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

Philippe Bourgois coined this term in his work on a Central American banana plantation to describe how class and ethnicity combine to produce oppression that differs experientially and materially from the oppression produced by class and ethnicity alone. Holmes, a pupil of Bourgois, draws on the concept to demonstrate how ethnicity and citizenship hierarchies on American farms are overlaid with other hierarchies related to class, job position, respect, and suffering.

This anthropological research method relies on participant observation—that is, on the researcher engaging with the people and settings being studied. Historically, ethnographers viewed the researcher’s body as a detached tool for observation, separate from the mind, which recorded “pure data,” or “facts.” More recently, however, anthropologists have turned toward embodied ethnography, an approach that attends to the body of the researcher and uses bodily sensations as research tools to catalog and analyze experiences.

Scheper-Hughes coined this phrase, which Holmes defines as “the normalized micro-interactional expressions of violence on domestic, delinquent, and institutional levels that produce a common sense of violence and humiliation” (90). Holmes argues that differing forms of violence impacting migrant farmworkers—including structural and symbolic violence—enhance, perpetuate, legitimize, and conceal one another to produce everyday violence. In other words, forms of violence interact with others on the violence continuum, leading to normalized, everyday violence.