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

Seth M. Holmes (b. 1975) is an American anthropologist and physician who specializes in social hierarchies and health inequities in the context of transnational migration from Mexico to the US. Holmes earned his PhD in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco in 2005 under the guidance of Philippe Bourgois. In 2007, he received his MD from UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine. Holmes holds an endowed position in the School of Public Health, Division of Community Health, at UC Berkeley. He also received a bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Spanish/Latin American Studies from the University of Washington.

Holmes’s training as an anthropologist and medical doctor, combined with his language skills and expertise in Latin American Studies, offers a rare perspective on the health and suffering of Triqui migrant farmworkers from San Miguel as well as the social structures shaping the medical profession in the US and Mexico. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, is a reworking of his 2005 dissertation. The book received the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology (2013), the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award (2013), the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award (2014), and the James M.