In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes gives readers an inside perspective as to what life is like for migrant farmworkers living in the U.S. He looks at the health of the of these farmworkers which he believes is being undermined by factors of racial prejudice, supply and demand, and migration. The book is about Holmes journey with these migrant workers told in a way that puts these farmworkers on a personal level instead of just being seen as labor in the fields. Holmes discovers is that these farmworkers are living in harsh conditions that are detrimental to their health. This book doesn’t just tell the story of these farmworkers, it also acts a way of getting the message out that something needs to be changed in the way that farmworkers …show more content…
are treated and how this negatively affect all of society. Seth Holmes began his journey when he decided to make a visit to San Miguel, Mexico and meet with the Triqui migrants living there. They are a group of migrants who make their way up and down the coast all the way up to Washington working in different fields in order to obtain find opportunities to earn income and support their family’s. Holmes makes his journey with these migrants in order to get a better understanding of what these migrants go through. Holmes not only just follows them as they are working, he even crosses the border with the migrants in order to see the experience that these migrants go through on a regular basis. Along this journey he sees these harsh conditions that the migrants are living in, he sees that not only are they working extremely hard in the fields but they are also working hard to survive outside of just working.
They are struggling to provide for their family’s but they prevail on and continue everything in their power to make sure they are supported. Holmes discusses how there is this hierarchy of suffering that exists amongst the richest to the poorest and the degree in which one suffers goes down as social status falls. The migrants lived in conditions where they could catch diseases and other illnesses and in most times lived in wet shacks with no heat and no …show more content…
insulation. Holmes also sees the physical labor required from berry-picking and how it was so demanding for these farm workers to complete their tasks in a given time.
Although Holmes does not go into much detail about the farm work as he focuses on the outside forces that oppress the farmworkers. He shows that there is this hierarchy that exists that keeps these farmworkers at the bottom and how racism and inequality affects the migrants. He says that he doesn’t believe that these migrants choose to be in their situation, living in suffering, outside forces are responsible for the oppression that exists. The migrant’s conditions in the healthcare system are also discussed by Holmes in great detail. He interviews the migrants about their experiences and finds that many of them are not treated properly and can’t understand the doctors because of the language barrier that exists because no translators are used. Holmes describes the structural factors that exist in the healthcare system and how it affects these migrants. He discussed the blatant racism exhibited by nurses and doctors to the patients and how it affected them emotionally and shape their opinion on the healthcare
system. Holmes didn’t write this book for the sole purpose of just sharing these migrant’s lives for everyone to read but instead the book acts as a call to the injustices that farmworkers face every day. He wants to inform people of the living and social conditions that these migrants face regularly and get people to critically think about why they are so oppressed and looked down upon by people. Holmes really gave an inside perspective into the lives of these migrant workers and just how their lives are gone through on a daily basis. He is almost dispositioned when he comes into to talk with the migrants, being a white male, so he doesn’t have the previous knowledge to look at his own privilege and can’t fully understand what is going on just by interviewing the migrants. Although Holmes doesn’t try to give the reader arguments about why his opinion or thoughts are correct but instead he focuses on the systematic failures that exists in our society that are negatively affecting those that are impoverished. This idea of “embodied anthropology” is a major theme seen throughout the whole book, meaning that Holmes uses his senses and experiences to get an idea and concept of the culture that exists amongst the Triqui. An interesting idea in the book is when Holmes doesn’t just put all farmworkers into the same category and instead distinguishes all the different types of farm work that exist and how all require different sets of skills. It helps to break down the barriers and stereotypes that are built up to put a negative view on migrant farmworkers. Holmes discusses how nobody will truly understand what the migrant farmworkers and it can be seen that the majority of policies created to regulate farm work and labor are designed by politicians who have no previous experience in working these kinds of jobs. This book truly opens the world’s eyes to the injustices and hardships that the migrant farmworkers face coming in from Mexico and how we can all do our part to make a change and better the current system that we live in.
...n the trying time of the Great Migration. Students in particular can study this story and employ its principles to their other courses. Traditional character analysis would prove ineffective with this non-fiction because the people in this book are real; they are our ancestors. Isabel Wilkerson utilized varied scopes and extensive amounts of research to communicate a sense of reality that lifted the characters off the page. While she concentrated on three specifically, each of them served as an example of someone who left the south during different decades and with different inspirations. This unintentional mass migration has drastically changed and significantly improved society, our mindset, and our economics. This profound and influential book reveals history in addition to propelling the reader into a world that was once very different than the one we know today.
The first barrier to a better life had to do with surviving poverty or the absence of certain privileges. In Angela’s Ashes, Frank, the protagonist of the book, along with his family had to endure persistent rains, exposure to disease and starvation. Frank and Malachy Jr. had to resort to stealing food several ...
Many people at one time or another will face some-sort of economic hardship; however it is safe to say that many people do not really know what extreme poverty is like. The Treviño family knows first hand what it is like to work in tedious, mind-numbing jobs for a very little paycheck. The life of a migrant worker is not anything to be desired. Simple things that most would take for granted like food variety, baths, clean clothes, and beds are things that Elva learned to live with. “We couldn’t have a bath every day, since it was such a big production. But [mom] made us wash our feet every night” (125). A simple task to any normal person is a large production for a migrant family that doesn’t have any indoor plumbing. People living in poverty do not often have a large wardrobe to speak of which means that the few clothes they own often remain dirty because washing clothes is a production too. “Ama scrubbed clothes on the washboard while the rest of us bathed. She took a bath last while the rest of us rinsed and hung up the clothes she had washed. This was the only oppor...
"The Story of Cesar Chavez." UFW: The Official Web Page of the United Farm Workers of
Since the Industrial Revolution in the United States of America, working conditions for women and minorities have not been given equal pay or top positions in the work place. Women being degraded by the men in charge, and minorities constantly at odds with one another so they will not form a Union. Such things keep those with low-status in the job in line, and not feel they are equal to the ones in charge. People from other countries are in search for a better life elsewhere, and take the risk of going to the United States illegally to seek out the American Dream. The articles Working at Bazooms by Meika Loe and At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die by Charlie LeDuff deal with the working conditions for women and minorities. Workers in both articles have to deal with having terrible working conditions, harassment in the workplace, low-status within the job, and the constant fear of job loss.
The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement. Hartcourt-Brace La Botz, Dan (2005). "The Species of the World." César Chávez and La Causa. Pearson Longman Moyer, John (1970).
The hospital release forms illustrate the white man’s way of making the narrator less than human by depriving him of his work at the company; the doctor will not let him work:
Literary magazines were not remotely interested in publishing Gilb’s stories, which focus primarily on the professional and personal struggles of working-class Mexican Americans. But his unapologetic stories about working-class Mexican Americans have made him a voice of his people (Reid130). Gilb’s short stories are set vividly in cites of the desert Southwest and usually feature a Hispanic protagonist who is good-hearted but often irresponsible and is forever one pink slip or automotive breakdown away from disaster (Reid130).
A major drought, over-cultivation, and a country suffering from one of the greatest depressions in history are all it took to displace hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners and send them, and everything they had, out west. The Dust Bowl ruined crops all across the Great Plains region, crops that people depended on for survival. When no food could be grown and no money could be made, entire families, sometimes up to 8 people or more, packed up everything they had and began the journey to California, where it was rumored that jobs were in full supply. Without even closing the door behind them in some cases, these families left farms that had been with them for generations, only to end up in a foreign place where they were neither welcomed nor needed in great quantity. This would cause immense problems for their futures. It is these problems that author John Steinbeck spent a great deal of his time studying and documenting so that Americans could better understand the plight of these migrant farmers, otherwise known as "Okies." From touring many of these "Hoovervilles" and "Little Oklahomas" (pg. v) Steinbeck was given a firsthand look at the issues and hardships these migrant workers faced on a daily basis. With the help of Tom Collins, manager of a federal migrant labor camp, Steinbeck began a "personal and literary journey" (pg. v), revealing to the world the painful truth of these "Okies" in his book Harvest Gypsies.
The movie opens up with rural images of thousands of migrant workers being transported in trucks with a short introduction by Edward Murrow and some occasional interventions of parts of an interview made to the secretary of labor after he saw the impacting images, and to the different people who have seen the lives the workers lead. Most of the secretary’s commentaries depict the exclusion that these people have since they are basically people who are silently crying out for assistance to stop harvesting the fields of their shame, or at least to hope for potential raises and better work conditions. From Florida to New Jersey, and from Mexico to Oregon, these people including women and children travel around the states following the sun and the demand from the seasonal goods while working around a hundred and thirty-six days earning and average of nine hundred dollars a year.
A main factor in the storyline is the way the writer portrays society's attitude to poverty in the 18th century. The poor people were treated tremendously different to higher classed people. A lot of people were even living on the streets. For example, "He picked his way through the hordes of homeless children who congregated at evening, like the starlings, to look for the most sheltered niche into which they could huddle for the night." The writer uses immense detail to help the reader visualise the scene. She also uses a simile to help the reader compare the circumstances in which the children are in. This shows that the poor children had to live on the streets and fend for themselves during the 18th century. Another example involves a brief description of the city in which the poor people lived in. This is "nor when he smelt the stench of open sewers and foraging pigs, and the manure of horses and mules" This gives a clear example of the state of the city. It is unclean and rancid and the writer includes this whilst keeping to her fictional storyline.
“The Jungle,” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, describes how the life and challenges of immigrants in the United States affected their emotional and physical state, as well as relationships with others. The working class was contrasted to wealthy and powerful individuals who controlled numerous industries and activities in the community. The world was always divided into these two categories of people, those controlling the world and holding the majority of the power, and those being subjected to them. Sinclair succeeded to show this social gap by using the example of the meatpacking industry. He explained the terrible and unsafe working conditions workers in the US were subjected to and the increasing rate of corruption, which created the feeling of hopelessness among the working class.
While McMurphy tries to bring about equality between the patients and head nurse, she holds onto her self-proclaimed right to exact power over her charges because of her money, education, and, ultimately, sanity. The patients represent the working-class by providing Ratched, the manufacturer, with the “products” from which she profits—their deranged minds. The patients can even be viewed as products themselves after shock therapy treatments and lobotomies leave them without personality. The negative effects of the hospital’s organizational structure are numerous. The men feel worthless, abused, and manipulated, much like the proletariat who endured horrendous working conditions and rarely saw the fruits of their labor during the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom and United States in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (“Industrial Revolution” 630).
In the hope of seeking better works, opportunities, freedoms, and pursing the American dreams, Mexican migrant workers decide to come to the United States, leaving behind their family and living across the border. Agriculture is the main source of livelihood for Mexican migrant workers. Migrant farm workers today still do not receive a chance of getting equal wages, good living, and good working conditions In the to the novel “Under the Feet of Jesus,” Viramontes states that "It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing" (Viramontes 1996, 4). Viramontes defines the life of Mexican migrants’ worker
In studying our prior immigration waves and the outcomes they have had on U.S. History, one can only better understand how to lead the next generations into a hopeful future. With researching into California’s farming movement and reading America is in the heart (Bulosan, 1946), one can gain a better look of the struggles and hardships the immigrants had encountered and can lead to a more clear path for the future generations as to not repeat the circumstances that may not have been in the best interest of all.