Social justice has been a part of my life ever since I realized what it was while nursing. I left this field to join a life of advocacy in social work. Since joining the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice, my understanding of social justice has been enhanced as a result of the teachings by instructors in the many thought-provoking courses and through the many hours of research. The Body Rights: Systems and Social Movements was one of these thought-provoking classes in which I learned about the migrant farmworkers that make the trek from Mexico up to the United States and Canada (although the book was focused on the United States) to work for farm owners, picking fruits. The book in which we learned from is titled Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, written by Seth M. Holmes PhD, MD. It brought to light the symbolic violence that is involved in this process.
Violence can be understood as a continuum, which includes political violence as well as symbolic violence, structural violence along with everyday violence. According to Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, political violence is considered “targeted physical violence and terror administered by official authorities”; Structural violence furthermore is “social inequalities and hierarchies often along social categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality; symbolic violence “is the internalization and legitimation of hierarchy, exercised through cognition and misrecognition, knowledge and sentiment, with the unwitting consent of the dominated” (Holmes, 2023, pg. 89). All of which is a representation of what occurs between the Mexican workers and not only the owners of the farms, but the farmhands that run and supervise the Mexican workers. Violence is a social injustice that occurs when those in power hold their status over those without. They take advantage of their position in society.
This book in its entirety brought to life the injustices of Mexican farmworkers that occurs in our own back yards. The power injustices Mexican farmworkers face with the farmers as shown in this book is an injustice to people. The Mexican farmer had no choice but to travel the long distance to work a farm where they were treated with indignities as remaining in their home country meant starving and not being able to afford to send their children to school. On the farms they are paid by amount of weight they pick, in fact, just to make minimum wage they must pick (for example) 51lbs of strawberries in one day. This doesn’t reflect on the back breaking work in which they do. It is known that many farmworkers experience deterioration of the spine from all the bending over they do day in and day out. This is exacerbated by the fact that if they don’t meet the weight quota twice, they are let go, so they often push through the pain. They face blatant racism by crew bosses during the fruit collection process which can be seen as symbolic violence.
The farms in which they lived spoke to symbolic violence. They were housed in shacks with tin roofs and no heating or cooling system. This meant that during the day they overheated and at night they froze. There was never an in between. They had orange colored water that came from hoses and each farmhand had to share a shower in a separate plywood hut with cement floors. These huts were always placed in the back of the farms out of view of civilians. By doing so, it made me question the intention of the farmworker. They must have known that what they were doing was indeed an injustice, otherwise, why hide what you are doing.
It made me rethink the way in which we shop for our produce, without thinking how it made its way onto our plates. We don’t often think of who puts the food onto our tables or the lives they lead in doing so. They are exposed to poisonous chemicals on the fruit day in and day out as well as ingest it without being able to wash it. They destroy their bodies without the ability to take sick leave while they have surgery or on the day’s they are unable to get out of bed. They must push through for their families and the farmhands know this. They experience abuse and racism without the ability to complain as there is always someone else willing to replace them. There are many social injustices present during this topic which is why I felt the need to share this for my reflection. Every time I am in the stores and see fresh fruit, I am taken back by the journey it took for it to arrive there.
We often are ignorant to what we cannot see, and it is this reason that these injustices can continue to happen. Following reading this book, I began to have conversations with friends and family about how we view the world. How what we do impacts the lives of so many people. It often feels overwhelming to think about what we can do to make a difference. It brought me back to why I became a social worker and why I joined the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice program, to learn…to take what I’ve learned and share it with others so that we can spread the information. To think that by sharing this information with one person we are starting a chain reaction of awareness to social injustices. Although we may not come up with a solution now individually, collectively we may have the power to make a change.
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies — Seth M. Holmes
Holmes, S.M. (2023). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States. University of California press.
