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

This anthropological research method relies on participant observation—that is, on the researcher engaging with the people and settings being studied. Historically, ethnographers viewed the researcher’s body as a detached tool for observation, separate from the mind, which recorded “pure data,” or “facts.” More recently, however, anthropologists have turned toward embodied ethnography, an approach that attends to the body of the researcher and uses bodily sensations as research tools to catalog and analyze experiences.

Scheper-Hughes coined this phrase, which Holmes defines as “the normalized micro-interactional expressions of violence on domestic, delinquent, and institutional levels that produce a common sense of violence and humiliation” (90). Holmes argues that differing forms of violence impacting migrant farmworkers—including structural and symbolic violence—enhance, perpetuate, legitimize, and conceal one another to produce everyday violence. In other words, forms of violence interact with others on the violence continuum, leading to normalized, everyday violence.

Fieldwork, or field research, is an immersive practice and a primary research method in the discipline of anthropology. The aim of fieldwork is to understand and analyze subjects by observing, recording, and participating in their daily behaviors and interactions. Holmes’s conducted fieldwork for this project on multiple sites, focusing on San Miguel, Oaxaca, Mexico as well as California’s Central Valley and the Skagit Valley of Washington State.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock advanced this idea in 1987, arguing that the body not only feels but thinks. The concept influenced Holmes’s embodied ethnography of Triqui migrants.

Enacted on January 1, 1994, this trade agreement between Mexico, the US, and Canada turned North America into a virtually tariff-free trade zone. Holmes argues that the negative economic impact of international policies like NAFTA on Indigenous communities in Mexico fueled migration to the US. NAFTA was replaced on July 1, 2020, by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Paul Stoller coined this term in 1997 to describe the incorporation of the senses into ethnographic research. The concept informed Holmes’s embodied approach to studying Triqui migrants.

Holmes defines this term, which he borrows from Bourgois, as “violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, has injurious effects on bodies similar to the violence of a stabbing or shooting” (43). Holmes demonstrates that structural violence in agricultural contexts is organized principally along race, ethnic, class, and citizenship lines. He argues that structural violence, in conjunction with other forms of violence, naturalizes inequities on US farms and has ill effects on the health of migrant farm workers.

Coined by Pierre Bourdieu, this term refers to the legitimation and internalization of hierarchy “exercised through cognition and misrecognition, knowledge and sentiment, with the unwitting consent of the dominated” (89). Holmes draws on the concept to analyze the suffering of Indigenous farm workers, who are perceived—and who often perceive themselves—as belonging naturally at the bottom of the social hierarchy.