Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Social Suffering and the Violence Continuum

In this chapter, Holmes focuses on the suffering of Triqui migrants as part of a continuum of violence. Holmes begins with a detailed account of his personal suffering living and working alongside Triqui pickers:

I often felt sick to my stomach the night before picking, due to stress about picking the minimum weight. As I picked, my knees continually hurt […] My neck and back began to hurt by late morning. For two or three days after picking, I took ibuprofen and sometimes used the hot tub in a local private gym to ease the aches (88).

According to Holmes, the broken bodies of Triqui migrants exemplify “the structural violence of social hierarchies becoming embodied in the form of suffering and sickness” (89). The rundown shacks, harsh working conditions, and dangerous border crossings are “mechanisms through which structural violence produces suffering” (89). Drawing on Philippe Bourgois’s notion of violence as a continuum, Holmes argues that the violence Triqui migrants suffer isn’t just political but also structural and symbolic. Using strawberry pickers as exemplars, he posits causal links between different forms of violence, arguing that each enhances, conceals, perpetuates, and legitimizes the other to produce “everyday violence” (a concept he borrows from Nancy Scheper-Hughes). Holmes notes that strawberry pickers develop health problems that hinder their daily activities. He profiles three strawberry pickers—Abelino, Crescencio, and Bernardo—to highlight different aspects of the violence continuum: Abelino’s knee pain underscores physical and mental suffering, Crescencio’s headaches call attention to the impact of verbal and symbolic violence on the body, and Bernardo’s stomach aches highlight the impact of political and military violence on the body. In addition, these cases demonstrate how a primary form of violence can interact with other forms of violence on the continuum.

Abelino and the Pain of Picking

Holmes’s field notes document an interview with Abelino, a 35-year-old Triqui picker. Abelino left Oaxaca with his wife and four children to escape crushing poverty. He continued to suffer in the US due to the grueling work of picking, feeling deracinated, and being unable to send his children to school. Holmes references structures that spur migration out of Oaxaca to the US—notably, economic depression stemming from unfavorable international policies, such as NAFTA. According to Holmes, Abelino’s suffering can’t be separated from these structures.

Abelino described his suffering on the Tanaka farm: “‘You pick with your hands, bent over, kneeling […] Your back hurts; you get knee pains […] They don’t give lunch breaks. You have to work every day like that to make anything. You suffer a lot in work’” (93). Abelino experienced acute pain in his knee while picking one day. He saw four doctors, a physical therapist, and a Triqui healer before being diagnosed with patellar tendonitis (the chronic inflammation and deterioration of the tendon connecting the kneecap to the shin bone).

Holmes presents Abelino’s knee pain as a form of structural violence—that is, as resulting from discriminatory social and political structures: “[Abelino’s] pain was caused unequivocally by the fact that he, as an undocumented Triqui man, had been excluded by both international market inequalities and local discriminatory practices from all but one narrow and particularly traumatic labor position” (94). This position required Abelino to bend over and swivel back and forth between rows of strawberry bushes seven days a week. Hundreds of Triqui pickers suffer from tendonitis as well as back and hip pain. Compounding their physical suffering is the fact that they’ve been driven from their homes and forced to cross a dangerous border only to remain impoverished, passing their poverty on to their children. Abelino’s body, then, attests to many levels of structural violence.

Suffering the Hierarchy

Holmes presents the theme of suffering from the perspective of hierarchy. Citizenship and ethnicity closely correlate with the farm’s labor and housing hierarchies. Holmes focuses on the body to understand more fully the connections between citizenship, ethnicity, class, health, and sickness. By attending to different kinds of violence, Holmes sheds light on the various social forces that produce bodily suffering.

In US agriculture, the more Indigenous one looks, the more physical and psychological suffering one experiences: “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” (95). The point isn’t that people at the top of the hierarchy don’t experience suffering but simply to emphasize that suffering is greater at the bottom. Triqui pickers live in the coldest shacks, hold the most strenuous and humiliating jobs, and work without breaks seven days a week. Thus, they experience a disproportionate share of pain and illness.

Crescencio and the Anguish of Insult

This section describes Holmes’s encounters with Crescencio, a Triqui man who suffered from chronic, debilitating headaches. Holmes learned that Crescencio got headaches whenever supervisors mistreated him: “The most common triggers included being called ‘stupid Oaxacan’ or being told in a deprecating or angry manner to ‘hurry up’ when he was already picking as fast as possible” (97). Crescencio was concerned because his headaches made him angry and prone to violence. Medicines provided short-term relief, but the headaches always returned and became more frequent over time. Eventually, Crescencio could find relief only by drinking 20 to 24 beers, which allowed him to relax and wake up without pain.

Holmes draws connections between Crescencio’s suffering and various social and symbolic forces structuring his life. Social forces made him work and live in harsh conditions at the lowest rung of the labor hierarchy. Supervisors insulted him and made impossible demands, which resulted in headaches. Crescencio’s socially structured pain led him to be ill-tempered with his family and drove him to drink, making him embody the stereotype of the violent, alcohol-dependent Mexican migrant. The stereotype, then, legitimized the racist treatment he received on the farm. As Holmes observes, symbolic violence “works to make invisible the racism and xenophobia underlying the disrespect that [Crescencio] and other Mexican migrants are seen to deserve” (98).

Migrant Farmwork and Health Disparities in Context

In this section, Holmes contextualizes the ill health of migrant farmworkers relative to other social groups, claiming that health problems directly correlate with citizenship, ethnicity, and class. He uses data to support his conclusions. The average age of agricultural workers in the US is 29, yet studies show that these young men and women disproportionately suffer health problems. Not only are they sicker than others, but they receive lower-quality health care—and Oaxacans fare worse than other Latinos because of their limited professional, linguistic, and educational resources. Studies reveal that the physical and mental health of Mexican immigrants declines during the year after they enter the US. Those who are undocumented suffer the most because of an accumulation of stress due to their experiences at the border and their fear of deportation. A 2004 study reveals that migrant agricultural laborers from Mexico have a higher fatality rate than other workers—and have increased risks of nonfatal ailments such as heart disease and various types of cancer. Migrant workers are also more likely to suffer stillbirths and to have children with birth defects. Research shows that up to half of agricultural workers have symptoms linked to pesticide exposure. Most migrant workers live below the poverty line, which increases their rates of malnutrition, hypertension, diabetes, anxiety, dental problems, pulmonary disease, and other illnesses. Obstacles that prevent migrants from seeking treatment include their near-total exclusion from worker’s compensation programs, minimum wage and overtime pay, Social Security, and unemployment benefits programs. Agricultural workers live and work in subpar conditions—despite the Housing Act of 1949 and the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Laws in all but one state bar most migrant agricultural workers from collective bargaining. Their nomadic, interstate lives and undocumented status prevent most of them from qualifying for Medicaid and health insurance. As a result, migrant workers are less likely to seek preventive care. These statistics contradict the widespread notion that undocumented immigrants overburden the American healthcare system.

Bernardo and the Damage of Torture

Holmes’s third profile focuses on Bernardo, one of the first Triqui to come to Washington State to work in agriculture in the 1980s. After Bernardo became a legal US resident in 1986 under a federal program that granted amnesty to agricultural workers, Bernardo moved back to Oaxaca, traveling to Alaska for five months every year to work at a fish processing plant. Bernardo spoke to Holmes in his hometown of San Pedro about the violence he experienced at the hands of mestizos from a neighboring village. The tensions related mainly to political affiliation and land ownership. According to Bernardo, mestizos gang-raped and murdered a girl in his village and killed many others, including a teacher and the son of a politician. Bernardo and his family moved away from San Pedro to escape the violence. The family built a house and opened a small store in one of the rooms with the money Bernardo earned in the US.

Bernardo complained to Holmes about chronic stomach pain and a lack of appetite. His stomach problems were so severe that he lost weight every time he went to Alaska. Bernardo attributed his pain to working too much: “‘All my life I work a lot, and one gets tired, tired, and the body hurts. In ’laska, we work 16 hours, no! Seven days a week. No rest for 2 months’” (106). Bernardo began experiencing stomach pain when Mexican soldiers, who mistook him for a member of an Indigenous rights group, kidnapped and beat him: “‘The soldiers punched and kicked me many, many times. Punched like this [making a fist and punching into the air], here in my stomach. Ah! But many beatings [chingadazos] until there was blood all over’” (106). During his captivity, Bernardo was denied medical attention and food. He drank his own urine. As Holmes notes, Bernardo’s suffering stems directly from political and social forces. The global inequities produced by neoliberal capitalism fueled Mexico’s economic depression, which in turn resulted in local land wars and labor migration. Multinational commerce depends on the poor remaining poor, thereby promoting the suffering of marginalized people.

The Impossibly Heavy Statue

Holmes concludes the chapter with the origin story of the Triqui people. According to legend, a Triqui family was driven from various lands while carrying a heavy statue of Jesus before finally settling in San Miguel (or San Pedro, depending on the speaker). This origin story mirrors the history of the Triqui, who have repeatedly been pushed off their lands in Oaxaca.

The Triqui people have a history of conflict not only with outsiders but also within their community. Holmes understands this friction within the context of the violence continuum:

Triqui violence between political parties and neighboring towns can be seen as a mirror image of the violence they have experienced at the hands of the Mexican military and the unequal global market […] In a similar way, the oppression of the Triqui people by the Mexican government is sometimes justified with the trope of Triqui violence (109).

Triqui migrants have endured many forms of violence. Land wars and political violence pushed them into areas unconducive to farming. Neoliberal capitalism now compels them to migrate for work. American labor hierarchies, a form of structural violence based on citizenship and ethnicity, forces them to take dangerous, low-paying jobs that wreak havoc on their bodies. Abelino, Crescencio, and Bernardo experienced various forms of suffering, including the symbolic violence of being disrespected and insulted.