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

Many scholars argue that America has a long history of abuse of immigrants through both social and structural systems, and Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides a ground-level portrait of the consequences of those systems on the individual. For decades, the American food and service industries have relied on undocumented labor to keep the costs of goods and services low. Erik Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2006), for instance, documents situations when employers provided illegal transportation across the border for groups of migrant farmers. According to the most recent US census data, undocumented labor makes up almost a quarter of Texas’s workforce, a number that is typical along the US-Mexico border and in states that rely heavily on agriculture for their economic output.

At the same time, political rhetoric frequently paints undocumented workers as a problem in terms that distort the reality, suggesting that the undocumented migrants are exploiting systems that most sociologists agree are actually exploiting the migrants themselves. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies paints a grim portrait of the reality of immigrant labor: poor pay, no social safety net, and difficult, dangerous labor that leads to chronic and acute injury. This pattern of exploitation is driven by the economic interests and decisions of the employers and the American consumer’s desire for cheap costs.