Lecture, Session 14

The following is an excerpt from Karen Richman's book Migration and Voodoo (University of Florida Press, 2005).  To purchase this book online, please Click Here. 

Haitian Transnational Migration

    Movements of people between the United States and Haiti reach back to the late eighteenth century, to the overthrow of European colonial rule and to the creation, in 1776 and 1804, respectively, of the first and second independent nation-states in the New World.  Opposing ideologies of race and racial slavery undermined potential kinship between the new renegade polities.  For North American settlers, winning political and economic autonomy from Britain only compounded racial difference; citizenship presumed whiteness in the new United States.  By contrast, the revolution in St. Domingue (the name of the French colony) was a rejection of both racial discrimination (particularly against free persons of color) and chattel slavery, whose resolution ultimately necessitated political independence from France.  The first “transnational” migrants between Haiti and the United States sojourned in the racial breach dividing the two nation-states.  They were refugees of a race war raging in one and the race-based nation-building of the other.

    The thirteen-year long struggle for freedom and citizenship for its African-descended majority was waged in St. Domingue at the same time that plantation slavery was expanding in the new American nation.  The thoroughly “free” Haiti that emerged threatened plantation agriculture and slavery in the United States, not to mention the estate of the slave-owning planter President, Thomas Jefferson (Plummer 1992: 18).  The emergent United States welcomed the fleeing French colonists, many of whom arrived with their slaves, and even provided funds to resettle them (Laguerre 1998: 33).  The United States government refused to recognize the Haitian republic for more than six decades, that is, until the emancipation of black slaves within their own national borders.

    The exodus of the colonists and the demise of the plantation system in Haiti at the outset of the nineteenth century provided openings for descendants of slaves in the newly independent nation to "reconstitute" a free-holding peasantry.  Mintz (1974) has argued that the freed slaves in fact extended their “proto-peasant” experience during slavery.  Slaves’ control of food production and exchange of products from their provision grounds during slavery provided a crucial foothold such that, once slavery ended, they succeeded in rapidly entrenching themselves as small, independent, land-holding farmers.  The peasants were therefore able to resist pressures to coerce them into plantation wage labor by the new state, beginning with the founding president and revolutionary leader, Dessalines.  It took the economic and military might of a new twentieth-century colonial power–-the United States--to push the Haitian peasants into capitalist agriculture.  Over the course of the twentieth century, the Haitian peasant economy was increasingly weakened and transformed into one that produces unskilled, wage labor for export and increasingly consumes imported food.  Haitian migrant laborers have thus followed and abetted the expansions and declines of North American capital by migrating to Cuba, other parts of Haiti, the Dominican Republic (the eastern side of the island), the Caribbean and, ultimately, to the United States and Canada.  The U.S. Occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 consolidated, rather than created, Haiti's emerging role as a source of cheap labor to an expanding American sugar empire.  The first important wave of migration to Cuba followed a revolt by native labor, when between 1200 and 1500 Haitians migrated (Lundahl 1983: 100-101).  Jacques Roumain's (1946) novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée, memorialized this experience in his portrayal of a “viejo,” returning from Cuba after a long absence.  The rates of migration steadily increased through the mid-twenties, with an annual recruitment by United Fruit and General Sugar of more than 20,000 workers.  About one-third of the workers remained permanently in Cuba (Lundahl 1983: 101).  The flow to Cuba ended abruptly during the depression in the early thirties when the United States shifted its sugar production to the Pacific and Puerto Rico.  Haitian workers were repatriated, exacerbating an already dire employment problem in the home country (Lundahl 1983: 106).

    The occupation of the western portion of Hispaniola (Haiti) coincided with--and outlasted--the intervention in the eastern side.  Between 1916 and 1924, the American Marines occupied the Dominican Republic.  While the country was under U.S. political control, the American-owned sugar industry greatly expanded.  Haitian workers provided the bulk of the labor.  Wages in the Dominican Republic descended to little more than the rate across the border.  As a contemporary Dominican observer commented on the 20 to 30 cents-a-day labor, "the cheap imported seasonal labor digs a pit of subsistence wages at the feet of the Dominican workers in the interest of the sugar business" (cited in Lundahl 1983: 122).  Lundahl (1983: 119) guesses that between 1916 and 1925 at least 150,000 Haitians crossed the border which had become a "veritable osmosis."  Yet the Administration issued only 300 visas in 1918 and 4,100 in 1923, the highest annual amount during the period.  The role of the United States policy in fostering the undocumented flow during the period is plain.

    The huge and vulnerable “illegal” Haitian population were easy scapegoats during the subsequent depression of the Dominican sugar industry.  In 1937, between 15,000 to 25,000 Haitian migrants were rounded up and slaughtered.  The Haitian government of Stenio Vincent did not only fail to protect them, they confiscated funds later earmarked to compensate families of victims (Heinl and Heinl 1978: 529).  I interviewed Richelieu Darius, an elder in the Ti Rivyè hamlet who narrowly escaped the terror in “Dominikani.”  Despite this atrocity and the dreadful conditions there, which are regularly deplored by human rights organizations, the Dominican Republic ultimately became the unwelcoming "host" to the second largest population of diaspora Haitians.  The town of Léogane continues to serve as a center of annual recruitment for “the Kongo” in the Dominican Republic.  But few men from the village of Ti Rivyè walk the short distance to the town to sign up for the Kongo, which is widely seen as the ultimate symbol of desperation.

    As the Bahamas was entering the U.S. economic orbit in the early fifties, as many as 40,000 Haitians provided the unskilled labor in construction and services (Marshall 1979 and 1985).  This clandestine migration originated primarily in the north and northwest provinces, the areas within closest reach to these islands.  When the Bahamian tourism-driven economic boom ended, Haitian immigrants were subjected to harassment, incarceration and summary deportations.

    While neither the Dominican Republic nor the Bahamas have drawn significant migration from Ti Rivyè, the French Départements of Guadeloupe and Martinique and Quebec, have been a magnet for men and women of Ti Rivyè.  After South Florida, Guadeloupe hosts the largest number of emigrants from Ti Rivyè .  Tens of thousands of Haitians migrated to the French Caribbean, Quebec, and to France during the seventies, leaving on planes with quasi-legal status, visa in hand.  Indeed a testament to this “legal” movement, which is classified as “leaving with a visa,” was constructed near the Ti Rivyè shoreline during the mid-eighties–-a new tin-roofed house painted in pink, white and pastel green, a popular combination during the migration-financed housing boom.  Painted on the side of the house was a huge mural of a jet and the words AIR FRANCE, the airline connecting Haiti and the French Départements, printed below it.

    Haitian workers began migrating to North America in significant numbers during the late sixties, part of the broad "new" Caribbean migration feeding the restructuring and relocations of U.S. manufacture (Bryce-Laporte 1979).  The Caribbean and Central America, as we saw above, were attractive frontiers for the intensified "subcontracting" of phases of assembly-line production.  As service industries replaced manufacture in center cities, low-paying, labor intensive service jobs became a magnet for immigrant workers.  Haitian migrants to the United States received ten times as many nonimmigrant tourist visas as they did immigrant visas.  Portes (1978) argued that the vulnerability of state-less migrants was structured by the host state.  The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) fully anticipated that the "tourists" would violate their visas and stay to work.  The INS only ever pursued a tiny minority of the undocumented immigrant population, just enough to indirectly harass the non-immigrant Haitian population as a whole into obedience.

    Between 1960 and 1980, a higher proportion of the Caribbean population emigrated than did the peoples of any other world area (Barry, et. al. 1984: 13).  Rates of out-migration ranged as high as 25%.  Haiti fell in the middle with one out of every five or six living Outside (Deyò).  The annual national emigration rate between 1971 and 1981 was 4.95%, with an estimated 23,240 leaving every year.  Port-au-Prince's population of internal exiles from declining rural areas, which had more than tripled during the previous two decades (1950 and 1971), was now growing at only 2%  (IHSI 1983c and 1984).  More Haitian women emigrated to the U.S. cities during this period because women obtained tourist visas more easily than men (Buchanan 1979a).  New York was the major destination of emigrés from the capital city, as it was for other Caribbean and Latin American populations.

    The mode and destination of Haitian migration to the United States changed at the end of the nineteen seventies, and the number of Haitians living in South Florida today rivals the Haitian population of greater New York.   Between 1979 and 1982, a flotilla of sailboats left Haitian waters for the South Florida coast, embarking directly from rural, coastal areas, bypassing the capital city of Port-au-Prince, the typical intermediary step for U.S.-bound emigrants.  The first detected Haitian refugee boat arrived in Florida in 1963 (Stepick (1987: 137).  The passengers' asylum requests were denied and they were repatriated.  Ten years later, another sailboat reached Florida.  As more Haitians became convinced of the possibility of completing the voyage to Florida and of being allowed to stay, the flow increased (Boswell 1982).  By 1977, Haitians boats were arriving regularly.  Between 1979 and 1981, as many as 70,000 Haitians entered Florida by boat.  By 1983, another 10,000 to 15,000 had entered by plane (Stepick and Stepick 1990: 73).  The early boat migrants were almost entirely male, but as the flow progressed, more women emigrated.  A sample of passengers arriving between January and April 1980, just before the height of the flow, indicated a 70:30 ratio of men to women.  The migrants were overwhelmingly young adults: up to 60% were between 18 and 29 years of age and 25-30% were between 30 and 44 years old (Buchanan 1982: iv).

    Haitians referred to these voyages as“kanntè.”  According to legend, when people started attempting to cross 700 miles of open sea in small, open, motorless sailboats, someone jested to the effect that, "those crazy people are so sure they will make it to Miami, they would think they were taking a Canter (kanntè)!"  Canter signifies power, speed and control–-the opposite of the fishermen’s “canoes.”  It is the name of the motoring powering the imposing Japanese trucks that transported people, produce, small livestock and other commodities between the central urban market and the provinces.  An emblem of internal marketing of peasant products thus became the dominant symbol of ruined peasant laborers risking their lives to sail toward Miami.

    The kanntè image was immortalized in the Gemini All Stars de Ti Manno’s hit recording of Canter in 1981.  William Colas, a band member, composed the song.  Colas strongly rebuked the impetuous voyagers, who offered themselves as naive prey for smugglers and sharks.  The chorus chided, 

    Instead, the song exhorts the hopeful migrants to stay in the countryside and put their efforts into farming.  The concluding line of the verse shifts to the authoritative register of French to advise the rural poor: trust in providence and patience.  The singer cites the French proverb,“Petit à petit l’oiseau fait son nid”(Little by little the bird makes its nest).

    Little River’s intense participation in kanntè between 1979 and 1982 partly overlaps with song’s representation.  The residents of this coastal fishing village certainly “tempted luck” (tante chans) by daring to cross seven hundred miles of open sea in their fifteen-foot “canoes.”  Even before they could risk their lives at sea, though, they exposed themselves to arrest for trying to depart illegally by boat.  Organizers and passengers of kanntè were often arrested, fined, beaten and imprisoned, though these fates varied in relation to political connections and bribes.   

    The song’s portrayal of vicious smugglers deviates from the experience of coastal Ti Rivyè.  Groups of between ten and twenty local relatives and neighbors collaborated to set sail in their own “canoes.”   They navigated by stars and compass according to instructions sent back by earlier adventurers.  They knew what to expect should their boats run aground near Cuba, namely that the Cubans would repair the boats and then pull them out to sea, and they knew what to expect once they arrived in Miami, as well.  They further anticipated that some boats would reach only as far as the Bahamas with the hope that they could eventually continue to Miami.  Many who ran aground in the Bahamas were returned to Haiti, only to attempt the departure again.

    These Canter voyages preceded and then coincided with the much larger 1980 flow of 125,000 Cuban refugees from the port of Mariel.  The INS extended a warm welcome to the Cuban exiles.  It rejected the Haitian refugees.  Perhaps the most embarrassing evidence of the disparity in the treatment of the two immigrant groups was the 1979 verdict by Federal District Judge King finding "specific discrimination against Haitians at a high level."  Judge King ordered the INS to reprocess 5,000 Haitian asylum applications (Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti 503 F.Supp. 442 (S.D. Fla 1980).  (Benjamin Civiletti was the U.S. Attorney General, see also Miller 1984: 94).  The Carter Administration responded to the King verdict by announcing that the INS would henceforth treat the two groups equally (Miller 1984: 94, Rocheleau 1984: 13 Stepick 1982b: 12)  In June, 1980, the Administration created a special temporary Cuban-Haitian "entrant" category granting the privilege to work and such limited benefits as access to workman's compensation, food stamps and public legal services. This policy change probably stimulated increased migrations from both Haiti and from the inhospitable host society of the Bahamas (Rocheleau 1984: 27).

    Almost immediately after taking office, President Reagan moved to garner the growing reactionary and xenophobic mood related to the national economic downturn.  The Haitian boat people were a ready scapegoat.  The Justice Department led the charge in reformulating an alien threat to the nation which gave the President a mandate to "regain control of the borders" (1981 Congressional Testimony of Secretary of Justice, William French Smith, cited in Miller 1984: 72).  The coastal invasion of 70,000 black, indigent refugees from the most reviled island nation in the hemisphere was "detrimental to the national interest," even though the coinciding inrush of 125,000 Cubans and 175,000 Indochinese posed no danger to the same (Stepick 1982b: 12 and Miller 1984: 73).

     Haitians who had already "entered" were consigned to immigration limbo ("status pending") for the better part of the decade, meaning they could not leave the country without jeopardizing their tenuous privilege to work in the United States.  Cuban entrants, on the other hand, had their status converted to permanent residents.

    Haitians who were still attempting to "enter" were held at the INS detention center in Miami and then dispersed to federal prisons in several other states, ostensibly to await deportation proceedings, but really to coerce them to volunteer to be repatriated.  Attorney Cheryl Little of the Haitian Refugee Center told me in 1991 that the INS commonly surprised detainees in the middle of the night and took them to remote federal prisons far away.  Isolating them from the support of fellow migrants, legal advocates, and cutting off their ability to communicate with their home succeeded in dissuading many from trying to endure their incarceration.  The returned migrants I interviewed in Ti Rivyè who had languished in the prisons told me that the anxiety of not hearing from their families was the key reason behind their requests to be returned.

    Haitian prisoners were increasingly being deported until June, 1982, when Federal District Judge Spellman ordered all Haitian prisoners released on parole (Louis v. Nelson 544 F.SUPP. 973 (S.D. Fla 1982)).  Within three months of the Spellman decision, President Reagan and dependent Haitian President-for-Life, Jean-Claude Duvalier, had signed a treaty to "stop the illegal migration" (Letter of U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Ernest Preeg, 23 September, 1981).  The goal was to keep the refugees from reaching U.S. shores where U.S. courts could enforce their rights under U.S. laws.  The accord stipulated U.S. placement of Coast Guard cutters in the Windward passage between Cuba and Haiti, interdiction of all Haitian boats, questioning of every passenger to determine valid claims for asylum and repatriation of those deemed ineligible for refugee status.  Between September, 1981 and February, 1991, a total of eleven Haitians were found to have valid asylum claims and allowed to enter the United States to apply for asylum (Haiti Insight 1992 3(6): 4).

    For the Haitian state's part, Duvalier vowed to increase surveillance of coasts, to arrest illegal migrants and not to persecute returnees (with the exception of "traffickers").  In Ti Rivyè, prosecution of those suspected of organizing voyages seemed to correlate with their personal and political connections.  I witnessed several cases during my year and half in Ti Rivyè of men arrested and imprisoned for alleged attempts to organize a boat.  None was charged or tried before their relatives purchased their release.  The investigators on board the cutters indeed rejected virtually all claims to political asylum.

    The flow of boats did not resume with any regularity until October, 1991, during the violent coup d'etat that ousted the newly elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.  The U.S. government immediately dispatched a flotilla of Coast Guard cutters to prevent the refugees from reaching the U.S.  Two thirds of the more than 23,000 escapees who arrived by the end of May were determined to be "economic migrants" and were almost immediately repatriated.  In response to human rights protests the INS set up a detention camp in Guantanamo Bay (where U.S. laws did not extend) to process their asylum claims.  Applying due process, the INS soon found about 40,000 to have valid claims and permitted them to enter the United States.

    But the prospect of a new Haitian invasion was politically intolerable.  Having no legitimate way to reduce the high rate of acceptance of valid asylum claims, President George H. Bush ordered the closing of the Guantanamo camp and reinstated the policy of forced return of all interdictees, without benefit of an interview to determine the validity of their asylum claims (Haiti Insight 1992 3(7): 1).   A tiny portion of the detention center remained open for an extended period, however, in order to become the world’s first concentration camp for the H.I.V. positive.  The INS moved to keep those whom they had already determined to be bonafide refugees from entering the U.S. by later testing them for H.I.V.  The 250 who tested positive languished in the camp’s tents for two years before being deported. (Richman 1993).

      In addition to these brief, intense boat migrations, there has been continuous movement of Haitians into and within the county of Palm Beach. First is the stream coming from Little River (primarily by airplane), as the former "boat" migrants continue to sponsor the migrations of their family members who arrive by airplane with legal or quasi-legal visas in hand. Second is the movement of Little River migrants within South Florida, which parallels their changing labor incorporation. Alex Stepick's (1998) analysis of Haitian migrants' incorporation in the South Florida economy reveals that few industries offered employment to the Haitian "boat people." As a result, the new immigrants could find work only in the most wretched sector: migratory farmwork. They were based in Belle Glade, Immokalee, Fort Pierce and other agricultural sites in Florida and worked on agribusiness farms along the middle East Coast during the summer. Most moved out of this irregular, low paying and dangerous work as soon as they could; some were pushed out by the agriculture industry itself, in retaliation for successful lawsuits filed against growers during the nineteen eighties (Richman 1992b). By the early nineties, most of the Little River migrants had relocated to Palm Beach and Broward Counties to work in the lower levels of the burgeoning industries of tourism, service, and health care (hotels, restaurants, theme parks, landscaping, construction, transportation, cleaning, and nursing homes.)

     Their home anchor in Little River is a quasi-peasant village. The people of Little River eke out a livelihood through farming (primarily sugar cane), fishing, and marketing of the food. Yet, their main economic activities seem to be producing low-cost labor for export, consuming wage remittances and imported food, and reabsorbing migrants when their capacity to work elsewhere expires. Everyday discourse reproduces their consciousness as producers of mobile labor and consumers of migrants' remittances. Children grow up expecting one day to "leave in search of a livelihood for their family" (chache lavi pou fanmi yo). Mundane references in village discourse to members located "Outside" (deyò) and "over there" (lòt bo a) further naturalize the reality of dispersal to South Florida, or Mayami, in particular.

     From Mayami, the migrants remain intimately tied to their mooring in Little River. "Transmigrants" (Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton 1994) return when they can for vacation visits, religious and family celebrations, seek therapy and recuperation, and retirement. Since they can only travel infrequently, the migrants' residential concentration in Palm Beach and Broward Counties is an important aspect of their continued involvement with one another and with their home. Independent couriers who specialize "coming and going" (va y vyen) run personalized, efficient, and entirely unregulated "parcel services" between distinct villages and urban neighborhoods in Haiti and their migrant satellite sites abroad. Members of this transnational community have long entrusted their money, correspondence, information, and gifts to the men and women who travel regularly between their host and home sites.

One device has provided a particularly vital linkage across this transnational community: the portable radio and cassette-recorder. For most Haitians, whose domination has long been reproduced by illiteracy in the colonial language, French, cassettes offer a way to "write" in their own beloved vernacular, Creole (Kreyol). But even if people were literate, the tapes are far more congenial for extending their emphatically oral Creole aesthetic, one that prizes proverbs, figurative language, indirection, antiphony, and fluid shifting between speech and song. Corresponding by cassette has become so normal that the term "to write (a letter)" (ekri) means recording a cassette rather than the epistolary form. There is now a distinctive genre of cassette-discourse, including formulaic greetings and salutations. Both recording and listening to a cassette-letter are "performance events" (Bauman 1984; Richman 2002). The portable cassette-radio thus stands as an epitomizing symbol, that is, "a model of and a model for" this transnational society (Geertz 1973:93). The apparatus is likely to be prominently displayed in the migrants' Florida apartments. A "boom box" is likewise an appropriate gift to send home, especially with the price tag still conspicuously attached. The device radiates the vitality of the dispersed family's intimacy. As a symbol of conspicuous consumption––like any art object--the apparatus at the same time connotes the migrant's success abroad.