Indigenous Mexican Farmworkers and the Health Effects of Racism Rick Kearns - Indian Country Today
go to original July 18, 2013

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States by Seth Holmes Check it out on Amazon.com

The racist discrimination against indigenous Mexican farmworkers in the United States is literally making them sick, and their plight is clearly misunderstood by immigration policy makers, according to medical anthropologist Dr. Seth Holmes who just published "Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States.”

The book by Holmes, who is Assistant Professor of Health and Social Behavior at the University of California Berkeley, chronicles his in-depth study of the lives of indigenous Triqui farmworkers who travel from Oaxaca, Mexico to the western states of the United States and back, and how the discrimination against these farmworkers, and to a certain extent all migrant farmworkers, leads to unfair treatment, inadequate healthcare and horrible living conditions for the people who pick our fruit and vegetables not as a matter of choice but for survival.

In an interview given last week, Holmes explained that he lived and worked with a group of Triqui farmworkers for over one and a half years, traveling with them during an illegal cross of the Arizona-Mexico border, then on to picking berries in Washington state, pruning vineyards in California (along with a week of homelessness living in cars), and harvesting corn in Oaxaca, Mexico, the home state of the Triquis.

The discrimination against Triqui farmworkers, Holmes said, that leads to the suffering could be seen in a number of their situations, starting with the jobs they are given on farms.

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