic polices and the ethnic-citizenship hierarchy of U.S. agriculture. Symbolic violence also plays an important role by normalizing structural violence and also directly compounding the suffering of Triqui people like Crescencio. The healthcare system, the subject of Holmes’s next chapter, also plays a key part in this structural and symbolic violence.
Holmes does not try to minimize or excuse the Triqui people’s violence: rather, he places it in a wider historical context in order to show how larger social and political forces created the conditions for it to spread. In other words, he shows how structural violence begets further violence and asks what it would take to break this cycle. Of course, this cycle is similar to the way that structural violence justifies itself with symbolic violence and thereby calls for more structural violence.
Themes
