Our Tricentennial: 300 years later, is N.O. still an international city?
25th June 2018 · 0 Comments
By Nicholas Hamburger
Contributing Writer
Editor’s Note: This is Part II of a series of articles chronicling New Orleans’ immigrant communities and their cultural influence, economic impact, and individual stories on the Crescent City.
Off General de Gaulle Drive on the West Bank of New Orleans, a fraction of Haiti’s diaspora gathers every year to celebrate Haitian Flag Day on May 18. The date commemorates the removal of the white stripe from France’s tricolor, which symbolically asserted Haiti’s independence from French colonists in the waning years of the Haitian Revolution.
As descendants of the only former slaves to found their own nation, Haitians in New Orleans come together each May clad in the red and blue of their country’s flag to honor the memory of their ancestors’ successful slave revolt. Organized months in advance, Flag Day visibly demonstrates an offshoot of Haiti’s existence in New Orleans: traditional voodoo music thrums, diri ak pwa is eaten, and Kreyol dominates in conversation.
But large-scale events like this are few and far between. According to various Haitians in New Orleans, disorganization – and an absence of public and private programs to assist the community – has limited the degree to which New Orleans’ Haitian population is consolidated. As Barthelemy Jolly, one of the principal coordinators of Flag Day this year, puts it, “The only time we were organized to do things, we made that country we call Haiti.”
New Orleans has long been linked to Haiti’s affairs. It was the Haitian Revolution that, having exhausted the French Empire’s finances after more than a decade of war, precipitated Napoleon’s sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803. This same uprising spurred an exodus of Haitian refugees – or Saint-Domingue refugees, as they were then called – to nearby Cuba. From there, more than 9,000 Haitians journeyed to New Orleans, doubling the city’s population in 1809.
Foregrounded in New Orleans’ history but today largely unseen, Haitians in New Orleans are a kind of microcosm of the dynamic between the city and its foreign-born population.
“In New Orleans, Haitian culture is everywhere,” said Damas “Fanfan” Louis, a drummer and vodou priest from the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. “But the Haitian community,” he explained, “is invisible.”
Though the exact number is unknown, it’s estimated that roughly 5,000 Haitians currently reside in the New Orleans metro area, typically in places like Gretna, Terrytown, Harvey, and Westwego. Accordingly, numerous Haitian churches dot the West Bank of Jefferson Parish, and their Sunday evening services unify Haitians in larger numbers than anything else.
“The Haitians here,” said Vladimir Datus, a Haitian-born resident of Harvey, “are church-going people.”
Aside from the community that the churches provide, community organizing tends to fall to individuals. One such individual, Sylvain Francois, has served as the linchpin of the Haitian community in New Orleans for over five decades. From his shaded home in Uptown, Francois, 80, offers personal counseling and professional assistance to Haitians and other immigrant groups in New Orleans, particularly Hondurans. Because of his abiding importance in the community, Haiti designated Francois as its honorary consul in New Orleans several years ago.
“The Haitian community was nonexistent when I first came here. I used to speak to myself in the streets – no one spoke Kreyol,” said Francois, who today is fluent in five languages. That changed in the late 1970s, when a group of over fifty Haitian émigrés arrived in New Orleans. Fleeing the dictatorship of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Francois explained, they intended to sail northwest to Florida. But after a storm blew their boat off course, the group made landfall in Louisiana, where they decided to settle.
This influx of Haitian émigrés, many of whom spoke no English, encouraged Francois to found a literacy school at the YMCA in 1978. Years later, a small group of the roughly fifty-five émigrés went on to create the First Haitian Baptist Church in Gretna. By happenstance, the Haitian presence in New Orleans had been restored.
While the number of Haitians in New Orleans has since swelled, the Haitian population here is dwarfed by communities in the greater Miami, New York, Boston and Orlando areas, which together constitute nearly 75 percent of the 676,000 Haitian immigrants in the U.S., according to the Migration Policy Institute. But despite the relative scarcity of Haitians in New Orleans, the city is, to many of its Haitian residents, deeply reminiscent of home.
“I call New Orleans the branch of Haiti,” said Charles Rene, a doctor originally from Port-au-Prince. Indeed, New Orleans conjures up Haiti in a variety of ways. Its cityscape, more so than other American cities, evokes Haiti with its French Colonial architecture: the cast iron columns and wrought iron balconies of New Orleans recall similar designs in Cap-Haïtien and Jacmel, and the city’s shotgun houses also derive from a West-African style developed in Haiti.
But New Orleans approximates the island country beyond its mere visual resemblance. Barthelemy Jolly emigrated from Haiti in 2004, migrating first to New York City, then to Florida, and finally, in 2010, to New Orleans. He remembers his first night in the city vividly: “In other places, I always feel like I gotta go back home. But when I came to New Orleans, it was different. It was a Monday evening. I step outside, and I see a second line down the street. I say, ‘Oh lord, I’m home for real.’”
The similarities, however, are not always positive. Like Haiti, New Orleans has not yet fully recovered from the devastation wrought by recent natural disaster. Both the Caribbean nation and the American city – which many cultural commentators contextualize as the northernmost (and wealthiest) city of the Caribbean – remain pockmarked by architectural and infrastructural dilapidation.
After the ruinous earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Jolly’s wife and daughter immigrated to the U.S. Along with the earthquake, political volatility and widespread poverty in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, underlie migration to the U.S., which accommodates more Haitian immigrants than anywhere else in the world. Because of Haiti’s economic challenges, many Haitians in New Orleans send remittances back home.
“I would love to live in Haiti,” said Charles Manel, a taxi driver from Baradères. “But you have to make money to take care of the family.”
Like Manel, most Haitians in New Orleans work in one of two industries: taxicab and hospitality. Whereas the Alliance, White Fleet and American taxi companies each employ a substantial number of Haitian men, with the vast majority of Alliance’s drivers hailing from Haiti, many Haitian women find work in the downtown hotels that house the bulk of the city’s tourists.
Manel, who is in the process of expanding a staffing agency he started two years ago, noted the scope of job opportunities for Haitians has not broadened since he arrived in New Orleans from Tennessee in 2002. For this reason, Jolly recently founded the Haitian Community Center, a nonprofit organization that intends to offer English classes to Haitians in order to facilitate the community’s connection to the rest of the city.
The Haitian Community Center, though, also plans to provide Kreyol classes for Haitian-Americans and the children of Haitian immigrants who do not speak the language. The organization, then, will attempt to preserve a native language in a new land.
This article originally published in the June 25, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
