Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013)

In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes uses ethnographic detail to explain how social processes naturalize structural violence in the U.S./Mexico migrant labor system. In essence, the book serves as an “ethnographic witness” to how racism and the neoliberal global economy undergird the everyday suffering of Mexican migrants. Holmes’ book is the result of five years of ethnographic research among the Triqui people of Oaxaca, Mexico. During this time, Holmes lived with Triqui indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca, accompanied migrants during their illegal border crossing through the Arizona desert, and was jailed with his informants. In the United States, he planted and harvested corn, and picked strawberries alongside Triqui migrants. As a medical anthropologist and physician, Holmes observed patient-physician interactions in both Mexico and the U.S., thus providing new insights for improving health care delivery to the most vulnerable. Holmes is an engaged intellectual who frames his argument in human terms in order to transform public debate about health and migration