This excerpt comes from Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered, pp. 189-200. Nina Glick-Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds. New York: New York Academy of the Sciences (1992).
For complete bibliography of Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (which includes citations to follow), please Click Here.
Inflections of Transnationalism in the Discourse of Haitian President Aristide," by Karen Richman
Multi-sited, transnational Haitian communities reach back two centuries, when Haitian families dispersed by the revolution, prevailed upon trading vessels to help them stay in touch (Laguerre 1998). Migrants' innovative uses of instantaneous and inexpensive technologies of communication, travel, audio and video recording, and the circulation of money (by computer modems and human couriers alike) have intensified and eased these simultaneous involvements. The growing transnational consciousness of contemporary Haitians (both at home and abroad) was belatedly acknowledged and appropriated by Haitian political discourse after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship. Their transnational experience was validated and reformulated in the eloquent, stirring discourse of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a liberation priest, who became a presidential candidate in the first free elections of 1990 (Richman 1992a; Richman and Balan-Gaubert 2000). The campaign unfolded as much inside Haiti as in its diaspora as migrants simultaneously engaged in politics as immigrants and as transnationals, claiming political rights and obligations and practicing long-distance nationalism (Laguerre 1998, Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001).
Aristide's landslide victory in 1990 culminated in the declaration of a nation-state without borders. Haiti now included, in addition to its nine internal provinces, an external Dixième Département, a Tenth Province, divided like the internal ones, into arrondissements and communes, with cabinet-level representation by the "Minister of the Diaspora." (The Tenth Province is often referred to as simply "The Tenth.") This "deterritorialized" nation-state affirmed that many of its citizens must live outside the country, but it maneuvers to anchor them to the homeland and benefit thereby from return visits, remittances, and investments.
Creole is now an official language of Haiti. Its newfound respect owes much to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Speaking Creole, he captivated people who have long been excluded from the political process. He spoke to them in their own beloved vernacular, using Creole proverbs and well-known speech routines and implicitly meant inclusion.
Aristide’s insistence on speaking Creole even at the most formal occasions reserved for French was tolerated in part because of his proven competence in the language of the subject. Indeed he is over-qualified, since he fluently speaks French, Spanish, English, Hebrew. The Creole poet Jean-Claude Martineau, who composed in exile during the Duvalier dictatorship and returned when Aristide was elected to the presidency in 1990, pronounced at an inaugural reception in early 1991: “I feel that with Aristide Creole is finally flourishing in the White House.”
After seven months in office the new president went to New York and proudly introduced a new language to the UN. He addressed the body of the UN in the language of slaves, the language of the Other: Creole. When he returned from that heady meeting the violent coup to oust him was already underway, and he went into exile.
US and US media which supported the coup, repeatedly portrayed his ability to communicate with the masses in the “darkest” terms he had unleashed a mob, class-warfare, incited by his “fiery” Creole rhetoric.
Lavalas means deluge in Haitian Creole. A lavalas surges with the first torrential rains after a drought and ravages everything in its path, only to fertilize the ground anew. Jean-Claude Martineau, writing and composing in exile under the pseudonym of Koralen, invoked the lavalas image in his celebrated 1975 freedom song, "Ayiti Demen" (Haiti Tomorrow), to describe an utter destruction of the Duvalierist state. A grassroots deluge propelled by "little churches" (Ti Kominite Legliz) indeed brought down President-for-Life, Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. But the United States hastily intervened to install a military junta which dutifully pledged their commitment to steward a transition to civilian government. Macabre incarnations of "Duvalierism without Duvalier" brutally restrained the tide for fundamental political change spilling over America's pesky dependency until October 1990, when Haitians unleashed a torrent of unprecedented solidarity known as "Lavalas." Their anthem: Martineau's "Ayiti Demen;" their slogan: "Alone we are weak, together we are strong, united together we are a lavalas!"
An intrepid "little priest," the author of the Lavalas slogan, had just declared his last-minute decision to campaign for the Haitian presidency in the upcoming December elections. A masterful Creole orator and champion of the indigent and downtrodden, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been a leader in the movement to "uproot" Duvalier and, during the imperialist-junta alliance which succeeded the dictator, he thrice narrowly eluded martyrdom (Richman 1990).
When Father Aristide announced his campaign, he minimized identification with his nominating party--a fragile alliance that splintered soon after the elections--and emphasized instead affiliation with the Lavalas "party of the people." Aristide's usage of "the people" meant persons residing inside the country's nine provinces and Haitians dispersed "outside" (deyò), around the four cardinal points of the diaspora," as he was fond of saying. Speaking at a rally before twenty thousand supporters in Miami (the second largest population center of the Haitian diaspora) two weeks after his entry into the electoral race, Aristide launched "Lavalas For (the benefit of) Home" (Lavalas Pou Lakay). Lavalas For Home would descend along with "Lavalas At Home" (Lavalas Lakay) to clear the ground at Home:
|
Gen Lavalas Lakay. Gen Lavalas pou Lakay. Lavalas lakay se pitit kay Ki mete ansanm pou yo desann. Nou se Lavalas pou Lakay Ki bay randevou Lakay. Si Lakay poko bèl Lakay pral vin bèl. Fòk Lakay vin bèl. |
There is Lavalas at Home. There is Lavalas for Home. Lavalas at Home are our people Who unite together to go down. You are Lavalas For Home Who have an appointment at Home. If Home is not yet beautiful Home will become beautiful. Home must become beautiful. |
(Haïti Progrès 7-13 Nov. 1990).
Lavalas For Home flooded the Aristide campaign with wages earned by Haitian migrants in Miami, New York, Montréal, Boston, Chicago and beyond. Lavalas at Home handed Aristide sixty-seven percent of the vote in the December twelve party contest.
The swift mobilization of Lavalas For Home in support of Aristide's candidacy confirms that the Haitian electoral process took place Outside as much as Inside. The transnational setting of the recent Haitian political contest is one instance of a growing world phenomenon. For like other workers whose movements followed and reinforced the transnational redistribution of capital over the last two decades, Haitians are constructing and reinventing social relations, religious ties, economic strategies and political allegiances which continuously straddle international borders (Basch 1987; Sutton 1987; Glick-Schiller and Fouron 1990; Richman 1990, Charles 1992 and Glick-Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992).
Nina Glick-Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (1992:11) have identified three facets of "transmigration" that can guide our explorations of the Haitian experience of migration, and of President Aristide's reconstruction of it. First, mobile laborers endure chronic, compound vulnerability in relation to both home and host societies. Second, migrants create cross-national relations, networks and institutions as mainstays of security. Third, such strategies encompass, rather than resolve, conflicting tendencies, some overt and others latent, to resist and to accommodate incorporation into the structures of their migration.
This see-saw in the experience of international displacement figured and refigured in Aristide's forceful Creole rhetoric with and about Haitian migrants. I would suggest that the preacher's successive transformations of this dialectic, as opposed to his resolution of it, contributed to his overwhelming endorsement by Lavalas For Home. Aristide identified with Haitian migrants' experience of double insecurity and their contradictory proclivities both to reject and to acquiesce to it. His fervent discourse of protest, carried by an antiphonal Creole style widely interpreted as a metaphor of popular political empowerment, exhorted migrants to reject policies of colluding home and host states contributing to their oppression. His subdued, but equally persuasive, rhetoric of accommodation, on the other hand, encouraged the birds of passage to continue following and abetting the asymmetrical migrations of transnational capital.
Two issues crystallized and exposed the chronic insecurity of Haitian immigrants in the United States during the last decade and so figured prominently in the contest of Haitian ethnic identity (Buchanan 1980; Glick-Schiller, et. al. 1987 and Glick-Schiller and Fouron 1990). Both issues involved agencies of the United States government in "constructing" an alien threat to the nation and then intervening to control it. First was a menacing marine invasion of black, indigent refugees from the most reviled country in the hemisphere to which the state "responded" with a capricious--but reliably discriminatory--immigration policy (Stepick 1982).
Since the late seventies, when boatloads of Haitian refugees "invaded" the south Florida coast, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has treated Haitian refugees as criminals, imprisoning them in Miami's Krome detention center and dispersing them to federal prisons in several other states to await deportation proceedings. Most of the refugees arriving before 1982 were eventually released, thanks to reproaches by U.S. federal courts, only to be consigned to immigration limbo (actually classified as "status pending") for the better part of the decade. As Buchanan (1980) and Glick-Schiller, et. al. (1987) have noted, extremely pejorative representations of destitute and desperate Haitian boat people exacerbated the class prejudices of earlier Haitian immigrants from the elite and middle class. The only Haitian groups to advocate for the boat people were the political left and the progressive priests, several of whom later became campaign advisors to Aristide (Buchanan 1980; Wilentz 1989 and 1990). Father Aristide consistently took up the cause of the refugees, praising migrants for their perseverance and condemning the Haitian state for its indifference to the emigrants' plight (March 1990 interview with Haitian Television Network Video Club 1990, Haïti Progrès 9-15 May, 1990).
Within a few years of the border "crisis" came a second rationale for a discriminatory immigration policy and informal exclusion of Haitians from American society: the spurious branding of Haitians as carriers of the stigmatized Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) by the Center for Disease Control. The Center for Disease Control's eventual reversal of their position on the linkage between the Haitian nationality and AIDS did little to change U.S. government policy, let alone the public's opinion. In 1990, the Food and Drug Administration issued a decree barring Haitians from donating blood.
Haitians responded to the state's renewed attempt to brand them as transmitters of AIDS with an unprecedented display of unity. They held demonstrations in New York, Miami, Boston and Chicago and at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince (Haïti Progrès 25 April-1 May 1990; Fouron n.d.). The demonstrators expressed their perception that the "Federal Discrimination Agency" fabricated the AIDS threat to license persecution of dark-skinned pariahs corrupting American society. Some apparently believed that AIDS was a means of germ warfare waged by the U.S. government (Haïti Progrès 2-9 May 1990).
Father Aristide visited New York shortly after the impressive April 20th, 1990 protest march in New York City. Thousands crowded into the Brooklyn church to participate in Father Aristide's electrifying antiphonal oratory. He reworked the angry protesters' understandings of the broader significance of this unrelenting affront: their continued insecurity in the United States was the result of the corrupt union between the host and home states. The political events currently taking place at home were thus immediately germane: the junta had just fallen and the interim civilian government was fervently preparing for elections despite the escalating violence. Most migrants had implicitly rejected the sudden parade of opportunistic candidates stumping across the Haitian countryside and diaspora communities. They believed that the electoral exercise, legitimizing another "brown nosed" leader, would merely perpetuate migrants' chronic vulnerability in the host society (and, of course, economic degeneration and injustice at home).
Father Aristide's speech was unforgettably brilliant. He composed it around a triple pun, playing upon the rhyming Creole words of SIDA (AIDS) with siga (cigar), and the well-known idiom, "men siga ou!" (here is your cigar!). "Here is your cigar!" means "surprise!" or "it will never happen the way you intended!" This expression is usually accompanied by a forceful gesture with a raised third finger, representing the cigar--it is not considered profanity.
Aristide opened with the cigar imagery to pose the essential analogy: North American policy toward Haitian people is like the relationship between a smoker and his cigar: he sucks out the essence and then discards the but. Aristide told his audience that since their massive mobilization protesting the FDA's SIDA (AIDS) policy, however, they had become a whole cigar lit at both ends. At one end--resistance to mistreatment of Haitians outside (in the U.S.) and at the other end--defiance of the imperialists and their "pimps" and "house boys" campaigning in the upcoming elections back home.
Since the beginning of "the little cucumber's struggle against the eggplant," North American imperialism has treated the Haitian people like a big cigar...It sucks out the marrow and the strength of the people and then it discards the butt. But it is so high on the smoke that it mistakes siga (cigar) for SIDA (AIDS). (applause) And through the FDA, it has declared that the Haitian people cannot donate their blood, that they have SIDA. Blood for blood, we are the ones with the blood of freedom in our veins, they should take our blood and mix it with theirs to become civilized (ovation).
This cigar, they will regret having lit both its ends. Since (the march) on April 20, it has been lit at both ends and they cannot smoke it they way they want to. And when we declare ourselves ready to die for it, then they will understand. The United States can do what it wants, it can kill as many people as it wants, but it will never totally kill the Haitian people (applause) precisely because the cigar is lit at both ends and this conviction, this pride and this nationalist strength make us stand up with all Haitians with blood in their veins to say to the makouts and to the American imperialists, "Surprise!" FDA, "Surprise!" Tontons-makout, "Surprise!" Criminals, "Surprise! Haiti or death!"
I smell a fragrance, a fragrance of honor, a fragrance of dignity, a fragrance of respect. Honor, dignity and respect for Haitians treated as vagrants. Tonight, in the American's country, we who have blood in our veins, we have come to say that we have a home, even if they have the birth certificate of our country in their hands. Even if the "house boy" candidates, the "servant" candidates, the "little brown-nosed" candidates want to sell this deed we have to wrestle it from their hands (shouting, applause)...(Haïti Progrès 9-15 May, 1990, my translation).
Depuis que "ti konkonm t ap goumen ak berejenn," l'impérialisme nord-américain a consideré le peuple haïtien comme...un cigare qu'il met à la bouche pour tirer dessus. Il extrait la moelle et le courage du peuple et puis il le jette. Mais il est tellement enivré par la fumée du cigare qu'il confond "siga" (cigare) et Sida (applaudissements). Et à travers la FDA, il déclare que le peuple haïtien ne peut pas donner son sang, qu'il a le SIDA. Sang pour sang, c'est nous qui avons le sang de la liberté dans nos veines; ce sont eux qui devraient prendre ce sang et le mélanger au leur pour devenir civilisés (ovation).
Ce cigar, ils regretteront d'en avoir allumé les deux bouts. Depuis le 20 avril, il est allumé aux deux bouts; ils ne peuvent le fumer comme ils veulent. Et lorsque nous nous déclarons prêts à mourir, cela prouve bien que c'est vrai. Les Etats-Unis peuvent faire ce qu'ils veulent, ils peuvent tuer autant de gens qu'ils veulent, ils ne pourront jamais tuer entièrement le peuple haïtien (applaudissements et cris) précisément parce que le cigare est allumé aux deux bouts et ce sont cette conviction, cette fierté et ce courage nationaliste que nous font mettre debout avec tous les Haïtiens ayant ce sang dans les veines pour dire, et aux macoutes et aux impérialistes américains, "Américains, voilà votre cigare!" "FDA, voilà votre cigare!" "tontons-macoutes, voilà votre cigare!" "criminels, voilà votre cigare!" Haïti ou la mort!
Je respire un parfum, un parfum d'honneur, un parfum de dignité, un parfum de respect. Honneur, dignité, respect du peuple haïtien traité comme un sans-logis. Ce soir, au pays des Américains, nous qui avons du sang dans les veines, nous venons dire que nous avons une maison, même s'ils ont entre les mains l'acte de naissance du pays. Même si les candidats "tchoul," les candidats "restavèk," les candidats "ti sousou" veulent vendre cet acte de naissance, il nous faut leur arracher des mains (cris, applaudissements).
During the "uprooting" of the Duvalier regime in 1986, when many political refugees returned to organize for change, there was a resurgence of false nationalist propaganda vilifying returning "diasporians" of all classes: from professionals with superior attitudes taking over the country, imposing their foreign values and monopolizing the high salaried jobs to lower class returnees corrupting the country with their "mafia" drug trade. By 1988, working class Haitians who had entered the Unites States at the beginning of the decade were returning for visits in record numbers, having achieved the long-overdue resolution of their immigration status. Arriving home for the first time in eight years, they were met with hostility and suspicion; some were assaulted and robbed as they left the airport. Government tolerance of persecution of returning migrants reinforced the latter's perception that despite the uprooting of the Duvalier regime, the home state continued to hold them in contempt.
When, in October 1990, Aristide suddenly shifted course and entered the presidential race, he deepened the growing romance with working class Haitian migrants. He promised inclusion, in stark contrast to previous Haitian regimes which variously feared, ignored and rejected exiles. Significantly, Aristide directed his first major post-victory speech to Haitians Outside. He spoke on New Year's Eve. The collected, reassuring "Message to the Diaspora," concluded with this comforting vow:
Sisters and brothers spread throughout the four cardinal points of the diaspora, even if we don't meet face to face, remember that you have a country that looks you in the eye so that you can look it in the eye, so that this face to face makes you want to throw yourself into its arms. Its arms are outstretched to welcome you, to kiss you, to embrace you as a child who did not leave to go away forever, but who left in order to return (Haïti Progrès, n.d., my translation).
Sè m a frè m kap viv...nan 4 kwen dyaspora a, menm si nou pa wè fas a fas, sonje ke nou genyen yon peyi k ap gade ou nan je pou ou menm ou ka gade l nan je, pou fas a fas sa a fè ou vin lage kò ou nan bra l. De bra l ouvè pou akeyi ou, pou bo ou, pou anbrase ou kòm pitit ki pat ale pou ale nèt, men ki te ale pou retounen bò isit.
What did Aristide mean by "return"? He explained during the same Message to the Diaspora. Some Haitian migrants should return home to invest in businesses and create jobs, but the majority should continue straddling national boundaries. The Haitian state would now make it easier for them to do so. He said
You who are thirsty to return home, it doesn't mean you have to give up residence elsewhere. What we want is for you to be able to return home whenever you want and for you to be able to return where you are working now whenever your like. I am not asking you to return permanently and forsake the other place completely ...(Message to the Diaspora, Haïti Progrès n.d.).
Nou menm ki swaf retounen...lè ou rive, ou pa oblije rive nèt san ou pa ka retounen kote ou sòti a...Sa nou vle se ke ou kapab retounen lakay ou lè ou vle e retounen kote ou ap travay kounyè a lè ou vle tou. M pa mande ou vini isit nèt pou ou bliye lòt bò nèt...
Five weeks later, Aristide introduced his notion of "good homegrown Creole tourists" (bon jan pitit kay touris Kreyol) to honored guests of the "Tenth Province," whom he received in the Palace garden on the day after the Inauguration. After a stirring welcome to the former exiles, the new president elaborated his expectations of Creole tourists: earn money abroad, return to spend it on tours of patriotic "discovery of the countryside," and cross two national boundaries to go back to work. He painted vivid word-pictures of transnationals trekking across the Haitian terrain. He also reiterated his desire for Haitians in the North American diaspora to emulate American Jews, whose donations and nationalistic pilgrimages to their "homeland" support the Israeli economy. He was not the first Haitian diaspora politician to promote this compelling analogy while simultaneously sidestepping the wide disparities between the class and migration experiences of the two populations, let alone the very different structural relations between the respective nations and the United States (Glick and Fouron 1990:341).
The "bank of the diaspora" was the term Aristide applied to the million or so Haitians compelled to work Outside. Aristide expressed his desire for the bank of the diaspora not only to continue defraying the living expenses of relatives in Haiti but also to serve as economic emissaries of the Haitian state. During a March, 1990 interview, Aristide plainly stated his conviction that resources of the "bank of the diaspora" were the means to freeing Haiti from imperialism (Haitian Television Network Video Club 1990). Questioned on the day of his announcement to run for the presidency about how he, an ardent anti-imperialist, expected to solicit support for his government, he responded that Haiti's greatest source of foreign aid was the "bank of the diaspora" (Haïti Progrès 31 October-6 November, 1990). Migration, the epitome of incorporation into the vagaries of transnational capitalism, should be transformed into a means of economic resistance for the Haitian state!
In my ethnographic research among members of a transnational Haitian community, I have explored how family members, dispersed across vast spaces and for protracted periods, have remained involved in one another's lives (Richman 1992). Their long-term separation, however, inevitably breeds antagonisms. I have described how some home residents have come to feel indignant about their excessive dependency on emigrants' remittances. Others back home detect a new arrogance among emigrants. They accuse migrants of taking a cavalier attitude when they are away and of showing off with their fancy clothes when they return. Family members at home often react to these perceived indignities by neglecting their benefactors, by not writing to them or by ignoring them when they visit. Many a migrant meanwhile perceives that their home relatives no longer look upon them as people but rather as beasts of burden. They feel that they slave away in hostile, foreign countries for the sake of people who resent them for ever having left.
The U.S. economic crisis of the last several decades, which lowered incomes and raised prices both here and in nations dominated by the U.S. (and, in turn, spurred waves of migration), has strained relationships between migrant emissaries and the people who depend upon the wages they send home. Racism has further limited Haitian migrants' chances for social and economic advancement here. They strive to counter these constraints by conserving and extending interpersonal ties at home and by investing in property and businesses there (Glick-Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992 and Portes 1978:478). Migrants see these investments--in both social relations and in resources--as practical, short-term insurance against suddenly having to return home for reasons of illness or injury and as long-term security for their retirement.
Yet the control and spending of remittances are frequent sources of anxiety, misunderstanding and dispute. Migrants worry that their home relatives, who seem ambivalent toward them, are unreliable as managers of their hard-earned savings. They often blame home residents for irresponsibly wasting or diverting their remittances instead of investing them for the migrants' future, even though forces far beyond any one member's control are more often the cause of the migrants' and their dependents' frustrated attempts to save and to improve their lives.
President Aristide recognized how international migration has distorted domestic relationships. He sympathized with the ambivalent sentiments harbored by both migrants and home residents. During his momentous post-inaugural "Meeting with the Tenth Province," for example, he applied his eloquent oratory to diffuse some of these latent hostilities. Having explained his vision of "good homegrown Creole tourists" circulating freely and proudly between home and host countries, he paused to paint a bucolic scene of a transnational returning to visit his impoverished grandparents in a remote hilltop village: "What will they see?" he asked the audience of "the Tenth."
| They won't see a child who came home dressed to the hilt to show
off and to make them ashamed that they couldn't go away to return all
dressed up like that too. No. No. They will feel that
(encouraging the audience to join in) "for every ear there is one
earring in a goldsmith shop." If every family did not have one member
in the Tenth Province--Hmm! Hmm! You know what would have
happened. You know what would have happened. You did it;
you want to continue doing it, regardless (Wilèk Film 1991, my
translation). |
Yo p ap wè youn pitit k ap vin taye banda, vin chèlbè, pou fè lòt yo santi krenn paske yo pa t kapab ale pou yo tounen bwodè konsa. Non. Non. Y ap santi ke "chak zòrèy (l ap fé jès pou mounn yo pale tout ansanm avèk li) gen youn grènn zanno kay ofèv." Si chak fanmi pa t genyen youn grènn manm nan fanmi nan dizyèm depatman an--Mmm, Mmm. Ou konnen konman sa ta ye. Ou konnen konman sa ta ye. Ou fè l, ou vle kontinye fè l, kan menm (Wilèk Film 1991, my transcription). |
Several guests at the reception told me that President Aristide gave an old proverb a new meaning. The earring proverb is commonly used as a lesson in humility. It is akin to "everybody has a skeleton in their closet" or "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." The President was targeting arrogant home residents: because every family at has someone Outside (in a foreign goldsmith shop), no one (at home) stands in a position to criticize migrants. Yet he was also using the proverb to praise migrants. He represented the migrants as precious gold jewelry, invaluable sources of wealth for their family members. The latter are (or should be) extremely gratitude.
Despite myriad obstacles in the host society and the ambivalence of the very people who would wear the gold treasure at home, migrants continued abiding their onerous transnational contracts. Aristide's eloquent mediation encouraged them to persevere.
Contradictions between accommodation and resistance in Aristide's discourse with and about Haitians Outside, so effortlessly subdued in his campaign rhetoric, rose to a turbulent surface when Aristide the President moved to garner the lavalas of support he had received from Haitians Outside. His fragmented approach to creating the transnational political entity of the Tenth Province, modeled selectively on the administrative structure of the nine internal provinces, was quickly exploited by political opponents and critics, and surely frustrated the resolution of such fundamental problems as emigrants' rights to vote, to hold office and to enjoy binationality. Some denounced the Tenth Province as "a sham"; others called it "a constitutional aberration." Still others challenged whether wages contributed by the "bank of the diaspora" alone entitled them to political legitimacy (Haiti en Marche 1-7 May, 1991).
When the new president called upon the resources of "the bank of the (now) Tenth Province" for a massive donation to the home state, known as "remitting to build up Haiti" (voye Ayiti monte or VOAM), battle lines over the organization and government of the Tenth Province had already formed. The ensuing debate over the marathon funds, which questioned the authority of the Outside over the dispensation of their money, highlighted the enduring insecurity of the Haitian migrants in relation to their home (Haiti en Marche 1-7 May, 1991; Haïti Progrès 10-16 July, 1991).
During Aristide's celebrated post-inaugural "reunion with the Tenth Province," the new president joined members of Lavalas For Home, long reviled and feared by the previous fascist regimes, in a stirring chorus of Ayiti Demen, the exile's song foreseeing the massive mobilization, the lavalas utterly destroying the Duvalierist state. The "little priest" had unleashed a flood of support from Lavalas For Home by validating and reconstructing the complex weave of Haitian migrants' consciousness. He grasped the various threads of their profound sense of vulnerability and rewove them into a fabric of pride and dignity. He foretold the coming of an era when the home state would look them straight in the eye, a necessary first step to stabilizing their transnational experience. Aristide's sententious rhetoric did not, however, transcend the relationship between home and host states toward an equally powerful critique of the larger forces structuring the migrants' experience. Indeed, the charismatic candidate encouraged the birds of passage to continue following and abetting cyclical migrations of transnational capital. Following the landslide victory of Lavalas, the new president offered this ultimate accommodation as a debatable symbol of resistance for the fledgling Haitian state.