Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Chapter 1: Introduction:
“Worth Risking Your Life?” Summary & Analysis |
LitCharts
Original: www.litcharts.com
The Road from San Miguel. Seth Holmes recounts traveling from the small town of San Miguel to the
U.S.-Mexico border with a group of Indigenous Triqui laborers. He brings a change of clothes, a little
food, and money for transport and coyotes. The journey is 49 hours by bus. At military checkpoints
on the way, the migrants lie about their destination and Holmes pretends to be a tourist. Three
soldiers on the bus tell Holmes how the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency funds these checkpoints. They
assume that Holmes is a coyote.
Holmes opens with a story that his readers are likely to already strongly associate with
undocumented migrant labor: the harrowing illegal journey across the U.S.-Mexico border. The
military checkpoints and the passengers’ deceptiveness about their plans show how the border
is both militarized and regulated—while crossing is illegal and dangerous, it's also exceedingly
common and there are set procedures for doing it. Even government officials understand its
unwritten rules. Holmes also emphasizes how he stands out in relation to the other migrants—
this shows how his research involves breaking social norms and hierarchies. It also suggests
that his personal experience living with migrant workers for a year is very different from
migrant workers’ own experience.
Fieldwork on the Move. Holmes explains that this book is based on the 18 months he spent living and
working with Triqui Indigenous migrant workers from rural Oaxaca, Mexico. When Holmes first goes
to visit San Miguel, the Triqui workers’ hometown, locals warn him that it would be dangerous and
town leaders give him the silent treatment. He points out that, because of their colonial history,
Indigenous Latin American communities tend to distrust outsiders.
Holmes’s difficult visit to San Miguel is a sign of Triqui people’s unique and difficult history.
Specifically, because powerful outsiders have oppressed and exploited them repeatedly over
the centuries, they have learned to distrust outsiders, including seemingly well-intentioned ones
like Holmes. However, mixed-race, Spanish speaking Mexicans also distrust and look down on
the Triquis because of this history. This shows how social structures and political forces strongly
shape people’s lives, relationships, and beliefs.
,Holmes began his fieldwork by working alongside Triqui migrants on a farm in Washington for a
summer. Next, he spent a winter in California’s Central Valley, living with an extended Triqui family of
18 people in a three-bedroom apartment. He passed the spring with his friend Samuel’s extended
family in San Miguel, where he received plenty of threats and suspicion, and then crossed the border
alongside nine Triqui men in the spring. After the Border Patrol arrested them, Holmes spent a month
doing research in the borderlands. Finally, he returned to Washington for another summer on the
farm.
Holmes deliberately lived, work, and migrated alongside the Triquis in order to understand their
lives, their suffering, and the causes of that suffering. His trajectory is typical of how a migrant
worker might spend their year, although not necessarily representative of how all migrant
workers do. Mexican migrant workers’ lifestyle challenges common-sense ideas about home,
community, and immigration—rather than moving once from a place of origin to a single
destination, they live in many places and belong to a transnational community located
throughout Mexico and the U.S.
Traveling to the Border. Holmes remembers eating at dingy roadside restaurants during the bus ride
to the border. His friends discuss the dangers of crossing and worry about dying or getting caught.
During other breaks, the passengers scramble to use ramshackle bathrooms. They barely manage to
rest on the long bus ride.
The migrants clearly understand that crossing the border will be dangerous and stressful—after
all, many of them have possibly done it before. But this doesn’t affect their decision to migrate,
which suggests that they aren’t making this decision based on the benefits versus risks of
migration—rather, they’re doing it out of a sense of obligation.
Holmes explains that hundreds of people die crossing the border every year. The dangers are
numerous: criminals, excessive heat, snakes, heavily armed militias, and the Border Patrol. The Triqui
migrants tell Holmes horror stories about getting kidnapped, raped, and worse. To truly understand
their suffering, Holmes feels he needs to cross the border, which was aggressively militarized and
became much more dangerous in the early 2000s. Migrants, lawyers, and relatives all emphasized the
dangers of crossing, but Holmes decided that it was worth the risk.
The border’s dangers leave an enduring mark on migrants. But Holmes suggests that these
dangers are totally preventable: they’re a result of the U.S.’s closed-off immigration policy.
Accordingly, migrant suffering on the border demonstrates how public policy creates inequity
and inflicts real, measurable pain on people. While Holmes is privileged and can choose not to
cross the border, he believes that accompanying the migrants will allow him to understand and
, ultimately better heal suffering. This shows how anthropology is uniquely suited to fixing social
problems: it starts with researchers putting themselves in other people’s shoes.
Holmes profiles the nine Triqui men whom he accompanies on his trip to the border. They include 29-
year-old Macario, who worked with Holmes in Washington the previous year. The border splits up
Macario’s family: two of his children live in California and two others live in San Miguel. Holmes
struggles to find a group, because the other migrants are suspicious of him. However, it’s easy to find
a bus to the border: they run weekly, all spring. Ultimately, Holmes attempts to cross under ideal
circumstances: his companions are young and fit, and they know their coyotes personally. Older and
non-Mexican migrants are usually less fortunate.
Holmes shows that U.S. immigration policies again force unnecessary suffering on migrants—
here, they separate Macario’s family across the border. Holmes highlights the way he stands out
as a privileged white man in order to emphasize how race, ethnicity, class, and citizenship
determine the roles different people take at the border. He appears suspicious because he’s out
of place—the implication is that white people don’t need to cross the border illegally, so it
doesn’t make sense to others that he’s there unless he’s doing something illegal.
The Mexican Side of the Border. Holmes remembers disembarking the bus near the border in Altar, a
scorching-hot desert town full of thieves, coyotes, and prospective migrants. In the local church,
posters depict the deadly animals, extreme heat, and vicious criminals that migrants face when they
cross the border and ask, “Is it worth risking your life?” Holmes is surprised that American authorities
haven’t raided the town.
In addition to informing migrants about the specific dangers they face, the posters in the church
reminds them that they can always turn back. However, this does not accurately reflect the
attitude of the people Holmes meets: they have long ago decided to cross the border because
they feel they have no other choice. Holmes’s surprise that the Americans haven’t raided Altar,
which is obviously a waypoint for migrants, further suggests that U.S. immigration policy is
either ineffective at or uninterested in stopping illegal immigration.
Holmes explains that migrant labor systems rely on migrants contributing to rich countries’
economies during their prime working years, while depending on their home countries’ social services
—namely, education in their youth and healthcare in old age. This is only possible because economic
policies welcome migrants into wealthy countries as a source of cheap labor, while immigration
, policies prevent migrants from permanently settling in those countries. These complementary
policies constantly evolve, usually becoming more brutal over time.
In the context of Holmes’s research, the Mexican government educates and supports migrant
workers while the U.S. benefits from their labor (including their tax dollars). To Holmes, this is
yet another way that global inequity leads to exploitation: even though Mexico’s government
has far fewer resources than the U.S.’s, it pays while the U.S. profits. Therefore, this inequality
perpetuates itself—or even worsens—over time. According to this perspective, immigration
policy is not really trying to prevent people from entering illegally; rather, it’s trying to manage
that flow of entries to maximize the benefits to the U.S. Therefore, economic and immigration
policies work together to exploit undocumented migrants in ways that it wouldn’t be legal to
exploit legal U.S. residents.
Holmes remembers waiting in an empty, filthy apartment in Altar. His group’s coyote lets Holmes
cross for free because of his noble purposes. The apartment’s owner comes to demand money, and
three recently-deported men show up in the middle of the night and wake everyone up. In the
morning, the group hides their money in mayonnaise jars. Then, they crowd into a tiny, scorching hot
van and take off. After three hours, they stop in the middle of the desert. The driver and coyote
negotiate with some heavily armed men and then send the migrants deeper into the desert in a
pickup truck. A group of Mexican soldiers aggressively questions Holmes but lets him go free.
Uncertainty, confusion, and a pervasive sense of danger define this portion of the migrants’
journey. Holmes and his companions are vulnerable and have absolutely no control over their
circumstances. Of course, this is all because crossing the border is illegal, and therefore
migrants have essentially no legal protections. This shows how their marginalization leads them
to be put in danger and even more marginalized. In contrast, Holmes’s privilege wins him
privileges: although he's likely the wealthiest among the whole group of migrants, he’s the only
one who doesn’t have to pay the coyote’s fee.
Holmes explains that most researchers view migration as an individual decision. They assume that
people rationally examine the costs and benefits of migration, and they divide migrants into two
groups: immigrants (who voluntarily migrate for economic reasons) and refugees (who are forced to
migrate for political reasons). But this model is inaccurate. Triqui migrants cross the border for
economic reasons, but they are forced to migrate to support their families—they have no other
choice.
