Anthropologist Seth Holmes traveled to Mexico and spent time with Triqui Mexicans that needed to risk their lives and cross the border to find work. Holmes wrote the book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies based on his experiences crossing the border and working with them. What he observed was that the Mexican workers, specifically the Triqui and Mixtec, experienced structural violence and were given insufficient work. Because they were Mexicans, they were not treated as the rest of the workers were and thus were stuck in a loop of crossing the border to work horrible jobs and then going home only to return the next summer. Holmes saw that this affected all aspects of their lives. Throughout American fruit farms and even migrant villages in Mexico, prevalent structural violence creates negative effects in health, reputation, and wages in migrant groups.

For migrant farmers like the Triqui people from poor villages in Mexico, structural violence plays a huge part in their health. On the Tanaka farms in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Mixtec and Triqui migrants are given the most labor-intensive jobs. They crouch on the ground picking berries for hours in the scorching heat with minimal breaks every day because they are not seen as worthy enough to take other jobs that white and Latino people are given. They also are under pressure to pick the minimum berry weight every day which intensifies their work. The author, Seth Holmes, picked alongside the other pickers once or twice a week and said he “experienced gastritis, headaches, and knee, back, and hip pain for days afterward” (Holmes 2013, 74). If that is what he experienced without even picking the minimum weight, the suffering of the Mexican pickers must have been magnified.

The effects of these grueling working conditions on the pickers’ health are severe. One example is Abelino who injured his knee while picking. Abelino knew he could not afford to leave work so he kept picking, but had to stop and see doctors after the pain increased. He went to several different doctors who all told him there was nothing wrong with his knee, but also who did not care to get a translator to understand him or spend much time with him to figure out his pain. It is a common claim that “doctors don’t know anything” because of this. Abelino even tried to get worker’s compensation but the farm sent in the wrong records so he did not receive much help. Even though he was still in pain after being supposedly treated, he returned to work at the Tanaka farm because he needed to make more money, while Holmes recalled that “to improve the likelihood of survival of his family and to continue working toward “the goal of putting a roof on his house in San Miguel, he again attempted to pick” (Holmes 2013, 95). Because the structural violence in the farms prevented him from possessing an easier job that paid him more, he had no other options.

Structural violence also affects the Triqui and Mixtec Mexicans’ reputations. Mexican farmers that migrate every year to American farms are treated incredibly poor and are given the lowest jobs. Because they have to work so hard at such long hours, they do not have time to take care of themselves or do things like take English classes. Because of this they are perceived as dirty and lazy and are looked down upon. One of the white California residents Holmes interviewed negatively remarked, “But these wetbacks—what I still call them; now they’re “migrants”—they come into a beautiful settlement and they tear it up drunk, drinking, and then they want another one” (Holmes 2013, 164). Neighboring communities even think the Mexican pickers are dirty drunks that party until four in the morning, but the noise they hear is the farmers getting ready and leaving for a full day of work.

The migrant Mexicans feel the effects of these judgements. Because their reputations are so poor, they are often treated poorly in stores, at doctors’ offices, and in public and are usually dismissed. An example is when one of the Triqui pickers went to the store with Holmes and asked a question to one of the store workers. The worker dismissed him, but took kindly to Holmes and directed him in the right direction. Their reputations are also poor back in Mexico. Migrants that come originally from San Miguel are seen as dirty, violent, and ungrateful. There is a Centro de Salud in San Miguel for its residents that is not very effective. Holmes spent time with and interviewed some of the nurses that worked in the poorly run Centro de Salud and their comments about the San Miguel residents were not nice. Holmes reported that one of the nurses complained that “I don’t like the land or the climate; the people are even worse! The people here are lazy, dirty, ignorant, mean gossipers” (Holmes 2013, 148). She did not spend time with the people in their homes to see what living conditions they experience and instead chose to judge the people on what she saw on the surface, which further damaged their reputations.

Structural violence further creates negative impacts on workers’ pay. Holmes describes the level of hierarchy throughout the farm, and how one’s position ultimately impacts how much the worker is paid. He emphasizes that “opportunities decrease and anxieties accumulate as one moves down the pecking order,” a continuum that obviously perpetuates the poor Triqui workers down the line (Holmes 2013, 83). Structural violence creates this continuum because it forces workers to work disproportionate hours compared to their supervisors, checkers, and executives, and still get paid less. Holmes dissects the financial status of each of the working groups and finds that while executives and managers are relatively financially secure, and the administrative staff and checkers are paid minimum wage, “pickers are paid piecemeal and live in poor conditions” (Holmes 2013, 84). Further, even among pickers, there is a wage discrepancy based on which fruits are picked. For example, pickers in strawberries and blueberries earn less, and are more likely to miss the minimum weight and get fired than those in apples.

Holmes further uses the structural violence continuum to describe how these workers do not have the opportunity to move up in hierarchy. He states that “ethnicity serves as a camouflage for a social Darwinist perception of indigeneity versus civilization” (Holmes 2013, 84). The Triqui migrant farmers are positioned opposite the Anglo- and Japanese Americans on the civilization spectrum. And because “the more civilized one is perceived to be, the better one’s job” is, the Triqui are denied opportunities to become checkers, managers, and executives, which further stunts their economic status (Holmes 2013, 95). The structural violence continuum entraps these migrant farmers to their impoverished state, all the while dehumanizing them through derogatory attitudes from superiors and health problems from hard labor.

Lupe Flores from Allegra Laboratory frames Holmes’s experience with the farmers to be a critical example of the structural violence he writes about. He states that, “even as he tried to experience the suffering of his informants through multi-sited ethnography, he is always pushed back to his social position as an educated, white man enjoying more dignity and respect than his migrant farmworker informants.” Flores mournfully agrees that the road to “pragmatic solidarity” seems to be far out of reach when the migrant workers continually face “nightmarish everyday violences.” Holmes addresses his privilege in his book and even admits to using a “local private gym to ease the aches, all too aware of the inequality of having access to such amenities” (Holmes 2013, 88). Another review from the New York Journal of Books highlights how Holmes sheds light on an invisible working class, which he aimed to do through deconstructing the cultural and experimental “chasms that warp perceptions of working conditions and related injuries.” These two reviews illustrate how effective Holmes was in his mission to expose the story of the migrant farmworkers, and the flaws of the American dream.

Holmes successfully guides his audience through testimonies from both migrant farmworkers and other anthropologists alike, and builds an argument on his empirical findings about the normative structural violence in American farms. Throughout the duration of the book, he analyzes how the violence continuum disproportionately affects migrants in their health, reputation, and pay. This structural violence ensnares workers in their poor living conditions and creates unequal, yet normalized, standards based on prejudice. Seth Holmes’s book clarified what migrant families specifically go through, and helped us empathize with these workers - a considerably important factor in our current political climate.