Sunday Feb 28, 2016 · 8:16 PM EST
On January 1, 1996, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, with the goal of eliminating barriers to trade and investment between the three signatories: Canada, Mexico and the United States. Within 10 years, major U.S. corn producers, heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars, had flooded the Mexican market, putting as many as 2 million farm workers out of jobs. Entire villages were wiped out, and while some moved to the cities, the majority went north to the United States, looking for work so that their families could eat. Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas program at the Center for International Policy, wrote in 2013:
As a result, 20 million Mexicans live in “food poverty”. Twenty-five percent of the population does not have access to basic food and one-fifth of Mexican children suffer from malnutrition. Transnational industrial corridors in rural areas have contaminated rivers and sickened the population and typically, women bear the heaviest impact.
The immigrants that Republicans would love to see behind bars, if not behind a massive wall, do not choose to migrate north. They are forced to do so by the very companies that pressured Congress to agree to NAFTA 20 years ago.
The Triqui are an indigenous people of Mexico, from an area known as Mixteca in the mountains of Oaxaca. They have their own traditions and language and, until NAFTA, were subsistence corn farmers. What they didn’t eat, they used to be able to sell. Companies like Cargill dominate that market now, and these people, who managed to survive the Spanish conquistadors, are now forced to migrate to live.
Seth Holmes was a post-graduate student of anthropology and medicine when he decided to do his thesis on the people of the village of San Miguel who travel north to pick our produce.
?Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is an ethnography written by a man with knowledge of both anthropology and medicine. In order to understand and explain this indigenous culture, he immersed himself, over a period of five years, in the Triqui society that he was observing. He traveled to Oaxaca to meet them in their village in the mountains and joined them on their journey north. And in the fields of Washington and California.
Fortunately for the general reader, Seth Holmes, in addition to being an anthropologist and doctor, is a talented wordsmith. His first chapter includes a riveting account of the journey from Oaxaca in southern Mexico to the border and north across the Arizona desert until they are stopped and sent to “border jail.” Seth Holmes was eventually released with a civil fine ($5,000), while his fellow travelers were fingerprinted, photographed and sent back to Mexico. His description of the 49-hour bus ride that preceded the border crossing is fascinating in its own right, as is his description of his initial arrival in the remote village, known for its violence and its lack of tolerance for outsiders.
Throughout the book, Holmes takes the time to put these experiences into a wider context:
...my Triqui companions explain that they are forced to cross the border. In addition, the distinction between economic and political migration is often blurry in the context of international policies enforcing neoliberal free markets as well as active military repression of indigenous people who seek collective socioeconomic improvement in southern Mexico.
The migration is forced by the simple need to eat. They willingly endure a marathon journey across Mexico and the Sonora desert just to pick strawberries. These migrants are not interested in remaining in the States. They would rather be home in the mountains, surrounded by friends and family.
Read more
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/28/1489938/-About-that-fresh-fruit-you-love-so-much
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