Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
By: Seth Holmes / Narrated By: Paul Costanzo
Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
No really, beYONd a Left/Right Issue—this is just a shared humanity, isn’t it?!?
I remember watching old footage of Ronald Reagan eating a grape in front of cameras during the Delano grape strike, and even as a little kid I knew it for what it was: Elitism and a gross lack of conscience. But in the 70s, things were a-swinging, an agreement was struck, and then I gave but sparing consideration to where my food came from, aside from an occasional twinge re: meat.
Still, early on in 2020, Covid-19 was DECimating slaughterhouse workers/meat-packing plants. This was after 3-years of Building The Wall as the rallying cry, after ICE raids ripped communities apart, after the utter demonization of Latinx people. What happened? Trump started calling them Essential Workers, leaving them no choice but to keep working in situations where there wasn’t any fresh air, sanitation abysmal, the ability to socially distance nil. All while still refusing the people who were responsible for doing the back-breaking work a moment to NOT fear being deported—no safe status, yet Essential.
Howzat work, exactly? I dunno, but here in 2021 those people are still demonized and rounded up, and exploitation is the name of the game. Seth Holmes, with Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, does a masterful job at weaving stories of particular individuals and their families, indigenous Triqui people from Oaxaca, with what appear to be sound anthropological studies.
Holmes chose to join groups in Oaxaca at home and then on their journey to enter the US, even getting caught and arrested with them. He faced a fine; they were deported. They still needed work, attempted the crossing again, and Holmes joined them in the back-breaking, knee-splitting work of picking berries, of living in the shacks (Wood boards with no insulation, little ventilation, a tin roof), of searching for places to live in between Picking Seasons (Only slums would take them without credit histories, thus leaving situations like 19 people cramming into a 3-bedroom apartment), and on the rare, very rare occasions where they HAD to seek medical attention for themselves.
The result is a grand ethnography of the Triqui, the berry pickers, the lowest of the low in a hierarchical setup on even Mom & Pop family farms (As opposed to the American agri-businesses that are industrialized). Those beautiful fields you see in Washington state? Those glorious vistas and gracefully understated mansions? Oh, look on the fringes and see the migrant camps. While the family farms get only a bit of buzz when it comes to their fight to survive against agri-business, to compete with countries with even cheaper labor, at least they get some buzz at all. The migrant workers? We know they’re there, we know they’re necessary, but danged if we’re going to make them have any legal rights (And the Triqui people aren’t even trying to stay here year round, wishing to only have the seasonal work and go the heck home) or considerations.
Holmes goes through each level in the hierarchy, and he shows how it all breaks down, how each level browbeats the levels below. Even the white teenagers who work as checkers (Weighing fruit, checking ripeness) jeer at the migrants, shortchange them by continually jotting lower weights. Or they throw fruit at the pickers, and then they go on back to their parents’ homes, to lives of ease, and jeez I could go on and on and on.
Suffice it to say, that it’s reeeeally easy to get worked up about what-all is packed into 8 1/2 hours. And don’t worry, it ain’t white-bashing, or a bashing of the right-wing: Neo-liberalism gets tagged as well, foreign trade deals and the like. That said, it’s easy to get worked up, yes? But then, do I wanna pay higher prices?
However, if this pandemic has taught me, p’raps a few people, anything? It’s that the system breaks down easily, and all cogs are necessary, and life should cost a little more than it does, but those essential workers are ESSENTIAL and should be compensated as such. I’d like to turn a blind eye and scarf my blueberry yogurt without consideration, but now I can’t. -Or- Now I won’t. Holmes doesn’t really give us what we can do about it—this is just an anthropological study where he studied systemic violence built into the system and shows us how it affects our fellow man. He experienced it in his own body as kinda a new and different approach to understand and quantify the abuses. He offers it kinda sorta not so humbly as every now and again he seems to be a bit smug about nobody else studying in such a manner. That said? Every now and again he’s TOTALLY aware of his soft upbringing, i.e. requesting a closet in the tenement apartment so he can have SOME space that’s just his own.
I won’t say that Paul Costanzo narrates this so much as he reads the text. He does, however, go beyond simple reading and adds some warmth to what is, for all intents and purposes, a scholarly treatise. That said, he makes me cringe for my kind, for my shared humanity with those who look down on the migrant workers, especially in health care settings, where Holmes saw translations break down: Where the health care workers suggested that the suffering Triqui couldn’t even speak their own language (Not understanding that, NO, they do NOT speak Spanish). And as ever, there’s the: It’s Just Their Culture—They LIKE to live all crammed together. Costanzo relates all this as tho’ thru Holmes’s eyes, showing his indignation for his friends, showing the utter unfairness of such a system, of such a lack of sensitivity.
ANYway, I keep getting lost in my thoughts as I write this review, and I guarantee that you’ll come out of listening to this thinking thinking thinking. This is an issue that we ignore; these are people we don’t see. Hey, we just wanna get our food from the grocery store and get back home to our families. We just wanna live our lives, confident that we’re not doing toooo much harm to the planet, toooo much harm to our fellow man.
It’s just that?
We are…
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