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

Holmes’s embodied ethnography of Triqui migrants uncovers the structures that negatively impact Indigenous farm laborers from San Miguel. His bodily experiences not only inform his analysis but also convey, in a visceral way, the challenges facing undocumented farmworkers in the US. Holmes transcribes excerpts from his field notes, which describe, in the first-person, what it was like to travel, live, and work alongside Triqui migrants. In addition to lending immediacy to the plight of migrants, these notes present their suffering in an engaging and accessible manner. In the Introduction, for example, Holmes recounts the frightening experience of waiting to cross the US-Mexico border with a group Triqui migrants: “This town scares me. It’s impossible to know which person dressed in dark clothing is an assailant wanting money from easy targets […] I push an empty soda bottle in my pocket above my money, and I feel a bit safer” (12). Later in the Introduction, he writes about his desperation after being detained by US Border Control agents: “I begin to cry, exhausted, imagining life in prison as I wait for the legal system to process my case” (24). Holmes’s experiences while crossing the border, including the journey’s physical impact on his body, mirror those of his Triqui friends, one of whose comments he shares: “He tells me that he suffered a lot crossing the second time.