Possibilities for Hope and Change

Holmes’s conclusion offers hope for the future. He calls on scholars to be attentive to opportunities to enact change, pointing to symbolic violence as a key path forward. This change can’t come through education alone. Rather, change requires a radical transformation of the conditions that produce particular dispositions. Social structures, the bodily dispositions they produce, and the symbolic structures that reinforce them are strongly interconnected. Thus, changes in social structures, such as new immigration and labor policies, can create new bodily dispositions and symbols, including new metaphors, stereotypes, and connotations related to migrants. In turn, these developments can lead to changes in actions and social structures themselves. The role of scholars isn’t just to theorize and do research. Holmes urges scholars to change perceptions and the inequalities they maintain by joining with others “in a broad effort to denaturalize social inequalities, uncovering linkages between symbolic violence and suffering” (191). His book denaturalizes ethnic and citizenship inequities in farm labor, health disparities in migrant clinics, and racialized inequality in American society. Exploring how symbolic violence legitimizes and reinforces dangerous conditions on the US-Mexico border is key to demilitarizing the border and imagining more effective healthcare.