Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Quotes

“The pressures of the current neoliberal capitalist system of health care and its financing force health professionals into a double bind. Either they spend the time and energy necessary to listen to and fully treat the patient and put their job and clinic in economic jeopardy, or they move at a frenetic pace to keep their practice afloat and only partially attend to the patient in their presence.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“... it is estimated that approximately 95 percent of agricultural workers in the United States were born in Mexico, 52 percent of them unauthorized”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“the reality of survival for my Triqui companions shows that it would be riskier to stay in San Miguel without work, money, food, or education. In this original context, crossing the border is not a choice to engage in a risk behavior but rather a process necessary to survive, to make life less risky.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 27)

“The farther down the ladder from Anglo-American U.S. citizen to undocumented indigenous Mexican one is positioned, the more degrading the treatment by supervisors, the more physically taxing the work, the more exposure to weather and pesticides, the more fear of the government, the less comfortable one's housing, and the less control over one's own time. Of course, the people on every level of the hierarchy suffer. Yet suffering is also roughly cumulative from top to bottom.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“By structural violence, I mean the violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, has injurious effects on bodies similar to the violence of a stabbing or shooting. This is what the English working men described by Friedrich Engels called 'social murder'. Much of the structural violence is organized along the fault lines of class, race, citizenship, gender, and sexuality. (...) Symbolic violence works through the perceptions of the 'dominating' and the 'dominated' (in Bourdieu's words), while it tends to benefit those with more power. each group understands not only itself but also the other to belong naturally in their positions in the social hierarchy. (...) Structural violence - with its pernicious effects on health - and symbolic violence - with its subtle naturalization of inequalities on the farm, in the clinic, and in the media - form the nexus of violence and suffering through which the phenomenon of migrant labor in North America is produced.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“Adding social structural analysis to medical and public health education would move toward a more realistic and balanced version of the biopsychosocial model already explicitly claimed in contemporary health-professional training. More important, this would provide future physicians and public health professionals with the lenses to recognize the societal critiques available in sicknesses and their distributions. With such an awareness of the structurally violent social context of disease, health professionals could move effectively toward acknowledging, treating, and preventing suffering.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“Those at the top worry about market competition and the weather. The middle managers worry about these factors and about how they are treated by their bosses. The pickers worry about picking enough to make the minimum weight so as to avoid losing their jobs and their housing.”
― Seth M. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“Triqui and other Latin American native languages are commonly referred to as dialects. (...) Instead of understanding them as languages that were spoken in the area long before the Spanish conquest, calling them dialects implies that they developed as derivatives of the real language, Spanish. This misinterpretation supports the prevalent attitude that indigenous Mexicans are less important, even less Mexican , than mestizo Mexicans”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“On a subtler level, the structure of framework inheres an intimate and complex segregation, a 'conjugated oppression'. Philippe Bourgois coins this term in his analysis of a Central American banana plantation to show that ethnicity and class work together to produce an oppression experientially and materially different from that produced by either alone.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States