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

Possibilities for Hope and Change

Holmes’s conclusion offers hope for the future. He calls on scholars to be attentive to opportunities to enact change, pointing to symbolic violence as a key path forward. This change can’t come through education alone. Rather, change requires a radical transformation of the conditions that produce particular dispositions. Social structures, the bodily dispositions they produce, and the symbolic structures that reinforce them are strongly interconnected. Thus, changes in social structures, such as new immigration and labor policies, can create new bodily dispositions and symbols, including new metaphors, stereotypes, and connotations related to migrants. In turn, these developments can lead to changes in actions and social structures themselves. The role of scholars isn’t just to theorize and do research. Holmes urges scholars to change perceptions and the inequalities they maintain by joining with others “in a broad effort to denaturalize social inequalities, uncovering linkages between symbolic violence and suffering” (191). His book denaturalizes ethnic and citizenship inequities in farm labor, health disparities in migrant clinics, and racialized inequality in American society. Exploring how symbolic violence legitimizes and reinforces dangerous conditions on the US-Mexico border is key to demilitarizing the border and imagining more effective healthcare. To this end, Holmes recommends incorporating more social structural analysis in medical training to minimize the writing off of entire social groups.

Im/Migration Studies, Binaries, and Meanings

This section calls attention to the ways that language can reinforce inequality. For example, the words immigration and migration are widely understood to refer to voluntary movement. However, Holmes’s research shows that Triqui migrants are forced to leave their homelands to survive. The term migrant, then, erases complex, international structures of inequality. Wealthy Mexicans who move to the US for work are generally called “international businesspeople” or “diasporic people,” not migrants. Other terms used in US agricultural communities have class connotations. The word “farmworker” should apply to everyone who works on a farm, including owners, managers, checkers, and crew bosses. However, it refers solely to migrant pickers. Tellingly, white teenagers who pick fruit are never called farmworkers. At Tanaka farm, these workers are instead called “the White crew” or “the teen crew.” The media often refers to undocumented migrants as “illegal aliens”—a term that has negative connotations. According to Washington State’s division chief of Border Patrol, most undocumented migrants obey traffic laws, pay their taxes, and avoid activities that draw attention from law enforcement. The term “illegal” is thus inaccurate and inflammatory. The term “alien” is also negative because it connotes difference and triggers fear.

The War of Positions Through Words

This section approaches the plight of Triqui migrants through Antonio Gramsci’s work on hegemony, or societal domination. According to Gramsci, hegemony occurs when a dominant class controls the means of production. Hegemony exists with the consent of those who are dominated, even though it goes against their economic and social interests. Hegemony and consent, however, are never total. Struggles exist over economic and symbolic structures, such as ownership, regulation, redistribution, and representation.

Gramsci identifies two ways of achieving societal control. The first is through military domination. The second entails a “war of position,” or “the ongoing struggle over meanings and cultural forms, which in turn affect political and economic structures” (189). The connotations and meanings of the term “illegal alien,” for example, produce fear and justify the exclusion of undocumented migrants from healthcare and other social services. This representation of migrant workers has resulted in legal and material hardships, such as California’s Proposition 187, which restricted access to social services for undocumented workers by declaring that residents of the state had experienced injury and damage at their hands.

Pragmatic Solidarity and Beyond on the Farm

Holmes promotes practicing pragmatic solidarity—that is, joining in the struggles of oppressed people in practical ways. Examples of pragmatic solidarity on farms include explicitly including migrant pickers in English classes and developing fairer hiring and advancement practices. Off the farm, pragmatic solidarity might include organizing events that bring different members of communities together to foster empathy. In addition, reporters might problematize the use of harmful terms, such as “illegal alien,” in their articles.

Critical Public Health and Liberation Medicine

Holmes recommends changing how medicine is taught and practiced. Attending to social structural analysis alongside the biological and psychological aspects of health would improve migrant healthcare. As the cases of Abelino, Crescencio, and Bernardo demonstrate, ignoring the socioeconomic and political causes of illness leads to ineffective or, worse, injurious healthcare. Adding social structural analysis to health education would help health workers better understand disease distribution and improve patient treatment. In addition, economic changes are necessary to improve the American healthcare system. Holmes points to studies showing that the US spends more on healthcare per capita than all other postindustrial countries. Wealthy people without preexisting conditions have access to quality healthcare. By contrast, the poor and sick struggle to afford treatment. Holmes advocates moving toward a system of universal healthcare and identifies the Affordable Care Act of 2010 as a promising step in establishing a fairer and more efficient single-payer system.

Solidarity from Society to Globe

Holmes’s book concludes with a call to action. He recommends that consumers seek out products from farms with a record of treating their workers fairly. He urges lobbying for immigration reform, fairer border policies, and access to educational and social programs for undocumented workers. Other forms of involvement include supporting organizations that help migrants cross the border safely and groups that lobby for migrant healthcare. Emphasizing that US society benefits from migrant workers but gives them little in return, Holmes suggests offering undocumented workers temporary residency or a path to citizenship. More broadly, he wants communities to advocate for greater equitability in global economies to prevent the poverty that fuels migration in the first place—and to lobby for the reform of International organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Supporting local producers rather than multinational corporations can help. Preventing forced migration—and the suffering it engenders—demands forming broad coalitions dedicated to creating a more equitable global economy.