The Hiddenness of Migrant Bodies

This chapter opens with a discussion of the invisibility of migrant workers. Many people in Washington State’s Skagit Valley are unaware that migrants live in the area. The erasure of migrants enables and perpetuates their suffering and mistreatment. Improving the plight of migrants demands seeing their suffering and the structural inequalities that cause it. This applies both to white residents and to migrants themselves. Inequities must also be recognized as socially constructed and changeable, rather than normative, natural, and deserved. The suffering of migrants has been normalized by everyone involved, including migrants. Understanding how this occurred is key to fostering equality and respect.

Symbolic Violence

Holmes draws on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence to explain how inequalities become normalized and are therefore unchallenged even by the oppressed. Symbolic violence is “the naturalization, including internalization, of social asymmetries” (157), which occurs “through doxa (mental schemata) and habitus (historically accreted bodily comportments)” (157) that stem from the social world and thus make social orders seem natural. Many see oppression as natural because it fits their mental schemata. As Holmes aptly puts, “symbolic violence acts within the process of perception, hidden from the conscious mind” (157).