What It's Like to Sneak Across the US/Mexico Border to Harvest Food Tom Philpott - Mother Jones
go to original October 31, 2013

Author Seth Holmes, second from left (standing), preparing to sneak across the US/Mexico border with Triqui migrant farm workers. (University of Califiornia Press)

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

For most anthropologists, "field work" means talking to and observing a particular group. But for Seth Holmes, a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, it also literally means working in a field: toiling alongside farm workers from the Triqui indigenous group of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a vast Washington State berry patch. It also means visiting them in their tiny home village - and making the harrowing trek back to US farm fields through a militarized and increasingly perilous border.

Holmes recounts his year and a half among the people who harvest our food in his new book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. It's a work of academic anthropology, but written vividly and without jargon. In its unvarnished view into what our easy culinary bounty means for the people burdened with generating it, Fresh Fruit/Broken Bodies has earned its place on a short shelf alongside works like Tracie McMillan's The American Way of Eating, Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland, and  Frank Bardacke's Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers.

Read the interview with Seth Holmes at Mother Jones

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