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.

本文探讨了一种没有发生的劳动力过时现象。在 1960 年代，佛罗里达州的柑橘种植者似乎准备与南方各地的农民一起推行农业现代化战略，使他们的收割劳动机械化，使三万名收获橙子作物的黑人和白人农场工人过时。他们的工作由佛罗里达柑橘委员会的收获研究与发展委员会 (HRDC) 协调，该委员会由种植者、贸易协会代表、研究人员和工程师组成，他们相信机械化已在他们的掌握之中。但二十年后，佛罗里达州的每一个橙子都是人工采摘的，HRDC 的资金被耗尽。为什么种植者认为机械化收割劳动既必要又迫在眉睫？然后为什么，在仅仅二十年的时间里，他们是否做出了这样的转变，基本上放弃了机械化项目？我认为，答案在于柑橘业全球化经历的特殊性。在资本层面，佛罗里达州的种植者在来自巴西圣保罗州新兴柑橘产业的竞争中措手不及；在劳动力层面，来自墨西哥、危地马拉和海地的移民扩大了可用工人的队伍。故事在佛罗里达和圣保罗之间移动，审视种植者为控制、监控和更换农场工人所做的努力，以及农场工人的反应，HRDC 的努力和评论提供了统一的线索。该论点被证明与 (1) 南方农业现代化的史学和 (2) 南方的史学有关。