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

Many scholars argue that America has a long history of abuse of immigrants through both social and structural systems, and Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides a ground-level portrait of the consequences of those systems on the individual. For decades, the American food and service industries have relied on undocumented labor to keep the costs of goods and services low. Erik Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2006), for instance, documents situations when employers provided illegal transportation across the border for groups of migrant farmers. According to the most recent US census data, undocumented labor makes up almost a quarter of Texas’s workforce, a number that is typical along the US-Mexico border and in states that rely heavily on agriculture for their economic output.

At the same time, political rhetoric frequently paints undocumented workers as a problem in terms that distort the reality, suggesting that the undocumented migrants are exploiting systems that most sociologists agree are actually exploiting the migrants themselves. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies paints a grim portrait of the reality of immigrant labor: poor pay, no social safety net, and difficult, dangerous labor that leads to chronic and acute injury. This pattern of exploitation is driven by the economic interests and decisions of the employers and the American consumer’s desire for cheap costs. This desire is amplified by economists who use the cost of food as a key indicator of how the economy is perceived by and contributing to the quality of life for the average American. By extension, this becomes a measure that politicians rely on in policymaking decisions.

The punishment for violations of immigrant policy inordinately fall on the immigrants themselves, and rarely on the employers that provide the economic opportunity: immigration watchdog TRAC Immigration notes that only 11 individuals were prosecuted for employment of immigrants during a 12-month period in 2018-19, while over 85,000 undocumented migrants were prosecuted. Because undocumented migrants do not have access to avenues of power that citizen business owners possess, such as private legal representation or political influence, they have fewer options for recourse. Immigrant policy that targets them can be proven effective through data even as it fails to address the underlying concern: the undocumented worker’s strong incentive to violate immigration law in order to secure employment from business owners who seek to exploit them.

Though the overt demonization of immigrants is often associated with conservative political ideology, policy that dehumanizes undocumented immigrants is a problem across the political spectrum: during the time that Holmes was conducting his research, the Obama administration painted the influx of migrants from Central America seeking asylum from drug violence as an administrative crisis, creating a priority juvenile docket to speed up the deportation process for migrant children, the fallout of which is documented in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends (2017). In many cases, the situation mirrors that of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies’s Skagit Valley: undocumented migrants’ lives and struggles exist beneath the notice of most citizens, so perceptions of them are largely based on distorted representations presented for political purpose. Holmes’s work is important because it provides an embodied portrait of these migrants in something approaching their own terms.