Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States Author: Seth Holmes Philippe Bourgois | Language: English | ISBN:
B00CM7A13U | Format: EPUB
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States Description
This book is an ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants. Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes’ material is visceral and powerful—for instance, he trekked with his informants illegally through the desert border into Arizona, where they were apprehended and jailed by the Border Patrol. After he was released from jail (and his companions were deported back to Mexico), Holmes interviewed Border Patrol agents, local residents, and armed vigilantes in the borderlands. He lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends. The result is a "thick description" that conveys the full measure of struggle, suffering, and resilience of these farmworkers.
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies weds the theoretical analysis of the anthropologist with the intimacy of the journalist to provide a compelling examination of structural and symbolic violence, medicalization, and the clinical gaze as they affect the experiences and perceptions of a vertical slice of indigenous Mexican migrant farmworkers, farm owners, doctors, and nurses. This reflexive, embodied anthropology deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which socially structured suffering comes to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care, especially through imputations of ethnic body difference. In the vehement debates on immigration reform and health reform, this book provides the necessary stories of real people and insights into our food system and health care system for us to move forward to fair policies and solutions.
- File Size: 6036 KB
- Print Length: 264 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 31, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00CM7A13U
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,475 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Emigration & Immigration - #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Labor & Industrial Relations - #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Labor & Industrial Relations
- #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Emigration & Immigration - #4
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Labor & Industrial Relations - #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Labor & Industrial Relations
Very few books I read ever get 5 stars. I only wish I could give a 5 start review, but I can't. I have read other first hand accounts of what Hispanics go through while working in the fields and spent my time writing a protest poem about it. This book goes deep into all the aspects of being a migrant farm worker today.
I have heard so many people complain that white people don't want to work in the fields because they are lazy and want welfare or Mexicans are taking away their jobs. I have heard my Mexican friends complain that white people quit within a week and can't do the work. And I have heard white people tell me that they worked in the fields when they were kids, well, only for a day, and it wasn't so bad.
Once you read this book you will see just how bad it is to work in the fields and how Hispanics are the new indentured servants. You will even learn that even Hispanics can't work past middle age in most cases.
By josey
I've not even finished reading this book yet, and I've already decided that this is one of the most important ethnographies ever written. It is theoretically rich, yet written in a way that is accessible to a broad audience. This ethnography has the potential to transform the way people think about immigration, forcing them to examine the global system that allows undocumented workers to be treated as subhuman.
By AnthroNerd
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