Triqui Farmworkers Summary

Dr. Seth Holmes, who is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, was witness to the lives of a group of indigenous migrant farmworkers from the Triqui village of San Miguel in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Through participant observation as well as interviews with clinic staff, public health officials, farm employees, U.S. border agents, and residents of the farming areas, he paints a detailed picture of the true cost of fresh fruits and vegetables in this country. In Holmes’ account, by using the stories of real people, we learn that Triqui farmworkers deal with backbreaking work, racism, language barriers (most Triqui farmworkers understand little English or Spanish), and

Beyond this, they are given almost no care or sympathy when they are hurt on the job. Frequently, the workers are treated rudely and even blamed for their own injuries.

Holmes watched his farmworker companions develop injured knees and backs and suffer from extreme stress. Yet those same farmworkers also avoided seeking medical help, continuing to work against difficult odds in order to care for their families and provide us with fresh fruit. The story begins as Holmes crosses the United States – Mexico border with nine Triqui men, facing dangers such as robbers, heat, rattlesnakes, and kidnappings. One particular incident was when Holmes and the nine Triqui men got caught at the border and where taken to the detention center. The journey was brutal from all the dangers, but Holmes

While in California the pickers did not have record of employment rather worked for a contractor and got paid the minimum wage. With these differences in labor hierarchies but with similarities in terms of race, class and citizenship there is this type of violence in where it is implemented in the everyday live of the Triqui migrant farmworkers, which are structural, symbolic, and everyday violence. Structural violence is defined as the violence of some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. But as Holmes described structural violence as “the violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, has injurious effects on bodies similar to the violence of a stabbing or shooting” (Holmes, 43). Symbolic violence is defined as the ideas and values of a ruling cultural class who purposefully imposed them onto a dominated social group. As Holmes would describe symbolic violence in his ethnography as “symbolic violence works through the perceptions of the ‘dominating’ and the ‘dominated’ (in Bourdieu’s words), while it tends to benefit