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

Social Suffering and the Violence Continuum

In this chapter, Holmes focuses on the suffering of Triqui migrants as part of a continuum of violence. Holmes begins with a detailed account of his personal suffering living and working alongside Triqui pickers:

I often felt sick to my stomach the night before picking, due to stress about picking the minimum weight. As I picked, my knees continually hurt […] My neck and back began to hurt by late morning. For two or three days after picking, I took ibuprofen and sometimes used the hot tub in a local private gym to ease the aches (88).

According to Holmes, the broken bodies of Triqui migrants exemplify “the structural violence of social hierarchies becoming embodied in the form of suffering and sickness” (89). The rundown shacks, harsh working conditions, and dangerous border crossings are “mechanisms through which structural violence produces suffering” (89). Drawing on Philippe Bourgois’s notion of violence as a continuum, Holmes argues that the violence Triqui migrants suffer isn’t just political but also structural and symbolic. Using strawberry pickers as exemplars, he posits causal links between different forms of violence, arguing that each enhances, conceals, perpetuates, and legitimizes the other to produce “everyday violence” (a concept he borrows from Nancy Scheper-Hughes).