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

Seth M. Holmes

nov 2023 · Univ of California Press

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With a new preface and a new epilogue co-written with Jorge Ramirez-Lopez, this updated edition of 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.

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Seth M. Holmes is an anthropologist and medical doctor, Chancellor’s Professor at UC Berkeley, Founder of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in medical anthropology, ICREA Researcher at the University of Barcelona, and recipient of a European Research Council Award for the project FOODCIRCUITS. Philippe Bourgois is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jorge Ramirez-Lopez (Triqui/Putleco) is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA in the American Indian Studies Center. He writes about Indigenous migration, social movements, culture, and politics.