Seth Holmes is a doctor and anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley who did something that wouldn’t occur to most white, middle-class, highly-educated Americans. About a decade ago, he spent a year and a half traveling, living with and working alongside migrant indigenous Mexican farmworkers from the state of Oaxaca. His stint included two seasons picking strawberries and blueberries on a large farm in Skagit County. He didn’t identify the farm, though he said it was the largest farm in the Skagit Valley and employed about 500 people at the height of the picking season. During that time, Holmes did as much as he could to live life as the berry pickers do. He lived in an uninsulated plywood shack in the labor camp. Because the shack had a tin roof, it would heat up to more than 100 degrees in the middle of the summer, and in the fall, when temperatures would fall below zero, his breath would condense on the tin roof and freeze. Then, as the sun came up in the morning, it would rain down on him and wake him up. Holmes spent one or two days a week picking berries. The rest of the time, he interviewed the Triqui and Mixtec Oaxacan workers as well as the farm executives, supervisors, local white teenagers who would weigh the berries and field workers who drive tractors and spray vinegar on the fields. In his book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Holmes chronicles a harrowing trip he took with several undocumented workers crossing the border from Mexico to Arizona, after which they were caught by U.S. border agents. And he describes migrating with some of the workers to California, where he was one of 19 people crowded into a three-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment for the winter. Holmes shared with KPLU these five things he discovered while working as a migrant berry picker in Washington state. kplu.org/post/5-things-one-anthropologist-learned-while-working-migrant-berry-picker-wash
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 14:31:05 +0000