Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes
1 Rating(s)
List: $16.99 | Sale: $11.89
Club: $8.49

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Author: Seth Holmes

Narrator: Paul Costanzo

Unabridged: 8 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/02/2016

Synopsis

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth M. Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes's material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This "embodied anthropology" deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequalities and suffering come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care.

About Seth Holmes

Seth M. Holmes, PhD, MD, is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on social hierarchies and health inequalities. His book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is an ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants. Based on five years of research in the field, traveling with and working with migrants, his book uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Dr. Holmes is Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jessaka on May 02, 2023

This has been a subject that has been of interest to me in recent years, especially since reading online about the horrors that Hispanics go through in the fields. I have even read a few other books on this subject, but no book has really gone into it as deeply as this one or at least none that I ju......more

Goodreads review by Marilyn on July 07, 2018

Those of us who eat fruit need to read this book. Those of us who have driven by strawberry fields without asking ourselves about what it's like to pick strawberries all day need to read it. Those of us who wonder why migrant workers risk their lives to live in crowded, squalid housing, work at back......more

Goodreads review by Dragoș on February 09, 2015

In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Seth M. Holmes uses his extensive fieldwork amidst the Triqui people to paint us a rather depressing picture of the US agricultural sector and US border policy in general. Trained as both an MD and an anthropologist Holmes gives us a dual perspective that blends medical......more

Goodreads review by rachel on April 09, 2025

read this for my anthropology: food & culture class. both a horrifying and necessary look into the lives of undocumented migrants and their systematic exploitation within the agriculture industry. i work at a very progressive, pro-immigrant, human-rights-advocate college; i’ve likely worked personal......more

Goodreads review by Casey on January 09, 2023

Not to compare apples with oranges -- after all, comparison is the thief of joy -- but in the small and jostled arena containing medical anthropology, thick ethnographies, and neoliberal Reaganomics, some amount of comparison is largely inevitable. And so, I tried to read Dr. Seth Holmes' Fresh Frui......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List