Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
Author: Seth M. Holmes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520399455

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely 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 United States, 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 inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a substantive new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a current examination of the challenges facing farmworkers and the lives and resistance of the protagonists featured in the book.

Protecting Youth at Work

Protecting Youth at Work
Author: National Research Council and Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 1998-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309064139

In Massachusetts, a 12-year-old girl delivering newspapers is killed when a car strikes her bicycle. In Los Angeles, a 14-year-old boy repeatedly falls asleep in class, exhausted from his evening job. Although children and adolescents may benefit from working, there may also be negative social effects and sometimes danger in their jobs. Protecting Youth at Work looks at what is known about work done by children and adolescents and the effects of that work on their physical and emotional health and social functioning. The committee recommends specific initiatives for legislators, regulators, researchers, and employers. This book provides historical perspective on working children and adolescents in America and explores the framework of child labor laws that govern that work. The committee presents a wide range of data and analysis on the scope of youth employment, factors that put children and adolescents at risk in the workplace, and the positive and negative effects of employment, including data on educational attainment and lifestyle choices. Protecting Youth at Work also includes discussions of special issues for minority and disadvantaged youth, young workers in agriculture, and children who work in family-owned businesses.

Grounds for Dreaming

Grounds for Dreaming
Author: Lori A. Flores
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2016-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300216386

Known as “The Salad Bowl of the World,” California’s Salinas Valley became an agricultural empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades leading up to the seminal strikes led by Cesar Chavez, this important work also looks closely at how different groups of Mexicans—U.S. born, bracero, and undocumented—confronted and interacted with one another during this period. An incisive study of labor, migration, race, gender, citizenship, and class, Lori Flores’s first book offers crucial insights for today’s ever-growing U.S. Latino demographic, the farmworker rights movement, and future immigration policy.

With These Hands

With These Hands
Author: Daniel Rothenberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2000-10-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780520227347

"What makes this book so important is that it allows us to see into the lives of those who do the stoop labor to put that lovely salad on our tables. With These Hands is a unique and valuable documentary work that skillfully presents the voices of laborers and others, helping us to understand our connection to the world of America's farmworkers."—Studs Terkel