Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Themes

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies focuses on a group of Indigenous Triqui families who migrate seasonally from their homes in Oaxaca, Mexico, to do the backbreaking work of picking strawberries at the Tanaka Brothers Farm in the United States. Author Seth Holmes, a physician and anthropologist, spends 18 months living and working alongside these families to investigate the connections between social inequality, physical suffering, and public policy in the United States. Through his research, Holmes…

It’s easy to blame farm management for exploitative working conditions, patients’ poor health choices for their chronic pain, and migrant workers’ greed and impatience for their decision to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. However, when author and physician-anthropologist Seth Holmes actually studies these issues, he realizes that global economic pressures—not individual choices—are actually responsible for them. Because most public conversations about agriculture, medicine, and immigration view individual decisions in a vacuum, without considering these structural…

As a physician, author Seth Holmes is horrified to see Triqui migrant workers’ health complaints ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed outright when they seek medical care in the United States. Based on the experiences of three men whose medical treatments he observes—Abelino, Crescencio, and Bernardo—Holmes shows that doctors and nurses consistently blame migrant workers for their own pain rather than recognizing the external factors that cause it. As a result, these doctors…

In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes confronts seemingly insurmountable problems in the U.S.: a globalizing agriculture industry, the broken healthcare and immigration systems, and a pervasive racial-ethnic social hierarchy. At the end of his book, he admits that it’s difficult for individuals to see how they can help reform these vast social structures. Scholars like Holmes strive to explain social suffering and represent oppressed groups, like undocumented immigrants, in a positive light—but many…