Fresh Fruit Broken Bodies Summary

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is an ethnography written by Seth Holmes which not only describes observations, but tells a story of the author living alongside the migrant workers whose lives he was observing. Seth Holmes is a medical anthropologist with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. His education and background were a big influence and support for him to go on a journey for his thesis. To begin this journey, Holmes headed south to San Miguel, Mexico where he joined a group of Mexican Migrants crossing the border to begin work in the West Coast. Through participant observation, where he included himself in long-term immersion in everyday lives and practices of the people from Southern Mexico for 18 months, Holmes went beyond just doing work for
This is where his expertise as a medical anthropologist became essential. He observed that the workers were constantly surrounded by stressful, physically strenuous, and humiliating jobs. The work never ended. It went on for seven days a week exposed to pesticides and never allowed breaks. With his background in medicine, he could see these situations as harmful and pursued further understanding about how they could receive care for these issues. While he was meant to be living alongside the other workers and gaining that first-hand knowledge, he also had to use his cultural capital and privilege to interview others from a different level in the hierarchy of work. He could begin to make sense of the immense health problems while digging deeper into the roots of why those health problems aren’t being addressed by migrant workers. He acknowledged that this exploration was only something he could do because of his privilege and knew that he was seen as a “doctor” or “anthropologist” and not actually one of the workers, even though he was doing all the exact behaviors the other workers
Of course it is good text for economic and medical anthropologists who will continue these types of studies. Going beyond them, it is a good text for politicians, who will eventually be changing or impacting the policy regarding immigration and could do that better after understanding migrant experience, American public, who Holmes’ wants to see migrant workers as skilled individuals, and health care professionals, who must notice the issues of prejudice and go forward treating people