Paul Farmer and João Biehl praise ‘Fresh Fruits, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States’

Dr Seth Holmes' new book 'Fresh Fruits, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States’ comes out on June 10th with the California Series in Public Anthropology of the University of California Press.The book has already received excellent reviews by, among others, Paul Farmer, João Biehl, Leo Chavez, and Dolores Huerta. This is what Paul Farmer, Co-founder of Partners In Health and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, says about 'Fresh Fruits, Broken Bodies': "Seth Holmes offers up an important and captivating new ethnography, linking the structural violence inherent in the migrant labor system in the United States to the social processes by which it becomes normalized. Drawing on five years of fieldwork among the Triqui people from Oaxaca, Mexico, Holmes investigates local understandings of suffering and illness, casting into relief stereotypes and prejudices that he ties to the transnational labor that puts cheap food on American tables. Throughout this compelling volume, Holmes considers ways of engaging migrant farm workers and allies that might help disrupt exploitation that reaches across national boundaries and can too often be hidden away. This book is a gripping read not only for cultural and medical anthropologists, immigration and ethnic studies students, students of labor and agriculture, physicians and public health professionals, but also anyone interested in the lives and well-being of the people providing them cheap, fresh fruit." João Biehl, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton and author of 'Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment' writes that 'Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies' is a "powerful exposé of the social and political realities that mark the bodies and limit the life prospects of Mexican migrant farmworkers in the world’s richest economy. An absorbing read and a resolute call for just labor relations and health equity as key to a common and sustainable human development.” 'Fresh fruit, Broken Bodies' by Seth Holmes comes out on June 10th and can be preordered here.