Perspective on "Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States," by Seth Holmes.

Seth Holmes composed a wonderful book based on his ethnographic field work. His vignettes were memorable and personal from his arrest by the Border Patrol, to his realizations of the social capital his skin color afforded him. He also intertwined several theoretical concepts throughout the book to break down the social/structural inequalities his Triqui friends experienced crossing the border, working on the farm, and through dealing with the medical systems. Holmes introduced the concept of the violence continuum to illustrate their suffering, and discussed how the clinical gaze can be dehumanizing; both ideas are quite interesting and dissect what is happening with precision in the lives of Triqui migrant farm workers.

The Violence Continuum is defined by Holmes through the minds of Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes. From their collective perspectives, violence is something that continues on a loop with multiple sources to keep it going over time that feed back into one another. “Under the violence continuum we include therefore all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation and reification, which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others” (Bourgois, Scheper-Hughes 2004: 21). By their definition, the clinical gaze is a part of the continuum, which I will elaborate on shortly.

According to Holmes, the continuum contains four separate sources of violence: political, structural, symbolic and everyday violence (Holmes 2013:89-90). Political violence is “targeted physical violence and terror administered by authorities and those opposing them” (Holmes 2013: 89). When Holmes was talking to Bernardo about health issues, he eventually revealed that he had been tortured and repeatedly punched in the stomach by Mexican police, which was probably more likely to be the cause of his chronic stomach pain than just doing manual labor over a long period of time (although I’m sure that could have severely aggravated his condition) (Holmes 2013:106). In this case, political unrest led to authorities inflicting physical violence on Bernardo, a citizen in the lower levels of the social hierarchy.

Following political violence, structural violence is “manifested as social inequalities and hierarchies along the lines of class, race, gender and sexuality” (Holmes 2013: 89). Chapter 3 is a wonderful breakdown of the Tanaka farm hierarchy and the barriers erected to keep Triqui migrant workers on the ‘lowest rung of the ladder.’ Available jobs are segregated by several factors such as race in relation to white teenagers vs Mestizo Mexicans vs Indigenous Mexicans; language ability in reference to higher level positions and the requirements for English, bilingual or Spanish speakers; and gender in terms of the fact that “the only people promoted above the position accorded to their race and citizenship are male” (Holmes 2013: 85). All of these obstacles combine to shore up the inequality Triqui workers face every picking season. Farming economies are part of the fluctuating agribusiness sector so “everyone on the Tanaka farm is “structurally vulnerable;” “the higher one is positioned in the structure, the more control one has over time,” and “the lower one is located in the hierarchy, the less one is paid and the more structurally vulnerable one is” (Holmes 2013: 83). Therefore, as each season passed and a new one began, even with hard work, it was next to impossible for the Triqui field workers to advance in general.

As a result, symbolic violence is manifested which is the “naturalization, including internalization, of social asymmetries” (Holmes 2013: 157). Personally, I believe this to be the most dangerous form of violence because if people come to accept the physical, structural, and everyday violence that is happening to them as natural, they are less likely to advocate for change; they will never reach their full potential. Holmes points out that both the dominant and dominated are victims (Holmes 2013: 157). I agree to an extent. Having your perceptions of others shaped in a negative way, even if it reinforces your ‘superiority’ (white privilege), can still be very damaging. However, the ‘others’ being perceived as negative will bear the brunt of the negativity in the long run. Holmes also notes that Bourdieu discussed symbolic violence in terms of men and women: the naturalization of high/low dichotomies places one group of people (men) in a superior position and convinces the inferior group (women) that they are indeed weaker, slower, etc. (Holmes 2013: 157). When the model shaping your perceptions of society tells you that you’re not as good as someone else, and it’s consistently reinforced by structural, every day or political violence, over time you’re likely to accept it as truth.

Finally, everyday violence is the “normalized micro-interactional expressions of violence on domestic, delinquent, and institutional levels that produce a common sense of violence and humiliation.” (Holmes 2013: 89-90). Holmes provides an in depth look at the way Triqui workers are treated on the Tanaka farm. Their interactions with supervising staff are primarily composed of microagressions that tear down their personhood a little bit at a time. Workers arrive at a certain time to begin picking, yet their time cards are marked incorrectly which robs them of at least 30 minutes of pay, then while checkers weigh their buckets, on average 4 lbs. worth of berries are taken out of their paycheck for ‘”standardization purposes” (Holmes 2013: 68-69). “If a person has 34 pounds of strawberries, 4 pounds are stolen because the checker marks only 30” (Holmes 2013: 76). On top of earned pay being stolen, Triqui pickers are shouted at by supervisors and called derogatory names; “they scream at us and call us dumb donkeys or dogs…it’s ugly how they treat us” (Holmes 2013: 77). Violent acts also target the victim’s emotional and mental state, breaking down their mental faculties at the same time that their bodies are assaulted. “Violence…includes assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim” (Bourgois, Scheper-Hughes 2004: 1).

All of these forms of violence (political, structural, symbolic and everyday) work together to form a continuum that preys on groups of certain people, and keeps them subjugated in a disadvantaged state of existence.. Political violence inflicts direct physical trauma, then structural violence creates and maintains social inequalities that prevent people from healing from the physical trauma, while symbolic violence causes them to accept violence as a normative part of their existence, which is reinforced by everyday violence through microagressions that remind them of their subordinate position in society. The process does seem like it could lend itself to being a cycle, however people often experience more than one form of violence at a time, therefore the concept of a continuum makes more sense. Holmes stated that “much of the suffering of Triqui migrant laborers can be understood as a direct embodiment of the violence continuum” (Holmes 2013: 90) and I would have to agree.

As far as my own personal experiences with the violence continuum, or how it has played out in ‘real life,’ it’s hard to think of a concrete example that fits all four aspects, however as a black woman I have definitely experienced everyday violence in terms of microagressions. My mother and I were in a trinket store looking at the little statues on the shelves, and an older white man came up and asked us if we needed help. My mother said no and we continued to look around. Despite his dismissal, he remained standing at the end of each aisle watching us walk around the store. When we left I told my mother that he seemed like a helpful nice man, then she said something that woke me up: “he wasn’t standing there to be nice, he was following us around the store because he thought we were going to steal something.” I still remember that to this day. My mother didn’t have to blatantly say that it was because we were black, but I knew that was the reason we received so much attention in the store. “The everyday violence of…humiliation that destroys socially marginalized humans with even greater frequency are usually invisible or misrecognized” (Bourgois, Scheper-Hughes 2004:2). I didn’t recognize it at first, but my mother did, and although I lost a little innocence that day, I’m grateful that she pointed it out to me.

Another of Holmes’ interesting concepts is the clinical gaze, which was presented as a separate occurrence, however it seems as though it could be a subset of the violence continuum. The gaze as described by Foucault is the evolution of the way doctors interact with their patients. The line of questioning during medical exams changed from asking the person “what is the matter with you” to “where does it hurt?” (Holmes 2013; 114-115). Patients have been slowly replaced by new medical technologies as active participants in their own care. Now medical professionals practicing biomedicine don’t need to trust and depend on the illness narratives of patients; they can x-ray and dissect them to find out where the malady is without validating their experience of the illness. Holmes picked in the fields with his Triqui friends a few times a week and began experiencing similar health issues after a limited/privileged amount of time. “During my fieldwork I picked once or twice a week and experienced gastritis, headaches, and knee, back, and hip pain for days afterward. I wrote in a field note after picking, ‘it honestly felt like pure torture’” (Holmes 2013: 74). Because of their extended work in the fields several of his friends acquired lasting injuries, and his attempts to help them navigate the effects of the gaze were frustrating to say the least.

Abelino experienced extreme knee pain after picking for multiple seasons in a crouched position with his knees and back bent for hours at a time with no breaks. Holmes worked with him to remedy the injury, however ultimately they were unsuccessful in completely remedying Abelino’s problem. From the beginning, physicians looked past his personhood and “valued their observations and biotechnical testing of the patient’s body over the words of the patient” (Holmes 2013: 125). Abelino asked for an injection to reduce the pain in his knee, a common treatment used in his hometown, however the first doctor refused and sent him to a physical therapist instead, negating the patient’s wishes and his personal experience/expertise of what works best for his body (Holmes 2013: 117). Then, one of the doctors went so far as to blame Abelino for his condition: “the doctor explained the cause of injury in the chart as ‘while picking, twisted his right knee’” (Holmes 2013: 118). Not only did the doctor not ease Abelino’s symptoms of pain, but he blamed him for his suffering, invalidating his skills and abilities as a worker. He became a depersonalized entity, and as such his illness narrative was not listened to or respected as valid, not to mention the fact that he became the cause of his own suffering in the eyes of the gaze. Structural inequalities that prevented him from getting a different position on the Tanaka farm, or finding a job elsewhere where never even considered to be factors.

In terms of a real life example, I can’t say that I have experienced dissection or dehumanization to that extent, however last summer I was hospitalized overnight for dehydration, and a few other things. I remember being asked where it hurt, x-rayed, poked and prodded, and stuffed in MRI machines. I didn’t have to deal with language barrier issues or such detrimental structural inequalities that Triqui workers like Abelino face, and I’ll never presume to know what suffering at that level is like. However, by the time I left the hospital I remember feeling like someone’s science experiment gone wrong. I had become a problem to solve, a body with malfunctioning parts. My experience with doctors lately has been better. The nurse I used to see at Texas State definitely employed witnessing, or “treating patients as whole persons” (Holmes 2013: 116), which made going to see her a more positive experience. However, if my ‘middle class status’ were removed along with adding in more inequalities and a language barrier, I’m not sure that our visits would be as pleasant or effective.

Overall, Holmes utilizes the violence continuum and the clinical gaze theories to connect, assess and explain how and why suffering manifests in Triqui migrant worker’s lives. The book was excellent, and he did a wonderful job. Hopefully, the people they come into contact with through work, the healthcare system and other sectors that are a part of their daily lives will take this book as a wake-up call to change the way they negatively affect migrant worker’s bodies, and personhoods.

Holmes, Seth M.

2013 Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies : Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe I. Bourgois

2004 Violence in War and Peace.Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2004.