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

Seth Holmes

Feb 2016 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Paul Costanzo

About this audiobook

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth M. Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes's material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This "embodied anthropology" deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequalities and suffering come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care.

About the author

Seth M. Holmes, PhD, MD, is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on social hierarchies and health inequalities. Dr. Holmes is Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Educated at Juilliard, Paul Costanzo brings the sensitivity and nuance of a classical music background to his twenty-five-plus years of voice acting, and AudioFile magazine has called his narration "superb."