1. Florida Agricultural Statistics: Citrus Summary, 1965 Issue (Florida Department of Agriculture Publication Department, 1965), 4–5.

2. Dow, J. Kamal, Impact of Mechanical Harvesting on the Demand for Labor in the Florida Citrus Industry (Gainesville, FL, 1970), 7Google Scholar.

3. 1969 U.S. Census of Agriculture, Part 29: Florida, vol. 1, U. S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC.

4. On the characteristics of modern agriculture—consolidated ownership, synthetic fertilizers, market dependent labor, partial or total mechanization—see the overview by Shane Hamilton, “Revisiting the History of Agribusiness,” Business History Review 90 (Autumn 2016): 541–45; for a history of American agribusiness sensitive to social and political factors, see Paul Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 (Lexington, KY, 2008); Harriett Friedman, “The Political Economy of Food: the Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order,” American Journal of Sociology 88: 248–68, which shows how the modern agricultural regime sustains the dependency of an agrarian periphery, and Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis (New York, 2006), esp. 375–439.

5. This runs counter to the normal tendency in agricultural modernization that “due to the industrialization of agriculture, the quantity of land and labor needed for growing crops was minimized—in the case of labor, almost to the vanishing point,” Aaron Benanav, “A Global History of Unemployment: Surplus Populations in the World Economy, 1949–2010,” (PhD diss., University of California, 2015), 125.

6. Florida Agricultural Statistics: Citrus Summary, 1965 Issue (Florida Department of Agriculture Publication Department, 1965), 5.

7. On the development of frozen concentrate, see Shane Hamilton, “Cold Capitalism: The Political Ecology of Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice,” Agricultural History 77, 4 (Autumn 2003): 557–81. On the modern history of Florida's citrus industry as a whole, Christopher Warren, “’Nature's Navels’: An Overview of the Many Environmental Histories of Florida Citrus,” in Paradise Lost?: The Environmental History of Florida, Jack E. Davis and Raymond Arsenault, eds. (Gainesville, FL, 2005): 177–200, and Scott Hussey, “Freezes, Fights, and Fancy: The Formation of Agricultural Cooperatives in the Florida Citrus Industry,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 89, 1 (Summer 2010): 81–105. These histories do not reach beyond the 1960s and so necessarily miss how quickly and fundamentally the industry was transformed by events of the 1970s and 1980s and largely neglect the topic of harvesting labor.

8. Leo C. Polopolus, Agriculture and Its Importance to the Florida Economy (Gainesville, FL, 1976).

9. The First 50 Years of the Florida Citrus Commission (Florida Department of Citrus, 1986). As John McPhee describes the commissioners, “all growers or canners or packers and nearly all millionaires,” in Oranges (New York, 1966), 123.

10. On the demographics of the labor force in the 1960s, Migrant Farm Labor in Florida (State of Florida Legislative Council, 1963), 5. The quoted term comes from Richard Follett, Sven Beckert, Peter Coclanis, and Barbara Hahn, eds., Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities (Baltimore, MD, 2016) and the description of Southern agricultural modernization, p. 156.

11. Follett, Beckert et al., eds., Plantation Kingdom, 156. Cindy Hahamovitch, “Planting Jim Crow in Modern South Florida: Growers, Government, and the Making of a Mobile Reserve Army of the Unemployed,” (unpublished manuscript, presented October 8, 2021, DC Area Labor and Working-Class History Seminar) has characterized the US South's agriculture as a whole as being meaningfully distinct from the rest of the nation due to this overwhelming “reliance on Black labor.” This, she argues, fits Florida's agriculture squarely among the southern states; but Florida departs from its plantation South neighbors in that their Black labor force was stationary—held in place through tenant contracts, debt, and threats of violence—while Florida's was mobile and migratory. I endorse this characterization and, in this paper, attempt to explain how that crucial difference resulted in a very different experience with mechanization—for growers and for workers—in Florida's citrus industry than in other southern agriculture.

12. Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture 1865–1980 (Lexington, KY, 1984); Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880 (Urbana, IL, 1985); Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1987); Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1987). For the overview that identified the “federal road” as the common culprit behind the authors’ shared stories of modernization, enclosure, and depopulation, Numan V. Bartley, “The Southern Enclosure Movement,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 71, 71 (Fall 1987): 438–50.

13. For the characterization of this as an “enclosure movement,” similar in both cause and effect to the much earlier English enclosure movements, Bartley, “The Southern Enclosure Movement,” and Daniel, Breaking the Land, 292–93. Historians have since expanded this canonical narrative of southern modernization—without changing its broad outlines—by focusing on conflicts among growers, between growers and the federal government, and between growers and the sharecroppers, tenants, and farmworkers whose labor was being displaced. Jeannie Whayne, A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas (Charlottesville, VA, 1996), and Nan Woodruff, , “Mississippi Delta Planters and Debates over Mechanization, Labor, and Civil Rights in the 1940s,” Journal of Southern History 60, 2 (May 1994): 263–28, both narrate conflict between planters’ associations, whose obstinance to accept a world where “where black workers lived off the plantation,” met with the organized resistance of tenant farmers’ unions. Economic historians Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York, 1986), and Susan A. Mann, “The Rise of Wage Labour in the Cotton South: A Global Analysis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 14, 2: 226–42, expanded the narrative outward, looking at how international economic pressures shaped the balance of forces in the region. And, more recently, Greta de Jong's You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice After the Civil Rights Movements (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016), has extended the story beyond the moment of enclosure, to the 1960s and 1970s, when Black Southerners, whose labor was now “expendable,” struggled to gain and retain rights in a hostile post-Jim Crow South where “the means of economic survival” were still held beyond their reach. On the often-parallel story in tobacco and the Upper South, Barbara Hahn, “Into the Belly of the Beast: The 2002 North Carolina Flue-Cured Tobacco Tour,” Southern Cultures 9, 3 (Fall 2003): 25–50, and Adrienne Petty, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (Oxford, 2016), chapters 8 and 9.

14. Florida Agricultural Statistics: Citrus Summary, 1975 Issue (Florida Department of Agriculture Publication Department, 1975), 4.

15. Tore C. Olsson, “The South in the World since 1865: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History 87, 1 (February 2021), 102. Olsson's overview is comprehensive and his argument—that transnational histories, rather than more traditional diplomatic or comparative histories, is the most promising method to study this history—is exactly correct, and his monograph, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton, NJ, 2017) ,serves as a model case, while still incorporating an ambitious comparative account into its transnational framework.

16. Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007).

17. For arguments against the novelty of the “Nuevo New South” on the grounds that it largely reproduced the dominant racial hierarchies and white supremacy of the South, see Perla Guerrero, Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place (Austin, TX, 2017), and Angela Stuesse, Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (Berkeley, CA, 2016); for the long history of Latina/o communities navigating and subverting those racial hierarchies, see Sarah McNamara, “Borderland Unionism: Latina Activism in Ybor City and Tampa, Florida, 1935–1937,” Journal of American Ethnic History 38, 4 (Summer 2019): 10–32, and for a comprehensive argument that recent migration can only be understood in the long context of Latina/o migration and in the joint histories the US South and Latin America, see Julie Weise, “Dispatches from the ‘Viejo’ New South: Historicizing recent Latino migrations,” Latino Studies 10 (2012): 41–59, and Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015). In the case of Florida citrus, an emphasis on continuity must be tempered by an acknowledgement that worker demographics shifted radically between the 1960s and the end of the 1980s, when Latina/os grew as a portion of the workforce from around 10 percent to around 70 percent, a quantitative change large enough to have qualitative significance. Leo C. Polopolus and Robert D. Emerson, “IRCA and Agriculture in Florida,” Immigration Reform and U.S. Agriculture, Philip L Martin et al., eds. (University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, 1995), 89.

18. For capital moving into the South, Timothy Minchin, “When Kia Came to Georgia: Southern Transplants and the Growth of America's ‘Other’ Automakers,” Journal of Southern History 83 (November 2017): 889–930; for southern companies expanding beyond the South, Bart Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York, 2015) and Country Capitalism: The American South and Planetary Ecological Change (Chapel Hill, NC, forthcoming).

19. And in occurring earlier, the experience of Florida citrus's globalization sometimes anticipates and sometimes confounds the historiographies of southern globalization. Though most of the studies of Latina/o immigration from the South begin their histories, like Fink, in the 1980s and 1990s, it began nearly a decade earlier in Florida's citrus industry. And that it happened earlier in citrus is significant. The experience with unionization of the Guatemalan poultry workers that Fink wrote about was, in fact—and as revealed in the archived interviews he conducted with workers—the union to which they belonged was in Indiantown, Florida, where they first immigrated before moving to North Carolina: it was the United Farm Workers Union, Florida Division, where they worked in Coca-Cola's Indiantown citrus groves. And in the case of citrus's capital exported into São Paulo State, it was not an “inward/outward movement,” as Olsson describes, but rather, outward/inward, and the boomerang landed with an unpleasant “thwack” when it returned to Florida's citrus industry.

20. Olsson, “The South in the World since 1865,” 98.

21. Erin Conlin, “’Work . . . or be deported’: Florida Growers and the Emergence of a Non-Citizen Agricultural Workforce,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 96, 4 (Spring 2018): 435–67, has connected the histories of (1) Florida's guest worker programs with the (2) later use of noncitizen immigrants in Florida's sugar and vegetable industries. But in citrus, attempted mechanization was the step between those two moments, pursued aggressively and at great expense by growers in the effort to control access to a labor supply.

22. The history of how industries and growers have revised contracting and hiring methods to further exploit, without consequence, the “Nuevo New South's” immigrant communities is itself still too little studied, especially in agriculture, although factory and poultry work has received attention, as in Stuesse, Scratching Out a Living and Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food (New Haven, CT, 2007). For agriculture, the literature has largely been on Florida's Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), as in Sean Sellers's “’Del pueblo, para el pueblo’: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fight for Fair Food,” (MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2009); Sean Sellers and Greg Absed, “The History and Evolution of Forced Labor in Florida Agriculture,” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 5, 1 (Autumn 2001): 29–49; and Silvia Giagnoni, Fields of Resistance: The Struggle of Florida's Farmworkers for Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). The focus on the CIW can be somewhat misleading. Because the CIW eschews traditional goals of organizing, namely, collective bargaining contracts, as won by the UFW in Florida citrus, and legislative change, as fought for by the UFW—and because Sellers neglects citrus and Giagnoni begins so close to the present—a longer history not just of farmworkers’ exploitation but of their organization is overlooked. From this perspective, I would argue that the CIW, for all of its successes, is better understood as one of the many successor organizations, less ambitious and more local, that grew up from the defeat of Florida's UFW.

23. On the increasing peripheralization and flexibilization of labor within the “agrarian periphery” proper, see Philip McMichael, ed., The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (Ithaca, NY, 1994), and, more recently, with a particular focus on Brazil, Josefa Salete Barbosa Cavalcanti and Alessandro Bonanno, eds., Labor in Globalized Food (London, 2014). In general, the strategy adopted—a familiar one in agriculture—by global agribusinesses is to hire farmworkers who are wholly dependent on wages but who have vanishingly few resources to contest exploitation or underpayment, either via law and the state (by hiring noncitizen workers) or by directly confronting an employer (by using easily replaceable third-party contractors). On guestworker programs in the United States context, see also Vanessa Casanova and Josh McDaniel, “Pines in Lines: Tree Planting, H2B Guest Workers, and Rural Poverty in Alabama,” Southern Rural Sociology, 19 (2003): 73–96.

24. On the ideological character of labor shortages, which is more typically a concern with having the “right kind” of labor available at the right cost, rather than a concern with absolute numbers of possible workers, see Conlin, “’Work or Be Deported’,” 445.

25. Conlin, “’Work or Be Deported,” and Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, NJ, 2011), 145–46.

26. Hahamovitch, “No Man's Land,” chapter 8, and “FFVA Labor Bulletin No. 307,” November 24, 1970, box 129, folder 1, Chase Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida Repository, Gainesville, FL (hereafter cited as Chase Collection).

27. Hahamovitch, No Man's Land, 179. On the UFW in Florida citrus, see Terrell Orr, “’Now We Work Just Like One’: The United Farm Workers in Florida Citrus,” Southern Cultures 25, 4 (Winter 2019): 140–57.

28. “Harvesting Research and Development Committee Meeting,” January 17, 1972, box 9, folder 18, Minutes, 1935–2017, Florida Citrus Commission, Dept. of Citrus, State Library and Archive of Florida, Tallahassee, FL (hereafter FCC Minutes).

29. “Florida Citrus Research Council Meeting,” November 3, 1966, box 9, folder 4, FCC Minutes; “Florida Citrus Research Council Meetings,” March 17, 1967, box 9, folder 6, date, FCC Minutes.

30. “Florida Citrus Research Council Meeting,” box 9, folder 4, November 3, 1966, FCC Minutes.

31. 6/3/1965, box 9 folder 1, FCC Minutes. On the difficulties of mechanizing citrus in California, Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 37.

32. “Harvesting Research and Development Committee Meeting,” June 3, 1965, box 9 folder 1, FCC Minutes.

33. But other natural difficulties remained persistent: in particular, nearly half of the Florida orange crop were Valencia oranges, whose trees carry “ripe fruit and new fruit at the same time,” so removal of the former threatens to remove the latter, McPhee, Oranges, 59. The HRDC's solution to this problem was abscission chemicals, which loosened ripe oranges enough that tree shakers would release only those.

34. “Study of Handpicking Methods of Fruit Separation,” July 18, 1967, box 9 folder 7, FCC Minutes.

35. “Meeting of Florida Citrus Industry Harvesting Committee,” May 13, 1969, box 9 folder 12, FCC Minutes.

36. “FFVA Labor Bulletin No. 233,” April 14, 1965, box 128, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association - Labor committee (1970), Chase Collection.

37. “FFVA Labor Bulletin No. 221,” February 28, 1965, box 128, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association - Labor committee (1970), Chase Collection.

38. “FFVA Labor Bulletin No. 221,” February 28, 1965, box 128, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association - Labor committee (1970), Chase Collection.

39. “Correspondence to Senator Harrison Williams,” April 29, 1969, box 127, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association – Labor (1969), Chase Collection.

40. “Correspondence to Senator Harrison Williams,” April 29, 1969, box 127, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association – Labor (1969), Chase Collection.

41. “FFVA Labor Bulletin No. 328,” March 16, 1973, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association - Labor: bulletins and legislative matters (1973), Chase Collection.

42. “Minutes: Industry Harvesting Committee,” October 13, 1972, box 9, folder 12, FCC Minutes.

43. “Florida Citrus Harvesting Research and Development Committee,” November 19, 1973, box 10, folder 1, FCC Minutes.

44. “Meeting of Florida Citrus Harvesting Research and Development Committee,” August 20, 1973, box 10, folder 1, FCC Minutes.

45. “Presentation of Mechanical Harvesting Status,” April 15, 1974, box 10, folder 2, FCC Minutes.

46. “Presentation of Mechanical Harvesting Status,” April 15, 1974, box 10, folder 2, FCC Minutes.

47. “Presentation of Mechanical Harvesting Status,” April 15, 1974, box 10, folder 2, FCC Minutes.

48. “FFVA Activities Report,” November 27, 1976, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association – General File (1976–1977), Chase Collection.

49. “Labor Bulletin, No. 350,” May 12, 1976, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association (1976), Chase Collection.

50. “Labor Bulletin, No. 350,” May 12, 1976, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association (1976), Chase Collection.

51. “Public Needs it Most of All,” The Citrus Industry, December 1976, 20.

52. “Labor Bulletin, No. 357,” February 3, 1977, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association (1976), Chase Collection.

53. José Graziano da Silva, “Agroindústria e globalização: o caso da laranja em São Paulo,” in ed. Josefa Salete Barbosa Cavalcanti, Globalização, trabalho, meio ambiente (Recife: INSPO, 2004).

54. “Freeze,” The Pensacola News, Feb. 6, 1985, 2D.

55. Elio Neves, interviewed by Cliff Welch, Araraquara, São Paulo, July 22, 1997.

56. “Meeting of Florida Citrus Harvesting Research and Development Committee,”,” May 19, 1975, box 10, folder 6, FCC Minutes.

57. “Meeting of Florida Citrus Harvesting Research and Development Committee,” May 14, 1974, box 10, folder 3, FCC Minutes.

58. “Meeting of Florida Citrus Harvesting Research and Development Committee,” October 2, 1975, box 10, folder 7, FCC Minutes.

59. “Meeting of Florida Citrus Harvesting Research and Development Committee,” May 4, 1976, box 10, folder 7, FCC Minutes.

60. An overview of the hiring structures and history of their adoption can be found in Leo Polopolus, Robert Emerson, Noy Chunkasut, and Rebecca Chung, The Florida Citrus Harvest: Prevailing Wages, Labor Practices, and Implications (Gainesville, FL, 1996).

61. “FFVA Activity Report,” September 25, 1980, Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association (1979–1980), Chase Collection.

62. “Program for the Future,” April 14, 1981, box 11, folder 6, FCC Minutes.

63. “Florida's Frost Warms Brazilian Hearts,” Tallahassee Democrat, January 24, 1982.

64. “Colhedores de laranja comemoram acordo,” Jornal do Brasil, May 20, 1981, 18.

65. “São Paulo mostra sua força,” Citrus SP, Nov. 1985, 12–13.

66. “Brazil has advantage in Orange Juice Wars,” Fort Lauderdale News, May 5, 1985.

67. Simão Pedro Chiovetti, “Reestruturação Produtiva na Agroindústria Paulista e a Luta dos Trabalhadores Rurais Assalariados,” Lutas Sociais 6 (1999): 151–66.

68. Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva, “entrevista com Padre José Domingos Bargheto.”

69. “Apanhadores de laranja em greve, em agosto, se não houverem acordos,” Realidade rural, Julho de 1984.

70. Two paradigmatic works exploring this strike are José Graziano da Silva, De bóias-frias a empregados rurais (As greves dos canavieiros paulistas de Guariba e de Leme) (Maceió: Edufal, 1997) and Jennifer Eaglin, “Sweet Fuel: Ethanol's Socio-Political Origins in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, 1933–1985” (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 2015), 221–73. Both works explore the reasons behind the sugarcane workers striking but neither differentiates the cause of the sugarcane and citrus workers. I argue that the strike of the citrus works had as much to do with local issues and traditions of labor organizing as it did with industry-specific changes in global competition, specifically, with rise in prices that benefited São Paulo's citrus growers and processors after the freezes in Florida.

71. Oliveira, “Aos Trabalhadores nem o Bagaço,” 172, and “Brazil has advantage in Orange Juice Wars,” Fort Lauderdale News, May 5, 1985.

72. “Brazil has advantage in Orange Juice Wars,” Fort Lauderdale News, May 5, 1985.

73. Oliveira, “Aos Trabalhadores nem o Bagaço,” 173.

74. Oliveira, “Aos Trabalhadores nem o Bagaço,” 173.

75. It is too easy, especially in this dramatic case, to overstress the role of “spontaneity,” as Elio Neves attested, FETAESP and other local unions were organizing workers toward the ultimate conflagration for years.

76. Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva, “entrevista com Padre José Domingos Bargheto.”

77. Oliveira, “Aos Trabalhadores nem o Bagaço,” 194.

78. Oliveira, “Aos Trabalhadores nem o Bagaço,” 212. This reversal-of-fortunes among workers competing across national boundaries suggests a tentative revision to the “race to the bottom” conception of global labor history best exemplified by Chomsky, Aviva, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (Durham, NC, 2008), 11, 211–12Google Scholar, along the lines of Silver, Beverly, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge, 2003), 3–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though, per Chomsky, it does seem that this opportunity for organization and gains among São Paulo's citrus farmworkers was only temporary. There may be a race, though it runs through the zigzagging and non-linear course of global capitalist competition.

79. Jeff Bloch, “Citrus Freeze Puts Long-term Squeeze on Industry,” The Miami Herald, March 14, 1982. This claim was later shown to have been spurious by labor economist D. Marshall Barry, “The Adverse Impact of Immigration,” 7–8.

80. Florida Citrus Mutual Triangle, October 29, 1982, 2.

81. “The Pros and Cons of Illegal Labor,” The Citrus Industry, August 1983, 11.

82. Lauren Ritchie, “88 Illegal Aliens Sent Home, U.S. Probes Crew Bosses,” The Orlando Sentinel, February 18, 1983.

83. Lauren Ritchie, “88 Illegal Aliens Sent Home, U.S. Probes Crew Bosses,” The Orlando Sentinel, February 18, 1983.

84. Lauren Ritchie, “Workers Find a Promised Land After the Dismal Life in Mexico,” The Orlando Sentinel, May 9, 1983.

85. The Hands that Feed Us: Undocumented Farmworkers in Florida (Washington DC,1986), 25–28.

86. Box 6, Folder 11, UFW Florida Boycott Records.

87. “United Farm Workers Hope to Squeeze Citrus Processors, The Tampa Tribune, December 12, 1985.

88. Tirso Moreno, interview by author, May 21, 2021.

89. “Report to the PEP Labor Crews, Inc. and Farmworker Association of Central Florida, Inc.,” Florida International University Special Collections, Miami, FL.

90. Tirso Moreno, interview by Laurie Sommers, Apopka, Fla. March 6, 1998, Last Harvest Documentation Project, UA 22-12, Box 14, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, GA.