Mechanical Harvesting, Globalization, and the Fate of Citrus Farmworkers in Florida and São Paulo, 1965–1985

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores an obsolescence of labor that did not take place. In the 1960s, Florida's citrus growers appeared poised to accompany farmers across the South in pursuing a strategy of agricultural modernization that would mechanize their harvesting labor, rendering obsolete the thirty thousand Black and white farmworkers who harvested the orange crop. Their efforts were coordinated by the Florida Citrus Commission's Harvesting Research and Development Committee (HRDC), a rotating group of growers, trade association representatives, researchers, and engineers, who were confident that mechanization was within their grasp. But two decades later, every Florida orange was harvested by hand and HRDC's funding had been gutted. Why did growers think that mechanizing harvesting labor was both necessary and imminent? And then why, within only two decades, did they make such an about-face, largely abandoning the project of mechanization? The answer, I argue, lies in the particularities of the citrus industry's experience of globalization. At the level of capital, Florida's growers were caught flat-footed by competition from the nascent citrus industry of the State of São Paulo, Brazil; and at the level of labor, immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti swelled the ranks of available workers. The narrative moves between Florida and São Paulo, examining the efforts of growers to control, monitor, and replace farmworkers, and farmworkers’ response, with the efforts and commentary of the HRDC providing the unifying thread. The argument is shown to bear on (1) the historiography of the South's agricultural modernization and (2) the historiography of the South's globalization (the “Nuevo South”), showing that it is necessary to join these two rarely connected historiographies to understand Florida's citrus industry, whose mechanization efforts spanned the 1960s histories of agricultural modernization and the 1980s histories of globalization.