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

Seth M. Holmes (b. 1975) is an American anthropologist and physician who specializes in social hierarchies and health inequities in the context of transnational migration from Mexico to the US. Holmes earned his PhD in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco in 2005 under the guidance of Philippe Bourgois. In 2007, he received his MD from UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine. Holmes holds an endowed position in the School of Public Health, Division of Community Health, at UC Berkeley. He also received a bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Spanish/Latin American Studies from the University of Washington.

Holmes’s training as an anthropologist and medical doctor, combined with his language skills and expertise in Latin American Studies, offers a rare perspective on the health and suffering of Triqui migrant farmworkers from San Miguel as well as the social structures shaping the medical profession in the US and Mexico. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, is a reworking of his 2005 dissertation. The book received the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology (2013), the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award (2013), the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award (2014), and the James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (2015). In 2014, Holmes received the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for bringing the discipline of anthropology to bear on broad sociocultural issues.

Holmes’s embodied approach to ethnographic research, with its visceral descriptions of migration and farm work, provides rich insights into the lives of Indigenous migrant laborers and the food industry’s reliance on human suffering. This embodied research approach also makes the book engaging and accessible to non-specialists. Holmes seamlessly integrates first-person field notes, secondary research, and theory into a mutually informative whole. His ethnography grounds the theory, while his use of theory lends the ethnography focus. Holmes’s academic contributions, exemplified by his book, fill important gaps in the field of food studies, labor, and migration and offer concrete advice to effect societal change.