Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti 9781978820623

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Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

Critical Ca­rib­bean Studies Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, Car­ter Mathes, and Kathleen López Editorial Board: Carlos U. Decena, Rutgers University; Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University; Aisha Khan, New York University; April J. Mayes, Pomona College; Patricia Mohammed, University of West Indies; Martin Munro, Florida State University; F. Nick Nesbitt, Prince­ton University; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University; Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania; and Lanny Thompson, University of Puerto Rico Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, although attentive to the context of ­earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays par­tic­u­lar attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Ca­rib­bean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Ca­rib­bean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Ca­rib­bean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Ca­rib­bean Colonialities. For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti

VINCENT JOOS

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Joos, Vincent, author. Title: Urban dwellings, Haitian citizenships : housing, memory, and daily life in Haiti / Vincent Joos. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Series: Critical Ca­rib­bean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021008377 | ISBN 9781978820586 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978820593 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978820609 (epub) | ISBN 9781978820616 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978820623 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Earthquake relief—­Haiti—­History—21st ­century. | Haiti earthquake, Haiti, 2010—­Social aspects. | Haiti earthquake, Haiti, 2010—­Economic aspects. | Housing—­Haiti. | Infrastructure (Economics)—­ Haiti. | Haiti—­Economic conditions—21st ­century. | Haiti—­Social conditions— 21st ­century. Classification: LCC HV600 2010.H2 J66 2022 | DDC 307.3/3609729452—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021008377 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. All photos by the author u­ nless other­wise indicated. Copyright © 2022 by Vincent Joos All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written ­permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­r utgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 To the memory of my grand­mother, Angèle Joos

Contents List of Illustrations Introduction

ix 1

1

Developing Disasters: Dispossession and Industrialization in Northern Haiti

26

2

Industrial F ­ utures: Abstract and Disciplinarian Landscapes in Post-­Earthquake Haiti

61

3

State Interventions: Infrastructure and Citizenship

87

4

Inhabiting Port-­au-­Prince a­ fter 2010: Indigenous Urbanization, History, and Belonging

114

5

Daily Life in the Shotgun Neighborhoods of Downtown Port-­au-­Prince

139

6

Demolishing Shotgun Neighborhoods

165

Conclusion: Peyi a Lok 186 Acknowl­edgments 193 Notes 197 References 201 Index 217

vii

Illustrations 1. Map of Haiti

xii

2. Map of Port-­au-­Prince

xii

3. Coconut grove in Aquin, Haiti

2

4. The edge of a field in Caracol

27

5. The landfill used by the Caracol Industrial Park

37

6. Monsieur Saint-­Thoma’s only remaining cow

43

7. Gérard Defils’s collapsed apartment

65

8. View of Village Lumane Casimir

66

9. Rehabilitated ravine in Parc Martissant

90

10. A view of ravine Saint-­Léger

104

11. A Gingerbread ­house in the Pacot neighborhood

120

12. Inside the Borno ­house.

122

13. The Etzer h ­ ouse

124

14. A shotgun h ­ ouse in Rue Saint Nicolas

130

15. Clomène Firmin

140

16. Selling mangoes in front courtyard of Clomène’s h ­ ouse

153

17. Clomène and f­ amily packing on the morning of the de­mo­li­tions

168

ix

x • Illustrations

18. Searching for salvageable materials from Clomène’s h ­ ouse

170

19. Clomène’s new ware­house

180

20. Unfinished bridge southwest of Port-­au-­Prince

187

Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

FIGS. 1 AND 2   (Top) Map of Haiti; (bottom) map of Port-au-Prince.

Introduction

Late in the after­noon on October 4, 2016, the eye of Hurricane Matthew passed over one of the greenest, most fertile areas of southern Haiti: the ­Grand’Anse region. At the time, I was in North Carolina teaching a seminar on the anthropology of disasters, and my students and I w ­ ere closely monitoring the hurricane on our phones. A few hours l­ater, it had flooded entire towns in counties near us. We had talked extensively about the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 and ­were now, at a distance, witnessing a new disaster unfolding in the country. None of us was able to focus on the writing workshop we had planned for the day. Instead, I projected photo­graphs from a file named Ayiti Bel—­“ beautiful Haiti”—­that I keep on my computer desktop. The photos flashed across the classroom wall: coconut groves, fishermen weaving nets next to a turquoise sea, small pineapples growing in the lush botanical garden of Les Cayes, and c­ hildren playing soccer in the hills of Haiti’s capital city, Port-­au-­Prince. The pictures elicited a long conversation about Haiti and about what ­people outside the country imagine as daily life ­there. We talked about Haiti’s rural provinces and about my friends who cultivate cocoa, yams, and bananas in the southern peninsula. We spoke about how the novels and articles we had read often depict Haiti as a place where ­people’s lives are similar to our own. As Laura Wagner puts it, before the earthquake, “­there was poverty and oppression and injustice in Port-­au-­Prince, but ­there was also banality” (Wagner 2010). We tend to forget this banality. We all knew that many p­ eople in Haiti live in poverty. But so did many p­ eople who live next to us in Durham, North Carolina. We also knew that normalcy in the United States is often defined in contrast to places that have long been represented as strange and chaotic. The deluge of documentaries depicting Haitians 1

2 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

FIG. 3  ​Coconut grove in Aquin, Haiti.

as helpless ­people living among the rubble in post-­earthquake Port-­au-­Prince was simply one new iteration in a long history of narratives that have represented the entire population of the country in negative, l­ imited, and homogenizing ways. I vividly remember what Sarah, a student who was conducting research on a new hospital in the provincial town of Mirebalais, said at the time: “Before I started studying Haiti, I thought of the island as some kind of gray ocean. For me, Haiti was the slums of Port-­au-­Prince, the dusty ­faces of ­children ­a fter the earthquake, the dirty seashore.” Her words sparked another long conversation about repre­sen­ta­tions of Haiti in the United States and about the very real effects—­psychological, material, po­liti­cal, and policy related—­such repre­sen­ta­tions may have. Sarah’s description of the island as “some kind of gray ocean” echoed my own image of Haiti when I was a young man in France. In school, we ­were taught that Haiti used to be a French colony, but our teachers never spoke about the enslaved ­people in the country who had fought Napoleon and caused his first ­great military defeat. We learned what Napoleon liked to eat, how ­little he slept, and what ­battles he won. But c­ hildren who went to school in the small, coal-­basin towns of northern France, as I did, never heard much of Haiti or learned anything ­else about it. I first remember seeing Haiti on tele­vi­sion in the 1990s when newscasters spoke of the island as if it ­were synonymous with poverty and po­liti­cal strife. Haiti appeared in the news when disasters battered the country or when po­liti­cal vio­lence para­lyzed Port-­au-­Prince. Back then, I also would have said that the country was an ocean of concrete where death and hunger reigned.

Introduction • 3

It was only when I moved to Louisiana in 2004 that I realized the complexity of Haiti’s geography and history. I read about the history of French colonial Amer­i­ca, and I learned about Haiti and the nineteenth-­century Haitian immigration to New Orleans. In the Deep South, I started to see Haitian influences everywhere: in the vernacular structures that dot the shores of the Mississippi River, in the ­music and cuisine of southern Louisiana, in the Creole1 spoken in the Lafayette area. The United States was also where I began to hear other clichés about Haiti. The “voodoo” dolls mentioned in guides and brochures written for New Orleans ghost tours, and the American obsession with zombies became part of my new cultural landscape. As Haiti entered everyday conversations, ­people unfamiliar with this country often tended to portray it as a place where, as Donald Trump said in 2017, every­one has AIDS and is poor. In brief, I experienced two ubiquitous pro­cesses across two continents, which Michel-­ Rolph Trouillot describes in detail: the silencing of the past within archives, narratives, and history related to the Haitian Revolution in France and the prevention of thought about Haitian daily life except to be “told over and over again that Haiti is unique, bizarre, unnatural, odd, queer, freakish, or grotesque” (1990b, 5). Repre­sen­ta­tions of Haiti as a chaotic, ungovernable place are unfortunately not confined to everyday conversations. Over the past fifteen years, international institutional actors have continuously depicted the Haitian government as corrupt and inefficient, and have acted accordingly. As Michel Obin, a Haitian American artist, told me in 2011, when I visited him in Mount Olive, North Carolina, “it’s always, always the same deal. ­Every time something happens in Haiti, the international community response is vio­lence. Take 2004. Th ­ ere’s a po­liti­cal crisis. The United Nations sends troops who made the situation worse. I can show you videos of ­people getting killed in Port-­au-­Prince, in their neighborhoods by the U.N. forces! In 2008, we had a food crisis. The U.N. troops answered with more vio­lence against protesters. And now, with the earthquake, instead of sending help, the U.S. sends more soldiers! Always the same, my friend! [Monchè, c’est toujours la même chose!].” Be it a “natu­ral” disaster, a po­liti­cal crisis, a famine, or an epidemic, international help often comes in the form of guarded convoys or troops marching into Port-­au-­Prince. For instance, the sending of thousands of American soldiers right a­ fter the earthquake slowed down the relief effort in the Port-­au-­Prince region. Disrupting the relief effort, however, was not local social unrest, but militarized assistance from the United States. Haitians showed a ­great deal of solidarity and coordination in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe. If international experts and humanitarian amateurs alike knew a ­little Haitian history, they could have expected an orderly and efficient popu­lar response, since being autonomous, pulling resources together, and collective work form the core of the Haitian economy. Th ­ ese disconnects from Haitian realities, fueled by institutionalized ignorance in the United States and Eu­rope and, more generally, by plain racism, prolong and amplify disasters by spurring equally disconnected

4 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

responses.2 This book concerns t­ hese violent responses, the abrupt and absurd disconnects from Haitian realities, and the failed reconstruction they engendered ­after the 2010 earthquake. In the meantime, it explores what ordinary lives—or what ­people deem to be normal routines and processes—­look like on the island. The ­people I have talked with and befriended over the past eight years pre­sent nuanced and varied accounts of what constitutes Haiti’s real­ity and what could be efficient international cooperation ­after disasters. However, the g­ reat majority of them told me how the complex social, economic, religious, and cultural systems of their country have repeatedly been distorted, ridiculed, and attacked. This book aims to explore ­these viewpoints and voices in order to understand how Haitian small-­scale economies open paths to self-­sufficiency as well as to dispel the image of the island as a gray ocean.

Sensationalist Accounts of Haitian Life In many ways, Haiti is unique. It is the first and only region where enslaved p­ eople successfully led a revolution and formed an in­de­pen­dent nation. From 1492, when Spanish colonizers entered the country, ­until 1804, when Haitians gained in­de­pen­dence from France, ­people across the island repeatedly fought against slavery and the deadly plantation l­ abor regime. During the eigh­teenth ­century, insurrections ­were frequent and became the prelude to the 1791–1804 long revolution. For instance, François Makandal, an enslaved man born in Africa who escaped the plantation where he worked, led thousands of Maroon soldiers and created a vast network of allies with the goal of freeing all slaves on the island (Fick 1990, 61). When he was executed in Cap Français in 1758, Makandal and his rebel allies had already burned plantations, killed planters, and opened the horizon of freedom for many. In the meantime, enslaved ­people cultivated small provision grounds at the margins of plantations. Th ­ ere, they learned how to maximize food production through polyculture in small, sometimes rugged areas (Mintz 1974). Once the Indigenous Army defeated the French in 1803, the majority of newly freed Haitians started to retreat to the mountains to escape the reinstitution of plantation ­labor by Haitian state authorities. To preserve their liberty, a majority of them refused wage-­labor systems. They only marginally engaged with the global export economy and did so on their own terms—­for instance, by bypassing customs and selling goods such as precious wood or turtle shells to foreign merchants (Gonzalez 2019). Mainly, they worked on small farms around which they built strong social and religious systems that allowed them to live autonomously. In such systems, most Haitians achieved autonomy and self-­sufficiency by collectively organ­izing work and relying on internal markets to sell or exchange goods. The Haitian rural world was not and is not a classless or egalitarian society. However, par­tic­u­lar social values help maintain a certain homogeneity. As Gérard Barthélémy (1990) has shown, individual wealth accumulation is frowned upon and often leads to ostracization. Instead of

Introduction • 5

creating institutions that vertically regulate their social worlds, Haitian rural dwellers have long relied on re­spect, reciprocity, and small autarkic organ­izations. However, as my students mentioned when we looked at photo­graphs of the countryside, an autonomous, self-­sufficient Haiti is almost never heard of in mass media. Instead, international media, along with some experts’ accounts, routinely cast Haiti in negative terms. It is depicted as a country of desiccated mountains where rural dwellers have no choice but to flee to urban centers to seek better lives. We repeatedly hear that only 2 ­percent of Haiti is forested. We are informed that Port-­au-­Prince is an urban inferno composed solely of slums and flooded with trash, a city where every­one is overwhelmed by poverty. Although Haiti indeed suffers from deforestation, scholars have recently shown that about 30 ­percent of the country is currently covered with trees and bushes (Tarter 2016). In addition, although the city has makeshift buildings or substandard h ­ ouses where many city dwellers live, Haiti’s capital is also dotted with functioning neighborhoods where ­people live ordinary lives in decent, sometimes even upscale ­houses and apartments. That said, sensationalist accounts of Haiti are built around a grain of truth. In­equality between the rich and the poor is staggering. More than a quarter of ­people t­ here live in deep poverty. During my trips to Haiti, many of the state workers and government officials I met recounted apocalyptic tales of Port-­ au-­Prince and deplored the existence of what they considered large, miserable neighborhoods. However, social in­equality is not unique, even though it is exacerbated in Haiti. Countries around the world experience extreme economic income in­equality. For instance, Brazil has overwhelming income in­equality and poverty rates. It is constantly rocked by environmental disasters, gang vio­lence, and po­liti­cal instability. Cities ­there comprise poor neighborhoods where ­people live in squalid conditions. However, journalists are able to render complex visions of Brazil by focusing on its cultural uniqueness, or on the popu­lar strug­gles that are taking place in the Amazon. This is rarely the case with Haiti, despite its cultural wealth and vibrant grassroots po­liti­cal movements. Instead, racist ste­reotypes framing Haitians as incompetent, irrational, and in need of foreign expertise allow for quick and dirty assessments of the country’s fragile infrastructure and economy. Repre­sen­ta­tions that rely on lenses of misery and helplessness have dire consequences once a disaster strikes. As my students and I would see in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, misrepre­sen­ta­tions of places where the majority of ­people are not white often lead to paternalistic, top-­down relief efforts and sometimes to the abandonment of entire disaster-­stricken areas. For example, in hurricane-­ravaged Robeson County, North Carolina, a region where minorities form most of the population, federal and state help was slow to arrive. In 2018, only 1 ­percent of the funds intended for disaster recovery in the region had been spent (Barnes 2018). Local and federal officials have l­imited knowledge of implementation

6 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

strategies, and local and federal governments in the United States have systematically sabotaged institutions meant to ­handle post-­disaster periods.3 As a result, ­people in Robeson County could only rely on their neighbors and local businesses and charities in their own communities to rebuild the region. Many p­ eople simply moved away from the county to find better lives elsewhere. The same could be said about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake that occurred in 2010. Although many p­ eople left the island to rebuild their lives abroad—­for instance, approximately sixty thousand ­people went to the United States ­after the quake—­those who remained in the Port-­au-­Prince region witnessed what happens when international, top-­down relief efforts are implemented at local levels (Lugo 2017). The country had a skeletal state workforce, and many qualified workers died in the earthquake. ­Because of this, and because of presumed state corruption, international donors deemed Haiti’s public sector too weak to h ­ andle national reconstruction.4 The international aid system and corrupt Haitian governments sponsored by the United States then intervened and made a bad situation worse. In par­tic­u­lar, international donors rallied to raise funds for humanitarian relief efforts, but they largely ignored Haitians’ viewpoints and desires regarding the reconstruction of their country. Countless media reports and telethon-­like shows inundated the global stage a­ fter the disaster, but they rarely gave voice to Haitians (McAlister 2012). Destructive myths about Haiti—as a country that cannot govern itself and is in need of help—­and images of poverty and hunger returned to the fore. The consequences ­were immediate: a torrent of foreign aid reinforced the already strong presence of humanitarian groups in the country. Thousands of nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs) and missionary groups flocked to Haiti. Then the United Nations special envoy Bill Clinton and his cohort of power­ful donors, such as the World Bank and Inter-­American Development Bank, assumed control of the national reconstruction agenda. P ­ eople in Haiti hoped that the billions of dollars in aid pledged by foreign allies would spur swift rebuilding in regions affected by the quake. In 2020, though, not much has been done. The center of Port-­au-­Prince is filled with buildings that could collapse at any moment. Electricity remains scarce throughout the city. Roads are full of potholes, and the ravines that streak the capital overflow with trash. The few operational hospitals of the capital are in dire condition, and the entire Port-­au-­Prince region is packed with half-­finished buildings and infrastructure. The international reconstruction of infrastructure and housing in the city center has remained mostly stagnant since 2010. ­A fter the earthquake, city planners and experts flocked to Haiti to work on the capital’s reconstruction with the government, international nongovernmental organ­izations, and other institutions. They developed a series of proj­ects that ­were largely un­co­or­di­nated and led to the bulldozing of entire neighborhoods. However, besides the construction of some government buildings, very few proj­ects in the capital resulted in ­actual construction; the only large-­scale reconstruction proj­ects that materialized

Introduction • 7

are located outside the disaster zone. In rural areas, the Haitian state and its partners, such as USAID and the Inter-­A merican Development Bank, built housing and industrial proj­ects that entailed the violent eviction of hundreds of peasant farmers in northern Haiti and worsened food insecurity in regions where the economy is centered around fishing and cultivating produce. Separated from the economic nerves of Haiti and resembling storage units, ­these housing proj­ects are already falling into disrepair. The industrial parks that w ­ ere supposed to grow the economy and foster the rebuilding of the country ­were only ­running at half capacity in 2018.

Port-­au-­Prince, Haiti, a­ fter the 2010 Earthquake When I first went to Haiti in May 2012, two years ­after the earthquake, I was struck by the amount of debris that still littered the streets of downtown Port-­ au-­Prince. The capital’s main plaza, Champ de Mars, was a tent camp. So ­were all other parks in the city. However, once I started visiting dif­fer­ent areas of the capital, my image of it changed. I found myself in a complex city with quiet, wooded neighborhoods. It was a city of many well-­kept courtyards that seemed like small intimate worlds where p­ eople retreated before the late after­noon rains could trap them in traffic. Even in the so-­called slums, I found well-­built h ­ ouses and social diversity. I learned to enjoy long walks between peak traffic hours and I observed, in a city supposedly riddled with unemployment, highly or­ga­nized networks of ­people who used the streets to conduct all kinds of business. As do the ­people who live in Port-­au-­Prince, I admired the large intricate Victorian ­houses and the polychromatic shotgun ­houses that dot the urban landscape. I had gone t­ here, in the first place, to conduct ethnographic research on vernacular architecture, and especially to look at buildings that had withstood the earthquake. This is what I found: many old ­houses reflected the creativity and savoir faire of their builders, they w ­ ere well adapted to the climatic conditions of the country, and w ­ ere now cherished by their current dwellers. With collapsed landmarks such as the cathedral and the National Palace, the city bore scars from the earthquake. The built environment, in general, echoed the ongoing trauma many p­ eople experienced. Discussions about the earthquake ­were frequent, as ­were ­those about the multiplying crises that affect Haiti. In the meantime, though, life continued. The city bustled with the energy of ­people who ­were rebuilding their homes, boutiques, or churches with ­limited means but with much creativity. ­People cooked food in courtyards, watched soccer games on Saturday after­noons, and sent their ­children to school in perfectly pressed uniforms. Life in Port-­au-­Prince moves to the rhythm of t­ hese routines. In that sense, it differs ­little from other major cities. On that first visit, though, I did note some curiosities. The absence of white ­people on the streets, despite the fact that thousands of them allegedly worked in Port-­au-­Prince for NGOs, was surprising. As Laura Wagner has shown, large

8 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

NGOs forbade their employees to venture into the city (2014, 375). At the time, I witnessed the redensification of the city and the rebuilding of shoddy cinder-­ block buildings in hazardous places. The massive presence of NGOs in the central neighborhoods of the city meant that rent prices had skyrocketed ­after 2010, which led to the displacement of many Haitians who could not afford to live ­there anymore. ­People had no choice but to move to the margins of the city, or, if they could afford it, to the mountainous areas southeast of Port-­au-­Prince. I also witnessed how the Haitian state and its international partners catered to the housing crisis by building residential compounds woefully maladapted to the tropical climate and to the economic needs of most Haitians. Instead of modeling their efforts on buildings that had survived the earthquake and ­were anchored in Haitian culture and history, most rebuilding agencies—­many of which ­were international—­used premade, stock plans that ignored local environmental and geographic realities. Instead of helping, the implementation of such plans furthered the infrastructure and housing crisis in Haiti. At the same time, overcrowding in the city, which contributed to the magnitude of the 2010 disaster, became even worse. More than 600,000 ­people initially abandoned cities and went back to the countryside ­after the disaster (Weiss Fagen 2013, 6). However, ­because most of the ­free ser­vices intended to help ­those affected by the earthquake w ­ ere available only in Port-­au-­Prince, ­people w ­ ere pulled back into the capital. Given that more than 300,000 h ­ ouses had collapsed or w ­ ere permanently damaged by the earthquake, p­ eople had no choice but to ­settle in tent camps or return to neighborhoods where lodging possibilities had suddenly become scarcer. The forces that led to the deaths of more than 300,000 ­people in 2010—­high urban-­population density and frail buildings—­were not natu­ral phenomena. Instead, they w ­ ere the product of a centralization pro­cess that began during the colonial period and intensified during the U.S. military occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth c­ entury. This crucial point was constantly reiterated during the fieldwork I conducted with Haitians across the country over the next eight years: the forces that led to so-­called natu­ral crises ­were never solely natu­ral. Instead, such crises w ­ ere deeply underpinned and exacerbated by structural forces at both the local and global levels. What are ­these structural forces, and how do their effects come to be erased in international narratives of “natu­ral” disaster? Below, I offer a short historical detour to examine how such forces came to be.

The Centralization Pro­cess French colonial administrators had trade in mind when they established Port-­au-­ Prince as the administrative center of the French colony of Saint-­Domingue in 1749. Although France’s primary export node in Haiti during the colonial period was and remained Cap Français (­today’s Cap Haitian), the royal decree that established Port-­au-­Prince as the capital of Saint-­Domingue reshaped the geography of the

Introduction • 9

western part of Hispaniola. Located in the m ­ iddle of a coastal arch joining the northern and southern regions of the French side of Hispaniola, Port-­au-­Prince was a commercial node that linked scattered inland plantations to the main internal markets and the metropolitan monarchy. It was si­mul­ta­neously a business hub and a con­ve­niently located administrative center. The Saint-­Domingue colony tried to reproduce some of the features of the French state by intentionally regrouping po­liti­cal, administrative, and military power in one place. In his analy­sis of the French state before and ­after 1789, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Never since the fall of the Roman empire had the world seen a government so highly centralized” (1955, 8–9). Centralization transforms the state into a monolith that citizens cannot influence. For Tocqueville, this feature of the French state rendered democracy impossible. The colonial state of Saint-­Domingue, and ­later the Haitian state, never managed to subjugate regional powers, not to mention distant rural parts of the island. However, the po­liti­cal structure introduced by the French was the beginning of a long pro­cess that put in motion, in the twentieth c­ entury, mass demographic regroupings in the capital city. Centralization implies the diminution of regional powers. As with subsequent colonial enterprises, the French authorities established a system of po­liti­cal and economic suffocation geared t­ oward provincial outposts they deemed unmanageable or not fully controllable. This system tightly channeled the routes of goods through strategic urban locations. Administrators ensured that provincial parishes ­were unable to grow to commercial or military levels. For instance, in Croix-­des-­Bouquets, a parish contiguous to Port-­au-­Prince, only “one surgeon, one locksmith, one saddler, one baker and one butcher” ­were allowed to ply their trades in the 1750s (Corvington 1992, 66). In addition to limiting the growth of provincial areas, French colonial administrators allocated most of their bud­get to developing both Cap Français and the capital and to sending skilled workers, urban planners, architects, and construction material from France to Port-­au-­ Prince. ­These tactics, suffocating provinces and strongly administering their economy, ­were also employed ­later during the American occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship. Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake in 1751, and authorities quickly realized that the Port-­au-­Prince region was unsuitable for urban living. Many ­people ­were killed, and three-­quarters of the buildings fell down (Moreau de Saint-­Méry 1785). The city was flattened and p­ eople lived in tent camps for months. However, given the strategic and central location of its port, administrators ignored social and environmental considerations. In the years that followed, earthquakes, floods, fires, and sieges devastated Port-­au-­Prince multiple times, but its thriving port activities transformed it into an urban phoenix that ­rose from the ashes of each crisis. But the path t­ oward colonial centralization in Port-­au-­Prince was halted abruptly during the nineteenth c­ entury. When Haiti gained in­de­pen­dence from France in 1804, a majority of Haitians retreated to the island’s mountains to

10 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

escape plantation work. Though the early rulers of in­de­pen­dent Haiti banished slavery and eliminated French plantation masters and man­ag­ers, they also wanted to revive sugar and coffee plantations to generate revenue for the state, for themselves, and for their allies (Barthélémy 1996). Few Haitians wanted to be confined on plantations, and most refused wage ­labor. Instead, a large majority of ­people in Haiti squatted or bought small plots of land on which they grew their own food crops. In the first fifty years of Haiti’s in­de­pen­dence, a “maroon nation” emerged, as the historian Johnhenry Gonzalez (2019) aptly termed it. ­People reactivated the practices of runaway enslaved ­people who lived autonomously outside of cities and plantations. They relied on their own social and religious systems to render justice, or­ga­nize work, and share resources, which, in turn, enabled them to live away from the state. Since the country’s inception, Haitian urban elites and ­people who dwell in rural settings have lived in opposite worlds. During the nineteenth ­century elites wanted to revive an export-­based economy that required extensive wage l­ abor. Rural dwellers simply wanted to be left alone to engage in global commerce on their own terms. In the early years of Haiti’s in­de­pen­dence, an enduring peasantry formed and created a power­ful decentralized economy based on selling surplus crops at hundreds of open-­air markets in the countryside (Mintz 1960; Anglade 1982). Strong social bonds based on reciprocity as well as nonmonetary exchange of ser­ vices and goods structured this new society. Even though p­ eople grew coffee and marginally participated in the global economy, autarkic models built on self-­ sufficiency prevailed and allowed most Haitians to disengage from urban and plantation life. The lives of t­ hose who formed part of this peasantry, however, ­were not always easy. Soil erosion and demographic pressure threatened their subsistence economy. They also faced far more power­ful forces that eventually compelled them to return to plantations and urban centers ­a fter their farms, ­houses, religious venues, and artifacts had been destroyed and all national ser­ vices had been centralized in Port-­au-­Prince. One such force was the United States. In 1915, the United States Army invaded Haiti and occupied the country u­ ntil 1934. At that time, the United States switched to an administrative occupation that lasted u­ ntil 1947. When members of the U.S. Army arrived in 1915, they installed Haitian figureheads in the highest state positions and thereby gained veto power over all government decisions. The U.S. army controlled the country’s finances, declared martial law, and allowed foreigners to acquire land in the country for the first time since 1804. In order to create a major import-­export hub in Port-­au-­Prince and a centralized, dominant state with a national army capable of preventing peasant rebellions, the U.S. Army eliminated regional bud­ gets and closed provincial ports and markets (Anglade 1982, 12). Th ­ ese actions completely changed the geography and economy of Haiti: most new roads built ­under American supervision converged on the capital, smaller regional cities

Introduction • 11

withered, and cash crops came to dominate agriculture. U.S. businessmen who ­were allied with Haitian po­liti­cal and economic elites used military power to kill or displace hundreds of thousands of small farmers across the country to make space for im­mense plantations of rubber, sisal, bananas, and cane sugar. As a result, p­ eople in rural areas w ­ ere left without access to land or resources. The landless class of workers that formed during this period are still growing in number ­today; the same types of industrial ventures persist in the country and continue to destroy the last strongholds of the Haitian peasantry. Ten years ­a fter American administrators departed, Port-­au-­Prince consolidated its dominant position in the country’s economy. In 1957 François Duvalier was elected president of Haiti, and he returned to an extreme politics of centralization. During the Duvalier dictatorship, the capital’s population grew, especially in the 1970s (Payton 2018, 228). By the end of the Duvalier regime in 1986, the population of Port-­au-­Prince was five times higher. The outskirts of the city ballooned into im­mense slums while the administrative neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince became residential areas for a small, handpicked set of Black middle-­class p­ eople who worked for the state. State authorities forced many ­people in the country to (re)­settle in the capital. In addition, b­ ecause all ser­vices and resources (e.g., education, health, and industrial parks) w ­ ere concentrated in Port-­au-­Prince, and due to faulty agricultural policies and heavy taxes on peasants, rural emigrants ­were inevitably attracted to urban areas. This steady influx of low-­income p­ eople to the capital changed its physical aspect. In the center of the capital, commercial structures and concrete apartment buildings occupied the interstices between small ­houses that dotted neighborhoods. Former members of the po­liti­cal and economic elite went into exile ­after the end of the Duvalier regime b­ ecause Haiti’s economy had plunged, and the proprietors of large estates in downtown Port-­au-­Prince divided and sold their land to make room for new residences. A ­ fter the Duvalier regime ended, ­people continued to move to Port-­au-­Prince. Each large wave of rural mi­grants built new lakou-­foumi, small neighborhoods comprising narrow corridors along which ­people build makeshift dwellings that are often consolidated with cement blocks over time. Port-­au-­ Prince was originally built to accommodate 200,000 ­people, but ­today, it ­houses more than 2 million (Wah 2003, 139; Orner, Lyon, and Danticat 2017, 11). This population growth was swift: in 1950 the city was home to approximately 150,000 ­people, but by 1970, 500,000 ­people lived ­there. Port-­au-­Prince reached 1 million inhabitants in the early 1980s and was well beyond 2.5 million on the eve of the 2010 disaster. In brief, three major forces transformed the 2010 earthquake into a major ­human and physical disaster: the fragility of the built environment, the population density, and the fact that the city is built in an earthquake-­prone zone. On January 12, 2010, the quake took the lives of more than 316,000 p­ eople, wounded 1.5 million p­ eople, destroyed around 400,000 homes, and left hundreds of thousands of ­people homeless (Charles 2020a). Of the structures that collapsed,

12 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

90 ­percent, including the National Palace, ­were built on soft clay soil (de Léon 2014, 48). Although earthquakes had already wiped out parts of the city center in 1751 and again in 1770, it was nonetheless rebuilt in the exact same disaster zone. Clearly, the 2010 earthquake is not simply a natu­ral disaster. The po­liti­cal concept and practice of centralization have had im­mense impacts on the physical, economic, and po­liti­cal lives of Haitians. The centralizing forces that enabled Port-­au-­Prince to become an overpopulated capital have been in motion since the colonial inception of the city. However, demographic centralization—­itself spurred by multipronged centralization efforts that started in 1749—is somewhat recent. Waves of newcomers changed not only the physical aspect of the city but also its social composition. ­People who had been forcefully excluded from urban economies experienced rejection again when they arrived in the capital city. Some of the hallmarks of urban life for rural dwellers who came to Port-­au-­ Prince during the past fifty years include negligent urban planning, destruction of markets and informal neighborhoods, and lack of access to formal jobs, health ser­vices, and education. However, as t­ hese p­ eople or­ga­nized into self-­sufficient communities, they also found ways to create spaces where they could live on their own terms. Maintaining links to historical systems of value and economy that originated in the countryside, many ­people entered the sphere of microcommerce and reenacted economic and social practices that enabled them to live away from a state that had long been predatory (Laguerre 1987). Solidarity and reciprocity formed the backbone of a social infrastructure that allowed rural mi­grants in Port-­au-­Prince to live, and even to thrive, in a city governed by national practices, policymakers, and politicians that denied them recognition as full citizens of Haiti.

Downtown Port-­au-­Prince On January 15, 2014, three days ­after the national commemoration of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, Haitian state employees affixed posters featuring images of a projected modern and orderly downtown Port-­au-­Prince onto a red sheet-­metal fence that surrounded a dozing construction site on Champ de Mars, the main public plaza in the city. I was taking a walk with my friend Luckson Jeudi, who took an indefinite leave of absence from his job in Queens, New York, to open a small business from his light-­green wooden ­house on Rue Charéron, a busy downtown artery. Luckson, like other ­people who lived in his neighborhood, had recently heard rumors about state urban planning proj­ ects in downtown Port-­au-­Prince. “That’s the way it happens all the time,” he said, “you hear rumors, and one day, without any kind of warning, you see bulldozers clearing up an area of the neighborhood. ­People ­don’t get compensated, they get kicked out. The state does what it wants with the city and disregards our needs. Always.” This narrative of

Introduction • 13

an all-­powerful state that reorders city space as if it ­were a blank slate is pervasive within neighborhoods adjacent to the National Palace and state institutions. With electricity ­running 24/7 in addition to functional infrastructure and ser­ vices, politicians and members of the private sector have long dreamed of transforming ­these dense residential neighborhoods into an administrative and commercial center. The freshly pasted posters on Champ de Mars indeed depicted a futuristic downtown Port-­au-­Prince that extended from an imaginary state-­ of-­the-­art port to a newly built National Palace. Luckson was quite startled when he saw computer-­generated images of the ­future “Cité Administrative” with its two four-­lane roads and its lines of administrative and commercial buildings; the government and private companies responsible for the proj­ect blueprint intended them to replace the residential part of town where he lives. He was used to small-­scale urban renewal proj­ects, but he never thought a full square mile of the city would be marked for de­mo­li­tion and renovation. The proj­ect would involve erasing a large part of the residential downtown: a one-­mile-­by one-­mile-­grid of rectilinear streets, known as Morne-­à-­Tuff, that are honeycombed with corridors, alleys, and courtyards. He rightly feared that what he had seen happen on a small scale ­until then—­quick evictions without compensation, and the bulldozing of residential buildings—­would happen in entire sections of the former colonial grid. Surrounded by half-­finished construction proj­ects, we asked ourselves if the Haitian state would even have the capacity to build anything a­ fter the downtown area had been cleared. The poster images stirred debate among a small group of bystanders. They all agreed that if ­these de­mo­li­tions occurred, they would displace hundreds of families. Nonetheless, most of the bystanders asserted that the downtown area should be completely demolished. One man said, “n dwe l kraze net-­net-­net! Ki kapital gen bidonvil nan mitan lavil?” (We should destroy it completely! In which capital do you see slums in its downtown parts?) Luckson vehemently opposed ­people depicting his neighborhood as dirty, chaotic, and dangerous, and he argued that thousands of moun de byen (good p­ eople) live and engage in well-­ organized activities ­there. He himself inhabits an old ­house that his ­family has maintained for generations, and he insisted that many parts of the neighborhood ­were historically relevant and that old ­houses ­were able to survive the earthquake. To this day, he pushes back against ­wholesale repre­sen­ta­tions of his neighborhood as a slum. Luckson, who describes himself as a middle-­class man, also asserted that the state completely disregards ­people like him: p­ eople who have roots in the provinces and create their livelihoods by ­running small businesses in the city. Like the majority of ­people in Port-­au-­Prince, Luckson is neither entirely from the countryside nor entirely from the city. In the capital, he often socializes with ­people from the same provincial region where he had lived for a while. As Laura Wagner has shown, regional enclaves in Port-­au-­Prince, and even abroad, are very common (2014, 78). For instance, e­ very Tuesday, Luckson buys lunch from a

14 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

­ oman who makes lalo ak diri peyi, a dish of jute leaves, spinach, and beef served w on rice produced in the Artibonite region. At her place, he meets friends from his ­mother’s hometown and shares news with them. Luckson was born in Port-­ au-­Prince near Place Saint-­Anne and lived at Rue de la Ré­union ­until he was eight years old. Then he moved to the Artibonite region to live with his grand­mother for three years before he settled with his ­mother in downtown Port-­au-­Prince. He said, “A lot of us have roots in the countryside. I lived with my grand­mother not far from the L’Estère river and still often go t­ here to see my cousins and friends. We all lived in the same lakou [courtyard]. That’s where we learned to share every­thing and to work hard. That’s where we learned to re­spect our elders. Lots of us who live ­here in downtown Port-­au-­Prince know how to re­spect and help one another, but I fear that the generations born ­here in the city ­will lose this culture.” Luckson’s story is common in Port-­au-­Prince; many p­ eople who presently live in the capital split time between the provinces and cities as they ­were growing up and have internalized and expressed rural values. The lakou he invokes remains a central idea for ­people who rely on collective work to live. Port-­ au-­Prince is too dense to re-­create the a­ ctual spatial features of the lakou, but the collective spirit of this central countryside space nevertheless still shapes daily life for many living in urban centers. In late after­noons, Luckson’s front porch often transforms into a place where his male friends can gather, and a former university professor who lives on Rue de la Ré­union presides over them all. I have spent long after­noons with Luckson and his friends. They like to talk about Haiti’s past and about changes in the neighborhood. The G ­ rand Cemetery is near Luckson’s h ­ ouse, so conversations about funerals are far from uncommon. When we spent time together, Luckson always insisted that personal memories linked to specific places ­were impor­tant to ­people’s own m ­ ental and physical stability—­schools, churches, radio stations, cemeteries, alleys, restaurants, and friends’ homes are urban ele­ments that provide him with a sense of familiarity and belonging. ­People show attachment to their h ­ ouses, apartments, and streets, and they recognize the cultural, religious, and historical importance of the urban landscape they inhabit. For instance, Tony, the former university professor, comes to Luckson’s store ­every after­noon, even though he lives a few miles away. “I used to rent a h ­ ouse two blocks away from Luckson, but it was badly damaged by the earthquake, so my wife and I de­cided to move to Tabarre [a city adjacent to Port-­au-­Prince] where we own a ­house. But I come ­every day ­here. This is where I worked and lived, this is where I have my friends and lots of good memories.” Downtown Port-­au-­Prince is not the messy slum often vilified by government officials and foreign media; it is a complex place s­ haped by hardworking residents who desire to be fully integrated in the social fabric of their city and country. Most of the p­ eople I met, like Luckson Jeudi, value the city’s urban cultural heritage and its remaining landmarks, which partially shape a sense of urban and national belonging. However, in my ethnographic work, I found that

Introduction • 15

international actors and po­liti­cal elites have systematically excluded everyday Haitians from that type of national belonging over time. Consequently, p­ eople who lived in suffocated provinces and ­later moved to marginalized neighborhoods in the capital are now rebuilding Port-­au-­Prince in ways that suit their needs, and they are claiming the right to live in specific areas of the city. Isolated urban enclaves for privileged classes have existed and continue to exist, but the post-­earthquake moment allowed for a drastic surge in social mixity in some parts of the capital.

Urban Citizenships Most ­people who now live in the capital, like Luckson Jeudi, had no choice but to leave their homes in the countryside. The systematic destruction of small farms to make room for industrial proj­ects, which has occurred since the American occupation, is one of the f­ actors driving p­ eople out of rural areas and into the city. Likewise, the concentration of ser­vices and opportunities in the capital, greatly accelerated by the American occupation, only increased ­after the 2010 earthquake—­sparked in part by the accruing presence of NGOs. Although rural life is suitable and ­viable for many Haitians, it is also impor­tant not to romanticize or fossilize it as immutable. Land scarcity, soil erosion, and overpopulation have combined to shrink peasant agriculture. Despite the number of small farms that have dwindled, though, certain key values among the peasantry have moved into urban areas along with rural dwellers. ­These values have proved crucial to reestablishing daily life ­after the horrific catastrophe of douz janvye (January 12). Some of the ­people I worked with are presently suturing their lives together ­after having lost ­family members, friends, homes, and schools in the 2010 earthquake. As Luckson stated, Port-­au-­Prince is home to ­people who value their neighborhoods and the longtime friendships and solidarity networks they have established ­there. ­People drew heavi­ly on ­these networks in the aftermath of the earthquake; neighbors helped one another in formidable displays of solidarity while international relief, intended to be immediate, remained stuck at the U.S.-­ controlled airport. This book focuses on the intersection of urban and rural relations by tracking how p­ eople adapt peasant values, ways of life, and spatial practices to transform the city into a space where they can belong. Thus, the urban space itself—­the streets, plazas, courtyards, ­houses, and boutiques—­intervenes directly in ­people’s lives. Architectural forms tend to reify certain modes of thinking and living, certain ideologies. But by looking at how p­ eople engage with urban built environments, I explore the ways that ­those in Haiti negotiate the past to invent ­viable f­ utures. Beyond the post-­disaster urban landscape of half-­collapsed buildings and boarded-up commercial venues, Port-­au-­Prince’s built environment strongly echoes the phases of colonization, occupation, and dictatorship that slowly but steadily impoverished most Haitians. Much of the urban ethnography of this

16 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

book takes place in the physical center of the country: the former colonial “Cité Royale,” which encompasses the area in and around the National Palace, the military barracks, state prisons, and ministry buildings where financial, administrative, and executive powers are regrouped. The Champ de Mars, the main public plaza of the capital, is “the neuralgic center of power and counter-­power,” where street debates take place in a space filled with national statues and symbols (Mézié 2020). Th ­ ese areas of the city are dotted with strong ele­ments, including plazas, museums, statues, monuments, and street names that form a national sensorium, defined by the sociologist Geneviève Zubrzycki as “the visual depiction and embodiment—in cultural forms, the built environment and the landscape— of historical narratives and national myths that are experienced by individuals in a variety of practices and settings” (Zubrzycki 2016: 21). In other words, ­these neighborhoods are spaces where the concept of nation can be experienced and felt as it is embodied u­ nder multiple vis­i­ble forms. In this book, I w ­ ill explore how p­ eople create dwellings in spaces where material cultural heritage echoes both a certain permanence of statehood and the shifting social regimes that trace the contours of daily life. This line of inquiry, in turn, yields insights about the functioning of the state, national identities in a country mainly run by international institutions and NGOs, and pro­cesses of crafting citizenship and belonging in a city that—­through evictions, de­mo­li­tions, or refusal of basic services—­has long rejected the majority of rural mi­grants that inhabit it. Conversely, I focus on descriptions of buildings to analyze the contributions to urban centers made by Haitians who have lived outside cities. The built structures that populate this book—­the small wooden h ­ ouses, the concrete buildings where ­people dwell and engage in business activities, the heritage buildings ­people transform to meet their needs, and the city’s mazelike corridors—­are not simply a backdrop to urban social life; I pre­sent them as active agents that shape po­liti­cal and cultural selves. By reading the city as enmeshed in the fabric of our social identities, we open the “question of what kind of ­people we want to be, what kinds of social relationships we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold” (Harvey 2012, 4). Scholars have studied Port-­au-­Prince’s heritage buildings, but they have mainly approached the buildings as objects that reflect the aesthetic values and history of construction techniques from a given period of time (Vlach 1976a; Langenbach 2011). H ­ ere, I instead explore what p­ eople do with buildings and how buildings intervene in p­ eople’s lives. Residences in downtown Port-­au-­Prince are also often commercial venues. They are places of easy socialization and they create partnerships of all kinds. The semiprivate spaces of the courtyard or the front porch are key places in urban life. My favorite places to hang out ­were mainly quiet spaces where conversations around a meal or a cold drink often happened. By returning repeatedly to the same places, I met ­people like Clomène Firmin, a small-­scale entrepreneur and vendor who used her centrally located h ­ ouse to conduct business. Clomène is an

Introduction • 17

energetic, hardworking ­woman with a fantastic sense of humor, and you ­will encounter stories of her life throughout this book. In her neighborhood, she formed the center of a tight-­knit community of ­family members and old friends who took refuge in her ­house and courtyard ­after the earthquake. In upper-­class neighborhoods, I met equally hospitable p­ eople such as Etzer Georges, a retired man who was always available to chat about the country and city he so deeply loved. Etzer and his wife Bernadine came from modest origins and fully understood how Port-­au-­Prince functioned. Th ­ ese and ­others I met opened the doors of their ­houses to ­people who needed support ­after the quake. They also opened their doors to me during the years I devoted to research for this book. All of them ­were keenly aware of the pro­cesses that led to the failed reconstruction of their city, and all had stories to share about it. ­A fter the earthquake, large proj­ects planned by international donors and agencies created new spaces of exclusion, but vernacular housing filled a critical socioeconomic gap: it facilitated employment and redevelopment. As a young Haitian urban planner named Jean-­Luc Pascalin bemoaned during a conversation in 2015, “the old plan of bringing garment factories to grow our economy failed again. The country is full of half-­finished schools, clinics that quickly shut down, and abandoned industrial parks. The reconstruction of Haiti never happened!” Pascalin’s words point to the central prob­lems of this book: What led to the failure of the international reconstruction of Port-­au-­Prince? What is the role of international aid in post-­disaster contexts, and how do abstract development practices and ready-­made solutions weaken local and rural economies? More specifically, how do industrialization and top-­down urban planning accentuate social fragmentations and create new spaces of exclusion? Conversely, what do the use and transformation of heritage buildings by everyday ­people reveal about the production of cultural meanings, politics, and social relationships in post-­disaster periods? This book explores often-­ignored, place-­based responses to disaster. It also examines how p­ eople mobilize culturally anchored systems that allow disaster victims to create ­viable livelihoods outside of the international aid framework. The forms of economic development promoted by international agencies and, in par­tic­u­lar, by ­those of the United States institutionalize impermanence and instability. In the countryside, the Haitian government, collaborating with international agencies, has addressed the housing crisis through a series of housing proj­ects that are largely inadequate and fail to reduce the needs in this domain. Planners working in rural areas have used architectural forms that do not meet the cultural and social needs and desires of Haitians. To the contrary, such reconstruction agents built new cities with gridiron patterns and yardless ­houses, reflecting industrial ideologies that most Haitians have fought against since 1804. As Henri Lefebvre (1992) argues, city plans designed in offices far away from the places they ­will transform are inherently violent: they precisely abstract and

18 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

geometrize the spaces they shape. The Haitian state and its private partners aim, through top-­down housing reconstruction, to discipline a population that they have long depicted as unfit for the modern world, as engaged in unproductive “voodoo economics.” Crucially, as I illustrate in this book, the forced industrialization of the countryside in recent years and the utilitarian residential spaces generated by industrial proj­ects symbolize a form of reconstruction that is completely disconnected from Haitian history and culture. Through the lens of industrial interventions in Haiti, I write about (neo)colonial pro­cesses of imposed development and its failure. In par­tic­u­lar, I explore how marginalized Haitians creatively subvert neoliberal development plans that conflict with everyday p­ eople’s lived preferences. The book’s description of housing proj­ects located in industrial parks and of the forms of mobility and sociality imposed in t­hese spaces reveals the authoritarian nature of neoliberal assemblages that seek to develop export economies. ­These assemblages between international businesses, NGOs, and state forces have orchestrated the spectacular failures of Haiti’s international reconstruction. When rural mi­grants reuse and transform heritage buildings and mobilize indigenous values, such actions point to culturally anchored spatial and economic practices that allow disaster victims to restore their lives. P ­ eople create spaces where they reinvent understandings of belonging and citizenship despite the ravages of disaster—be it natu­ral disaster, war, or mass displacement. I thus position citizenship not only as a ­legal status recognized by state bureaucracies but also as the lived experience of belonging to communities that ­people shape by engaging with urban environments. The French colonial state’s granting and denial of citizenship and freedom enabled colonial settlers to create race-­ and gender-­based hierarchies that endured in the postcolonial Haitian state. As I ­will detail, gender, race, religion, and urban or rural origins can serve as categories of exclusion for state-­sponsored regimes of citizenship. However, by creating autarkic socie­ties in remote regions, Haitians created new forms of belonging based on their relations to one another, to nature, and to the spiritual world. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot warned against the use of prescriptive North Atlantic universals such as citizenship ­because “they do not describe the world; they offer visions of the world” (2002, 847). The term “citizenship” is loaded with supposedly egalitarian and universal characteristics, but once it is studied empirically, it appears to be a flexible category—it is a tool of exclusion and, at the same time, an expression of belonging ­shaped by ­human, natu­ral, and sometimes spiritual forces. Social scientists have, for instance, studied how citizenship is embodied and how per­for­mance of class, race, gender, and sexuality ­matters in the creation or demise of citizenship regimes (Sheller 2012; Thomas 2011). This book describes how dominant colonial and postcolonial discourses and practices have cast racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies as inferior, abject, and unfit for national citizenship. However, if embodied citizenship remains impor­tant to understanding the concept and practice of

Introduction • 19

belonging, this book emphasizes the importance of spatial settings in the creation or suturing of communities.5 To investigate citizenship through such a spatial framework means analyzing the cultural, historical, economic, and social dynamics p­ eople put into motion a­ fter mega-­disasters; dynamics p­ eople use to suture their lives and create worlds in which they feel they belong. By looking at citizenship through a material lens, though, I spatialize what is often described as an abstract notion. In post-2010 Haiti, national citizenship was denied through very spatial means: evictions, lack of rebuilding, and destructive urban planning are ways to exclude ­people from their country’s sociopo­liti­cal fabric. In turn, by transforming the city to accommodate not only their needs but also their desires, many Haitians have de facto created new spheres of belonging away from the state. The spatial and architectural ­angles of this book simply aim to concretize what belonging means. Port-­au-­Prince is not, in the words of my former student, a “gray ocean” of concrete. It is a place that contains buildings that echo a troubling past. Beyond the earthquake, po­liti­cal and aesthetic movements symbolized in certain architectural forms seem to have been halted as they developed. The large derelict Victorian ­houses that dot this urban landscape, for instance, reflect the past domination of an elite that moved freely between Eu­rope and Haiti. But t­ oday, ­these ­houses are transformed by ­people who refused to go to tent camps in the wake of disaster. Instead, they opted to stay in the heart of the city. Their actions indicate the transformative power of minor architectural acts, such as the transformation of f­ amily residences into apartment complexes and commercial venues. The reuse of such buildings points to concrete engagements with the Haitian past and with social hierarchies. In brief, exploring ­people’s entanglements with materialities—­meaning destructions, transformations, and abandonments—­ allows for the crafting of new narratives about Haitian spaces, economies, and regimes of citizenship.

­Doing Research in Haiti Between 2012 and 2015, I spent a total of fourteen months in Haiti and conducted fieldwork in Port-­au-­Prince and rural regions of the country. For nine months between September 2013 and July 2014, I lived in Port-­au-­Prince and gathered information on state urban planning, vernacular architecture, and social use of space. For two months in the summer of 2015, I mainly focused on aspects of my research that dealt with industrial proj­ects and housing in newly built industrial parks. B ­ ecause visa issues prevented me from traveling outside of the United States, I was only able to resume fieldwork in 2018. During this period away from Haiti, I kept in touch with friends through social media and phone calls. Since 2018, I have returned often to Port-­au-­Prince and to Cap Haitian for follow-up interviews and to observe changes initiated by the construction of a ­giant industrial park in northern Haiti. In the meantime, I also did fieldwork

20 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

in Mount Olive, North Carolina, where more than two thousand Haitians settled in 2010. In other words, for the past eight years, I have collaborated steadily with Haitian and Haitian American friends while researching the history, ­music, architecture, and lit­er­a­ture of Haiti. When I first went to Port-­au-­Prince in May 2012, my friend and fellow anthropologist Laura Wagner gave me a crash course on how to navigate the city. From my first day in Haiti, I met Laura’s friends and, ­later, made connections with urban planners, NGO workers, teachers, university students, and writers. I learned a ­great deal from Laura. Taking a walk with her meant stopping and talking with street vendors or with p­ eople who w ­ ere surprised to see blan (white ­people) walking the streets of Port-­au-­Prince. As I noticed with my Haitian friends l­ ater, such street conversations form part of daily life in this city. P ­ eople exchange jokes in public transportation and watch out for one another in the streets. I remember countless times when someone grabbed me by the shoulder and held me out of the path of a motorcycle, a car, or a hole in the ground. They also easily engage in debates on Champ de Mars, the large public plaza I mentioned ­earlier, where ­people gather during the day for intense po­liti­cal and philosophical debates (Mézié 2020). In other words, meeting p­ eople was never an issue. Encounters often happened around the Mausoleum, an open-­air market for books, where I met many ­people with whom I maintain relationships ­today. Looking for rare books on Haitian history and for ­music recordings allowed me to enter masculine circles of scholars and rec­ord collectors. My lifelong passion for Ca­rib­bean m ­ usic, and for Haitian ­music in par­tic­u­lar, opened conversations. I met musicians and DJs who ­were active in the heyday of konpa ­music in the 1960s and 1970s and who often participated in radio programs. My friend Tony Lamothe, a DJ for radio station RFM Haiti, taught me a lot about m ­ usic and put me in touch with ­people who ­were crucial for my fieldwork. They drove me around the city, took the time to talk with me, and overall, their knowledge contributed to this book. In other words, as a man who speaks French and Kreyòl, I easily met other men who shared common interests. Beyond t­ hese masculine circles, I also met and befriended ­women of all social backgrounds. In downtown Port-­au-­Prince, many of them work from their homes, which often makes encounters more difficult. By returning to the same restaurants and boutiques when business was slower in the after­noons, I was able to engage in conversations and weave lasting relations. The recent sexual scandals involving foreign NGO workers echoed a long history of colonial gender-­based vio­lence. It was legitimate for p­ eople to be suspicious of anyone who comes to work in Haiti. Openly conversing about t­ hese issues and being clear about my research and politics helped me to build relations with p­ eople from all walks of life. In September 2013, Jane Voltaire, a fearless Haitian American advocate for ­women’s rights, introduced me to the b­ rother of one of her colleagues at a large NGO in Port-­au-­Prince. He is Aland Joseph, an art history teacher and scholar

Introduction • 21

who also had an interest in heritage buildings and was documenting the remaining vernacular h ­ ouses in the city. Aland grew up in both Port-­au-­Prince and the Artibonite region. His knowledge of the country’s history and geography is extensive, and his passion for teaching it is contagious. ­A fter meeting a few times, we de­cided to conduct a few proj­ects jointly. Since 2013, we have traveled around the country together and have enjoyed the long, strange “ethnographic” walks we often take in Port-­au-­Prince. Both Aland and I are interested in what ­people think of their dwellings and the aesthetic heritage of old structures. Working together has allowed us to accomplish t­ hings neither of us could have done on our own. We have knocked on many doors and asked ­those who answered if we could take a look at their ­houses. ­People often welcomed us, and relationships ensued. But just as often, p­ eople told us to go away. Th ­ ese interactions made me quickly aware of the power dynamics that exist in the city. One after­noon in October 2013, as we left a gingerbread ­house Aland had always wanted to visit, he told me something that made me aware of the often painful race dynamics that ­shaped our encounters with ­others. I captured Aland’s words in my field notes. He said: I tried to talk to this lady many times. She lives right in front of the school where I teach on Fridays. I took many photos of her h ­ ouse, but from the outside. ­Every time I tried to smile at her or to engage in a conversation, she had a mean look in her eyes. That’s something you need to realize. I’m Black. She’s of mixed descent [milat] and she’s bourgeois. I guess she sees ­people like me as vagabonds [vagabon], as uneducated ­people not worthy of her attention. I was stunned when she opened the door for you. You spoke French to her, ­you’re white. You got her attention. [Laughing] When we go downtown [anba lavil], I’ll be the one talking. When we meet rich ­people [bourgeois], you’ll do the talking!

Aland and I often had the same type of conversation. For instance, when we entered a supermarket, employees would ask him to leave his backpack in a locker, but they said nothing about mine. Sometimes, it happened the other way. P ­ eople who w ­ ere angry with the many, albeit rarely seen, white p­ eople who came to the city to work for NGOs vividly expressed their thoughts. For example, one after­noon in March 2014, we knocked at the door of a gingerbread h ­ ouse in an upper-­class neighborhood. I introduced myself and Aland in French. The man—­Monsieur Albert—­talked only to Aland and told him, angrily and in Kreyòl, that white ­people ­were responsible for the post-­earthquake failures in Haiti. I answered him in Kreyòl and said that I also believed NGOs and international institutions w ­ ere largely responsible for the country’s current quagmire. I stated directly that I favored financial reparations from the French government, which had inflicted a debt that para­lyzed the country in 1825. We fi­nally sat down and had a long conversation. Being clear about my po­liti­cal

22 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

opinions and speaking in Kreyòl sometimes helped me to build bridges. Other times, p­ eople simply refused to speak with us. Although we had animated debates, we never felt physically threatened in any way. For Aland, and for some of my friends, race-­based discrimination had grave consequences. Many ­people I knew ­were regularly rejected from job interviews and from places such as banks and supermarkets, and state officials often talked down to them. Th ­ ese dynamics fueled, and continue to fuel, the conversations I have had with Aland and our friends about race, privilege, and in­equality. Aland introduced me to many of his friends. I quickly opted to forge long-­ term relationships rather than interview randomly sampled ­people. I conducted a few cold interviews with state officials and workers, but I mainly interviewed ­people with whom I developed close friendships over time. I took extensive field notes at all times of the day and transported my small notebooks in Ziploc bags. Over the years, my collaboration with Aland has been crucial. Together, we have published coauthored articles in newspapers and have helped each other with our respective proj­ects. To this day, I am still in touch with the ­people whose lives form the basis of this book, and I try to help my friends by organ­izing fundraisers when needed.6 Following the methods of collaborative ethnography, I use long interview excerpts that my con­sul­tants, when pos­si­ble, have read and edited. ­These collaborative research practices do not fully resorb the power dynamics I have mentioned. The collaborative pro­cess itself is messy, but it allows for transparency and frank discussions that often fail to emerge when standard anthropological fieldwork, based on one-­off interviews and “fly on the wall” observation methods, guides research. Over the past ten years, I have collaborated with p­ eople in the Port-­au-­Prince region and in northeastern Haiti. The ­people I have worked with in Port-­au-­ Prince ­were often still anchored to the countryside in vari­ous ways. My friend Clomène Firmin, one of the most impor­tant ­people I ­will talk about in this book, comes from Chambellan, a village in the southwestern peninsula of Haiti. She was raised on her ­family’s farm where her s­ ister and aunts still live. Clomène often reminisced with a certain nostalgia about her childhood and talked about all the fruits and vegetables her f­ amily was able to grow. However, b­ ecause she had three ­children and she wanted them to attend college at some point, she was unable to move back to her home in the countryside. Nonetheless, Clomène often called her ­family and kept in touch with childhood friends who had also moved to Port-­ au-­Prince. And she cooked meals from her home region. When I spent time with Clomène and her ­family, I realized the extent to which rural and urban areas in Haiti are intertwined and how much regional solidarity networks forged across generations endure in urban centers. With Luckson and Aland, I came to know the Port-­au-­Prince made in L’Artibonite. With Clomène, I came to know the Port-­au-­Prince made in G ­ rand’Anse. I was able to enter their circles of friends and had the privilege of spending time with their families. Some of the ­people I met ­were university professors and ­lawyers;

Introduction • 23

some ­were street vendors and craftspeople. All the p­ eople you w ­ ill read about in this book worked hard from sunup to sundown to meet the needs of their families. They all lived “normal” lives, even if failing infrastructure and state ser­vices across the country often interrupted their routines. Over the past eight years, my friends have graduated from high schools and universities, had babies, gotten married, gotten divorced, left the island, returned to their farms, or traveled to big cities to search for better lives. Some of them passed away from diseases that could easily have been prevented. Some died of old age. Many continue to live fulfilling lives and strive to create a better Haiti—­even in the darkest moments of po­liti­cal crisis.

Structure of the Book Chapter  1 of this monograph considers one of the main pro­cess that forces ­people to move from the countryside to urban centers and focuses on the costliest post-­earthquake proj­ect in Haiti. Built through a private–­public partnership ­under the supervision of USAID, the Caracol Industrial Park is a mixed-­use manufacturing fa­cil­i­ty that was built in northern Haiti in 2011. This proj­ect is unique ­because it attempts to decentralize Haiti’s economy by creating parks in the northern part of the country. Using interviews and observations recorded over a five-­year span, the chapter ethnographically explores how the government has forcibly evicted farmers from fertile land in order to impose industrial proj­ ects that often vanish ­after a few years of destructive activity. ­Here, I posit a key argument of the book: attempts to industrialize Haiti have largely led to disaster vulnerability among the country’s rural and mi­grant populations and have created dense neighborhoods in urban centers, especially in Port-­au-­Prince. Chapter 2 zooms in on the dwellings of ­people who relocated to a state-­ sponsored housing proj­ect a­ fter the 2010 earthquake. It draws on my ethnographic work between 2014 and 2018 with a f­ amily that lived in Village Lumane Casimir, the largest housing proj­ect ever built in Haiti. The ­couple with whom I worked divorced in October 2017—­the stress and living conditions in the housing proj­ect broke apart this f­ amily. The housing proj­ect comprises 1,280 small concrete h ­ ouses built in the semidesert area north of Port-­au-­Prince. In contrast to the case presented in chapter 1, the industrial park attached to this housing proj­ect remains only half built. The ­people who moved ­there hoping to find employment in the formal sector have been forced to return to the capital or to rely on remittances to make ends meet. In this chapter, we witness daily life in a disciplinarian landscape that resembles an expansive field of storage units. This housing proj­ect illustrates how abstract urban planning produces symbolic and direct forms of vio­lence by creating highly compartmentalized spaces that elide the cultural and social needs of many Haitians. Chapters 3 and 4 are shorter and take readers into Port-­au-­Prince. They provide an overview of the city by describing vastly dif­fer­ent neighborhoods. In

24 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

chapter 3, I compare two adjacent neighborhoods in the southern part of Port-­ au-­Prince. In contrast to the case study on abstract urban planning presented in chapter 2, I first describe a neighborhood from which the state has been completely absent since 2008. Then I compare it to Martissant, an area the state and a large Haitian NGO started renovating in 2007. The first neighborhood, Bolosse Troisième Ave­nue, lacks basic infrastructure and ser­vices. ­People live along a ravine where overflowing trash invades their homes when it rains and the electricity has been turned off since 2008. State, municipal, and NGO actors do not intervene in this part of Port-­au-­Prince b­ ecause it is considered too dangerous. In contrast, Martissant is a large low-­income neighborhood that was revitalized ­after the disaster. Since 2007, the Haitian NGO Fokal, partnering with the state, has worked on an ambitious urban renewal proj­ect centered on the preservation of a large urban forest. By contrasting ­these two places, I argue that the state does have the capacity to implement forms of urban planning that are beneficial for the environment and for urban dwellers. I also show how participatory urban planning has the potential to revitalize citizenship and collective engagement with the city’s key prob­lems. In chapter 4, I describe two neighborhoods in the city’s central districts. I explain how p­ eople in Port-­au-­Prince mobilize the values of the lakou and transform heritage buildings into places where they can work and live on their own terms. By describing the formerly bourgeois neighborhoods and the large Victorian polychromatic gingerbread ­houses that dot them, I illustrate the social changes that have taken place in the capital during the past fifty years. The earthquake brought radical changes to t­ hese places and h ­ ouses. Focusing on the use and reuse of heritage buildings allows me to reflect on the cultural meanings of architecture in the city and on its ties to rural areas. The second part of chapter 4 describes Rue de L’Enterrement, a central neighborhood where middle-­class and low-­income Haitians coexist. H ­ ere, I observe how rural mi­grants create a city in which they feel they belong. Rural mi­grants are very mobile and maintain strong relationships with their rural homes and prior communities. The values of the lakou (such as reciprocity, trust, and solidarity) are clearly vis­i­ble in large urban centers where egalitarian exchanges contour the informal economy. In chapter 5, I focus on the Rue de L’Enterrement neighborhood and also on the life history of the businesswoman Clomène Firmin. In ­doing so, I further develop the book’s attention to the role of materiality and architecture in defining the pro­cess of dwelling. More specifically, I show how w ­ omen create businesses and work opportunities by using their homes. Working from shotgun ­houses (a structure with a small street facade that allows for both private and commercial space), w ­ omen use their ­houses to build moral economies woven around familial solidarity and egalitarian relations. Detailing the life history of Clomène Firmin allows me to show the central role w ­ omen play in the Haitian economy and to discuss the obstacles faced by w ­ omen who move from the countryside in post-­earthquake Port-­au-­Prince. I suggest that, through economic

Introduction • 25

inventiveness, ­women who do not have access to formal employment mobilize the power and politics of heritage h ­ ouses in a distinctive mode of entrepreneurship to redefine their social positions and create work opportunities in a city plagued by unemployment. In chapter 6, I detail the destruction of the historical district in Port-­au-­Prince, which occurred in 2014. The Haitian state tends to implement “fast and furious,” highly vis­i­ble reconstruction ventures that actually increase social and ecological vulnerabilities. In May 2014, the Haitian state destroyed a large part of downtown Port-­au-­Prince to make room to construct an administrative corridor. Dozens of heritage houses—­mainly shotgun houses—­were destroyed in the pro­cess. In this chapter, I return to the experiences of Clomène Firmin, whose ­house and business ­were destroyed in this de­mo­li­tion, and trace her trajectory since 2014; she now lives in a peripheral neighborhood where she cannot work, and she recently re-­created her business on the ruins of her former home. This chapter illustrates how destructive urban planning transformed the life of a formerly self-­sufficient ­family and how ­people resist de­mo­li­tions by occupying urban spaces from which they have been evicted. Such efforts destroy the grace, aesthetics, capital, and connections that ­people have achieved through their creative uses of heritage ­houses. ­Today, the capital’s center stands as a patchwork of half-­finished buildings, rubble, produce markets, and small streets filled with old h ­ ouses that reflect the creativity of their occupants and makers. In this book’s conclusion, rather than treating the low-­income Haitians who live in t­ hese neighborhoods as bare lives in need of assistance, I detail the spatial and economic practices that have allowed them to create v­ iable lives in a post-­disaster landscape. By exploring the entanglements among memory, architecture, and daily life as they shape spaces of inclusion, I redefine citizenship as a holistic form of belonging in places where culture and social norms preclude po­liti­cal participation. While I explore this key concept throughout the book, I use the conclusion as a theoretical platform to reflect on the possibilities of a culturally grounded notion of reconstruction in which t­ oday’s marginalized populations become empowered citizens able to sculpt a country in which they feel they can thrive and belong.

1

Developing Disasters Dispossession and Industrialization in Northern Haiti

Located in northeastern Haiti, Trou du Nord is a dense city with about forty thousand inhabitants. When I arrived at lunchtime on a sunny day in March 2019 with my research partner Aland Joseph, wind blew dust down the unpaved streets of the city center. ­Children ­were at school, so the downtown area was quieter than it sometimes can be. Aland half joked, “It’s like a Far West movie scene.” Cinder blocks and mounds of sand and cement w ­ ere everywhere. Small crews of men climbed up and down scaffolds, and the distant sound of hammers banged on tin roofs. The wind whistled and snippets of ­music floated from a few boutiques and restaurants. The noises created a strange soundscape that indeed reminded us of a movie. Beyond this eerie atmosphere, similar to what you would see in a slow-­paced western film, the city looked like what it was: a frontier boomtown. Northeastern Haiti is a peculiar region in Hispaniola. So many aspects of the area have attracted plantation ­owners and industrialists since Eu­ro­pe­ans colonized the island in 1492: the presence of gold, naturally irrigated and lush valleys, forested mountains, semideserts, and ocean bays covered with mangroves. When Aland and I arrived in 2019, we w ­ ere aware that this was not Trou du Nord’s first time as a “new frontier.” But peasant farmers and fishermen had taken 26

Developing Disasters • 27

FIG. 4  ​The edge of a field in Caracol, which used to be one of the most wooded and fertile

areas of northeastern Haiti.

advantage of the region’s natu­ral resources ever since the area experienced an industrial slump that started in the early 1970s. From the 1970s u­ ntil very recently, their activities had formed the backbone of the local economy. ­People grew nutritious organic produce and legumes all year round, and small fields shaded by fruit-­producing trees dotted the plains, valleys, and mountains in the area. Now, however, rapid urbanization threatens this green, diverse landscape. ­A fter the earthquake in 2010, something surprising happened: The Haitian state and its international partners de­cided to transform this mostly agricultural area into an industrial pole in order to kick-­start the reconstruction of Port-­au-­Prince. But when they used prime farming land to create free-­trade zones on which they built factories, their actions had dire consequences for northeastern Haiti’s residents, agriculture, and environment. As Edison Isma, a young farmer from this region, told me in 2019, “you know, I think it’s insane [ yon bagay tet chaje] that solutions for the earthquake destroy our community ­here in the north. . . . ​ We just cannot understand why and how they chose the best land around Cap Haitian to build their park.”1 Since 2011, a flurry of industrial activity has transformed northeastern Haiti. From large plantations that produce ­bitter oranges to newly built assembly and textile factories, northeastern Haiti is quickly becoming the country’s industrial center. Thus, when we talk about Trou du Nord, Aland Joseph’s Far West analogy was pertinent in many ways. He referred not only to the city’s spatial settings but also to its recent uptick in industrial activity sponsored by the United

28 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

States. Attracted by this industrial boom, thousands of newcomers have moved into burgeoning low-­income settlements. Although the recent construction and industrial efforts are new, they are anchored in a long history of problematic industrialization in Haiti. ­A fter the 2010 earthquake, in what seems a counterintuitive move, foreign investors and the Haitian government implemented industrial proj­ects that w ­ ere underpinned by the same economic policies that led to destructive industrialization in the past. The largest of all t­ hese proj­ects is an industrial park built in the city of Caracol. It pre­sents an even greater conundrum, which Edison invoked above: since 2008, the Haitian government has prioritized food security in the country. Despite this, industrialists chose to build their new proj­ect on the most fertile land in the region. They also chose to displace peasant farmers who had lived t­ here for de­cades. According to the Haitian state and its partners, the Caracol proj­ect was supposed to uplift the regional economy. Instead, locals argue that it has harmed them in a host of ways. In this chapter, I consider historical evidence to examine why industrialization efforts have focused on this region in the past, and I draw on the experiences of ­people who have farmed in this region for de­cades to describe how recent industrialization ventures have affected their livelihoods, values, and social systems. Most Haitians who work in the Caracol Industrial Park (CIP) do not make a living wage, and they work long hours in stressful factory environments. Moreover, farmers who ­were evicted from the fertile land on which the ­giant factories are being built now live in utter misery; the meager compensations the Inter-­A merican Development Bank (IDB) offered never counterbalanced the money and food farmers had been able to generate when they cultivated their own land. Even more significant, ­people in the region do not simply farm land; they also nurture deep spiritual relations with the soil, trees, animals, and plants that surround them. Spatial and spiritual practices related to land have helped maintain social and environmental equilibrium in the region since the end of the colonial period. The evictions, dispossession, and land destruction ­people have experienced in the wake of the CIP have uprooted their value systems. In addition, as I show in this chapter, when the state offered compensation packages to restore livelihoods, its actions created new social fractures by dividing ­people into new—­and dif­fer­ent—­socioeconomic classes. From implementation to reparations, the state’s efforts in the region have been underpinned by development ideologies and practices that have contributed to fracturing communities that ­were formerly self-­sufficient. More broadly, in what follows, I detail the displacements generated by industrial proj­ects, and I describe the central pro­cesses that led millions of rural dwellers to leave the countryside for urban centers during the past fifty years. I also discuss how each forceful intrusion of industry led to equally forceful forms of re­sis­tance. Notably, northeastern Haiti was the starting point of the Haitian Revolution and of the Caco Wars against the United States that began in 1919.

Developing Disasters • 29

Two practices lie at the core of this book: domicide—or the willful destruction of someone’s dwelling—­and the construction of hazardous dwellings in urban areas. Th ­ ese spatial practices contour exclusion and belonging in Haiti in concrete ways. They also determine how citizenship, which I simply define h ­ ere as the practice of being included and participating in a par­tic­u ­lar society, is enacted. The industrial development that has occurred in the Caracol region, in the very center of historical re­sis­tance against wage-­labor systems, represents an attempt to silence indigenous history and practices. It also destroys the agricultural systems, cosmologies, and ecologies that have allowed most rural Haitians to live, and sometimes to thrive, in northeastern Haiti. Although the small-­farm-­ based economic system in the region, created by Haitians ­after the country’s 1804 revolution for in­de­pen­dence, has profoundly changed, I argue that the cultural, spatial, and religious practices of a self-­sufficient Haitian peasantry pre­ sent fruitful alternatives to an export-­based economy that ruins the island ­today.

The Rush to the North Since 2013, Aland Joseph and I have talked about and researched one of the most transformative aspects of the 2010 earthquake—­what the Haitian journalist Roberson Alphonse (2012) has aptly named the “rush to the north,” which started in 2012. Shortly ­after the earthquake, the United States and the United Nations used power­f ul po­liti­cal leverage to assume disproportionate roles in defining reconstruction priorities in Haiti. UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton coordinated the efforts of the Clinton Foundation, the United Nations, and the U.S. Department of State to create a growth pole in northern Haiti. Bill Clinton and the Haitian prime minister Jean-­Max Bellerive then led the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), an entity created by presidential decree on April 21, 2010, to foster national economic growth in order to generate revenue to rebuild the country. In 2011, Michel Martelly was elected president of Haiti. His pro-­business politics aligned with the Clintons’ agenda and helped kick-­start the creation of an economic corridor in northern Haiti. The idea of this corridor quickly gained national traction. As Fritz Jean, the former prime minister and current president of the Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Professions of Northeastern Haiti, notes, “population movements, new forms of land use and the emergence of new industrial and commercial enterprises w ­ ill redefine [Haiti’s north as] ‘The Northern Economic Corridor’ ” (Alphonse 2012). In this growth pole, according to the government, earthquake victims would find ways to rebuild their lives through employment stability and housing opportunities. The Haitian government and its allied international mega-­donors sang a gospel of ­future prosperity. They claimed the newly built free-­trade zones would generate tens of thousands of jobs and extra revenue in the region. This, in turn, would foster the creation of a new port, new roads, and new schools. The

30 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

Northern Economic Corridor would spearhead new development in Haiti and trigger rebuilding efforts in regions affected by the earthquake. Both foreign and Haitian journalists, along with telegenic p­ eople such as the celebrities Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, and Richard Branson, touted a par­tic­u­lar idea as the key ele­ ment for long-­term recovery: northern Haiti would be “open for business.” Indeed, media noise around the Northern Economic Corridor transformed this region. International donors and international financial institutions (IFIs) forcefully argued that creating industrial poles would be the best long-­term development strategy for post-­earthquake Haiti. For instance, Sean Penn, the actor who suddenly became a leader in humanitarian aid and started managing a tent camp in the Port-­au-­Prince region in 2010, strongly backed “open for business” policies as a way to fix Haiti. As he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, foreign investors should back the international community’s efforts to create a strong industrial sector in Haiti since industry would trigger the country’s reconstruction (2014). This type of discourse was ubiquitous in post-­earthquake Haiti. But trickle-­down economics was far from new. A ­ fter devastating floods and a food crisis that rocked the country in 2008, the United Nations sent experts to find supposedly new ways to stabilize Haiti. In a report for the secretary-­general of the UN published in 2009, the economist Paul Collier advocated creating jobs in two ways: reconstructing infrastructure and creating export zones. Growing the economy by expanding the country’s garment industry was at the center of this report. ­A fter the 2010 earthquake, Collier’s strategy became a key component in national reconstruction efforts (Katz 2012). At the same time, in his leading role as a UN special envoy and as the codirector of the IHRC, Bill Clinton also strongly advocated expanding the garment industry. However, the Clintons’ involvement in Haitian affairs was not heavi­ly motivated by finances. Instead of cashing in on the multiple proj­ects they helped launch, the Clintons sought economic power. As Jonathan Katz aptly notes, “the island represented a key piece of what [Hillary] Clinton called ‘economic statecraft’—­her theory that U.S. foreign policy should not simply respond to security threats but should actively bolster both Amer­i­ca’s economy and global influence through diplomacy, trade and economic development abroad” (2015). Hence, aid was replaced with economic development in the form of policy proposals, investments, and advantageous trade conditions with the United States u­ nder the assumption that this pro­cess would strengthen both countries. Even though the board of this temporary institution included Haitian experts, international donors promoted this neoliberal agenda. By and large, the IHRC ignored the input of Haitian representatives. Instead, it implemented an agenda created well before the earthquake, and the presence of Haitian experts on its board was simply cosmetic. In December 2011, the twelve Haitian members of the IHRC wrote a letter describing how they had been marginalized to Jean-­Max Bellerive and Bill

Developing Disasters • 31

Clinton. As they stated, “the twelve Haitian members pre­sent h ­ ere feel completely disconnected from the activities of the IHRC. . . . ​In spite of our role in the governance structure of the institution, we have so far received no follow-up on the IHRC activities” (CEPR [Center for Policy and Economic Research] 2011). According to other scholars, Haitian board members had one role in the IHRC: they ­were supposed to endorse any decisions made by the director and the executive committee (Lundahl 2013). Their major task was to empower national ministries by assigning them to lead reconstruction proj­ects and by developing long-­term state capacity and expertise. However, a g­ reat part of the immediate reconstruction was not handled by the Haitian state or Haitian companies. ­These conditions created an industrial rush in the post-­earthquake moment. Indeed, just three weeks a­ fter the 2010 earthquake, Kenneth Merten, the United States ambassador in Haiti at the time, stated the following in a secret cable titled “The Gold Rush Is On!”: “As Haiti digs out from the earthquake, dif­fer­ent [US] companies are moving in to sell their concepts, products and ser­vices” (Herz and Ives 2012). The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), spearheading debris removal and immediate relief efforts, provided more than $200 million in reconstruction contracts in less than six months. In his 2009 report, Collier aptly recommended using infrastructure (re)construction as a lever for job creation and private-­sector reinforcement. However, on the 1,490 contracts USAID awarded in 2010, only 23 Haitian companies w ­ ere selected. As a result, only 2.5 ­percent of the funds disbursed by USAID went to Haitian companies (CEPR 2011). In contrast, U.S. corporations secured impor­tant construction contracts. USAID was and is in charge of allocating funds for the U.S. Department of State, and most of the reconstruction contracts went to Washington, DC, Beltway firms. The U.S. companies that formed part of the influx—­the usual actors in disaster capitalism such as AshBritt, DRC Group, and the ubiquitous Chemonics International, Inc.—­specialized in post-­disaster and postwar reconstruction. Although t­ hese companies cashed in on the contracts, they rarely involved local residents and communities in the proj­ects they implemented. In addition, most failed to employ the quota of Haitians they w ­ ere supposed to hire (Kushner 2012). Although the financial power of the IHRC was ­limited, it nonetheless managed to orient the general long-­term recovery plan in the country and maintain the reliance on Beltway companies. Hillary Clinton forcefully intervened in the 2011 Haitian presidential elections in order to install the pro-­business government of Michel Martelly, who backed the IHRC development agenda. USAID gave nearly $100,000 to the for-­profit U.S. contractor Chemonics which, in turn, allocated ­these funds to Martelly’s party Tèt Kale before the election runoff in May  2011 (Johnston 2015). ­T hese funds fueled the electoral campaigns and demonstrations of Martelly’s party and led to a fraudulent victory that the

32 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

Organ­ization of American States representative Ricardo Seitenfus called a “­silent coup d’état” (Beeton and Nienaber 2015). With a Haitian government sponsored by the Department of State, Bill Clinton had power within the IHRC to direct reconstruction according to his own neoliberal vision, and the 2009 Collier report was refurbished into a disaster recovery plan—­the Action Plan for the Recovery and Development of Haiti. Although this plan was implemented ­under the motto “Building Back Better” (who would want to build back worse?), very ­little was actually built or rebuilt in the post-­earthquake period. By 2012, only $215 million of the $6 billion dollars in aid disbursed ­after the earthquake had been used for housing reconstruction. Most of the funds went instead to humanitarian relief, and “ ‘Building Back Better’ became an opportunity to push for a wide range of programmes not connected to the destruction of the earthquake” (Fan 2013, 22). Indeed, the Action Plan catalyzed the construction of free-­trade zones and industrial parks to h ­ ouse the garment industry. That industry would supposedly kick-­start the economic growth that would, in turn, generate long-­term recovery. Essentially, the IHRC’s Action Plan set bud­get priorities and privileged the creation of “growth poles” in Haiti. As journalists and scholars argue, the post-­earthquake relief effort was poorly coordinated. It was also out of touch with Haitians’ needs, and the massive influx of nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs) and development agencies ultimately contributed to further the weakening of state capacities (Fatton 2014). Ultimately, it resulted in the development of free-­trade zones and industrial parks. Long-­term development replaced relief u­ nder the influence of United Nations Special Envoy Bill Clinton and his allies. Although the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, created in 2010 by the former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, stated that “100% of donations [would] go directly to relief efforts” to help victims of the earthquake, this allocation categorically did not happen (Herz 2011; Robinson 2016). On the ground, the $50 million fund was dedicated to long-­ term development or, as Ansel Herz phrases it, to “long term programs to develop Haiti’s business class” (2011). This was not the first time Bill Clinton successfully advocated for a pro-­ business agenda in Haiti. The neoliberal mea­sures imposed by the United States and IFIs on Haiti in 1995 greatly accelerated the unraveling of the Haitian agricultural sector. In 1994, ­a fter years of economic embargo and paramilitary vio­lence, Jean-­Bertrand Aristide signed the Governor’s Island Accord, which allowed him to resume his presidency. Aristide, urged by U.S. allies and pressured by Bill Clinton, had no choice but to implement drastic structural adjustment programs (Dupuy 2007). Once again, opening Haiti for business proved to be a violent endeavor. A U.S.-­backed United Nations force occupied the country and suppressed popu­lar re­sis­tance to the newly imposed austerity mea­sures in the name of stabilization and peacekeeping. Aristide himself became a tame advocate of capitalism and development through economic growth. ­Under Bill Clinton’s influence, the second Aristide government, and the many successive

Developing Disasters • 33

governments that followed it, implemented the same neoliberal mea­sures that further pauperized Haiti. When describing the Clinton government-­sponsored return of Aristide, Doug Hellinger writes, “Though mindful of the misery caused by a long history of elite rule in Haiti, the Clinton team, along with the international financial institutions, have insisted on control over the Haitian economy through a structural adjustment program that gives priority to the interests of foreign investors over ­those of the Haitian poor” (quoted in McGowan 1997, 2). The usual IFIs—­the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, USAID, and the IDB—­ promised to provide $2 billion in aid upon implementation of pro-­business policies. What ­were ­these policies? International donors asked the Haitian government to retrench half of its civil servants, decrease minimum wages, privatize nine state enterprises, limit state regulation and intervention in the economic field, create free-­trade zones, and provide tax incentives to foreign businesses (McGowan 1997). As the Haitian state dwindled and public ser­vices dis­appeared, the country entered a long phase of acute crisis. Gary Victor’s (2000) novel, A l’­angle des rues parallèles, describes this period forcefully by following the trajectory of Eric, a state worker who loses his job ­because of IMF-­backed structural adjustments and “who becomes a serial killer as his private world and the society around him collapses” (Munro 2015, 98). With the sudden disappearance of an already frail system of public ser­vices and state regulations, the possibility of a better f­ uture became foreclosed to many Haitians like Eric. As other scholars have shown, such mea­sures caused an abrupt decline in small-­scale agriculture, a heavy reliance on food imports, and a deep sense of po­liti­cal instability (Richardson 1997; Farmer et al. 2012; Steckley and Shamsie 2015). The radical decrease in tariffs in the 1990s and 2000s allowed subsidized U.S. rice to flood the country and sapped the vibrant Haitian rice agriculture—­a decline for which Bill Clinton apologized in 2010 (O’Connor 2013). Slashing import tariffs meant slashing state revenues. As Jean-­Germain Gros suggests, structural adjustment programs are not a “cure” but rather represent the very ele­ ment that sparks “the contagion of the disease” as they foster state fragility, international debt, and massive dwindling of state revenues (2010, 983). Slashing tariffs in Haiti spurred economic activity—­but only for rice farmers in the Mississippi Valley. At the time, attractive conditions for the business sector ­were forcefully implemented, but foreign investors did not flock to Haiti. Yet again, pro-­business policies failed everyday Haitians. The ideas expressed by Paul Collier in his 2009 report w ­ ere not new; they simply reinvoked old economic ­recipes. From 1970 to 1980, assembly industries became a key sector in Haiti’s economy, and they employed 80 ­percent of the industrial workforce (Péan 1987). They functioned on an enclave model: international manufacturers in Haiti benefited from tax and tariff exemptions and paid no taxes on materials and machinery imported for goods production. The

34 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

resulting sweatshops paid their workers very low salaries and often subtracted extra money from employee paychecks for unreasonable expenses. For instance, employees had to pay for toilet paper and drinking ­water. They ­were also subject to seasonal layoffs. Meanwhile, the 9 ­percent taxes removed from their salaries w ­ ere siphoned into the coffers of Duvalier and his inner circle (Schuller 2007). This model is pervasive in con­temporary Haiti: we see roughly the same system of shaving salaries in industrial parks. In 2011, the industrial pole meant to catalyze the creation of the Northern Economic Corridor emerged in Caracol in the form of a 617-­acre industrial park. ­Because Haitian administrators w ­ ere mostly bypassed, the construction of the park was swift. Similar to what historically happened in the American Wild West, developers invaded and destroyed Caracol as if it w ­ ere a blank slate devoid of history and h ­ uman activity. The proj­ect was well funded: Sae-­A Trading Co. Ltd. invested $78 million to buy equipment and promised to hire 20,000 workers (Shamsie 2019). The IDB provided $200.5 million for the construction of buildings, roads, and a ­water treatment plant, and the U.S. government funded a $98 million electrical power plant. The main garment producer that moved to Caracol at this time and created 13,000 jobs between 2012 and 2019 was Sae-­A, a large Korea-­based multinational apparel production com­pany. When Daniel Cho, president of the Haiti subsidiary of Sae-­A, arrived at the park’s construction site in early 2012, he said, “You can see. Nothing is h ­ ere. This area is like a white paper, and we can draw on it” (quoted in Sontag 2012a). Cho’s words crudely reflect what the economist William Easterly calls the “blank-­slate mentality,” namely, the tendency to “ignore history and to see each poor society as infinitely malleable for the development expert to apply his technical solutions” (2013, 25). Sae-­A supplies U.S. retailers such as Walmart and Kohl’s and has played a major role in the industrial development of several Latin American countries. However, instead of ushering in prosperity, Sae-­A tends to offer low salaries to its employees in t­ hese countries and creates stressful work conditions. More impor­tant, the com­pany has historically collaborated with repressive governments and pro-­corporatist u­ nions to repress workers who try to or­ga­nize to seek better work conditions and pay. Of course, Caracol was not and is not a blank slate or piece of white paper. But the blank-­slate narrative, as I detail ­later, is a common tool used by developers of all stripes to transform the Caracol region many times before. In the case of the CIP, in order to make room for the proj­ect, an estimated 366 families ­were displaced from their land (Chérestal 2015). The CIP also negatively affected “720 agricultural workers and thousands of resellers, food pro­cessors and pastoralists, as well as rural community members who relied on the agricultural production of the land for food and livelihood or used it to access w ­ ater” (Chérestal 2015, 3). Actually, a more recent report explains that the CIP exacerbated food insecurity in the region by actually displacing 442 families (Kolektif Peyizan 2017).

Developing Disasters • 35

Although some farmers received small financial compensations for their lost land, the money did not make up for their lost livelihoods. During the fieldwork I conducted between 2015 and 2019, I observed that the CIP had failed to increase quality of life for most ­people who live in northeastern Haiti. The park’s employees, and Sae-­A’s workers in par­tic­u­lar, receive meager wages for the hard work they perform in overheated factories. My interlocutors resent that managerial positions have been given to p­ eople from Guatemala and ­Korea while Haitians have been offered only menial, low-­paid jobs. Although the park was supposed to create 60,000 jobs in five years, only about 35,000 people work in the Haitian apparel industry as of 2018, and approximately 9,000 ­people work in Caracol (Haiti Libre 2018). In 2019, fewer than 15,000 p­ eople worked in the CIP. As you w ­ ill hear below from p­ eople who worked at the CIP, it destroyed not only the livelihoods of peasant farmers but also the complex cultural, social, religious, and economic systems that enabled them to thrive in their homeland. Farms and livelihoods w ­ ere crushed but value systems w ­ ere also deeply disrupted in this area where deep relations between h ­ umans and their environment sustain a fragile but vital social and environmental equilibrium.

Touring the CIP In March 2019, I met with Benoit, a Haitian businessman who lives in Cap Haitian and imports goods for one of the factories in the CIP. A friend of mine who runs an NGO in Port-­au-­Prince introduced us. They had gone to school together, and Benoit contributed funding to her NGO. Benoit picked me up in a brand-­new SUV at Trou du Nord’s central plaza around noon. We talked about our mutual friend, and I explained my research. When I asked Benoit what he did for a living, his answers ­were vague. “Import-­export stuff,” he said in En­glish. Benoit grew up in Cap Haitian but attended college in Florida, where his parents currently live. As we drove t­ oward the CIP, he noted, “They know me well; I can come and go as I want.” On our way, I asked him what he thought of the mega-­project. Initially, Benoit sounded enthusiastic about the CIP: “The north has been ignored for so long. Every­thing is centered in Port-­au-­Prince, all the factories and development proj­ ects. We felt ignored ­here, t­ here’s not much you can do in this region. . . . ​I think it’s g­ reat that ­people are getting jobs.” He pointed to ­houses in vari­ous states of construction as we exited Trou du Nord. As p­ eople moved to the area in larger numbers over the past five years for work opportunities, the small town expanded in e­ very direction. Benoit said, “The power plant gives electricity to Terrier Rouge, Caracol, Trou du Nord, Fort Liberté. Businesses are developing t­ here. New opportunities I guess.” When I asked what he thought of the unplanned construction of housing settlements in the region, Benoit sensed that I doubted the benefits of the CIP.

36 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

When he realized I would be open to critique of the industrial park, Benoit’s tone suddenly changed: “This is a prob­lem. Bidonvilles have emerged everywhere, that’s true. Even in Cap Haitian, ­there are new neighborhoods where ­people ­can’t even access potable ­water. H ­ ere in Trou du Nord, ­there are sanitation prob­lems. Too many ­people came very suddenly, and I feel we could have a Cité Soleil effect, you know, it’s the biggest Port-­au-­Prince slum, and it grew ­after factories open in this part of the capital.” Benoit then recalled the Cap Haitian of his youth: clean, orderly, and somewhat functional. When we spoke, it had been almost five years since Cap Haitian had received electricity, and trash collection had been almost non­ex­is­tent for the same period of time. As we chatted, I noted that the city and its bay are presently littered with fatra (trash) and that state-­sponsored urban renovations had ­stopped as well. Benoit agreed and said, “Fast urbanization is not good, and I think the CIP contributes to the trash prob­lem, too.” During our conversation, he made it clear that for a local businessman like him, the so-­called Northern Economic Corridor proj­ect brought few benefits to the region. Benoit then said he wanted to show me something before we went to the industrial park. We drove among the flat fields not far from the small town of Limonade, and we ­stopped at the site where CIP factories dump their trash. By that point, Benoit’s tone had completely changed. He was outraged. We climbed out of the car and talked briefly to a guard at the entrance of the dump. He allowed us to look at the site and even take pictures. The guard seemed equally outraged when he said, “They w ­ ere supposed to dig a hole and to do t­ hings properly. They ­were supposed to produce some kind of study, but they just dump every­thing ­here, in the ­middle of the fields.” The landfill was extensive. Piles of scrap clothing formed im­mense mounds of colorful trash. On the ground we could see tags with the names of American stores for which the factories produced garments—­Kohl’s, Walmart, JCPenney. “Can you believe it?” Benoit said. “It’s not a landfill built with American norms, it’s just a dump in the ­middle of the fields. It shows how much t­ hese foreign companies re­spect us.” He asked for my camera and said, “I’ll take a picture of you h ­ ere, so you can show p­ eople that this dump is real!” Not only garment factories but also CIP trucks had littered the site; leftover clothing mingled with CIP waste on the side of the road. Unfortunately, this practice was common. For instance, on July 31, 2019, a newspaper reported that the mayor of Cap Haitian, Yvrose Pierre, “accompanied by the police, s­ topped a spill, arrested several ­people and seized a large container of waste from the Caracol Park which unloaded its contents illegally in the commune” (Haiti Libre 2019). The ­people I talked with told me that CIP trash was everywhere—in the fields, in the streets, and even in the ocean. They talked about how a nineteen-­ hectare site was supposed to be constructed in Limonade, but a local businessman blocked the proj­ect and claimed rights to the fields. Locals have waited almost ten years for the landfill to be constructed. They continue to wait.

Developing Disasters • 37

FIG. 5  ​The landfill used by the Caracol Industrial Park factories near Limonade.

The World Bank, the French Development Agency, and the IDB invested $33.5 million into the creation of the landfill. However, the infrastructure necessary to accommodate a large industrial site was simply not in place when Haitian and international stakeholders de­cided to build the CIP. The IDB and its partners fast-­tracked the proj­ect and implemented it without a full social and environmental analy­sis. The IDB pre-­feasibility assessment, once again, wrongly described the site of the CIP as “devoid of habitation and intensive cultivation” (IDB 2010, 56). José Augustin Aguerre, the country department man­ag­er for the IDB’s Haiti division, even stated that it would take ten years to build the park “if one has to do this in the normal pro­cess of planning and then funding and then decision-­making” (quoted in Sontag 2012a). In the Caracol area, no ports equipped to ship large quantities of goods exist, and officials conducted no study to assess how the park could potentially harm the Trou du Nord River and the Caracol Bay or how it might affect the availability of groundwater. Instead, the CIP was built fast and furiously, and officials completely disregarded the peasants who already worked the fertile land of Caracol as well as anyone e­ lse who might have been affected by the park’s pollution. When Benoit and I discussed this pro­cess, we both tried to think of benefits it may have created for the local population. As we brainstormed, Benoit said, “The Korean com­pany built a g­ reat school where some employees’ c­ hildren go. . . . ​But it’s a tiny fraction of the region’s c­ hildren who benefit from this school.” When we fi­nally arrived at the CIP, Benoit asked me not to speak with anyone. We stayed in the car and quickly toured the proj­ect. Fifteen large factory

38 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

shells in white and blue dotted the park, and some remained empty. Asphalt roads ran alongside the buildings. Two large garment companies, a perfume com­pany, and a paint com­pany had established their assembly lines in Caracol. Sae-­A , the South Korean garment firm I mentioned e­ arlier, is the main employer in the CIP. Benoit said, “It’s far from being full, ­there are now about 14,000 employees working h ­ ere, most of them working for the Koreans. We ­were promised 60,000 jobs when the Clintons inaugurated the park.” He ­stopped the car by an office building and showed me a few mango trees that had been spared by the bulldozers. “It’s funny, ­a fter their shift, ­people come into this area, they pick plants, fruits. Some t­ hings are still growing ­here.” He then restarted the car and quickly showed me the Korean headquarters. “The Korean man­ag­ers live in ­these apartment buildings, it’s like a gated community,” he said. “They ­don’t mingle with Haitians, ever. They even have their own cafeteria. ­There are some man­ag­ers from Guatemala too, but they live in newly built settlements in Terrier Rouge. The ­children at the Korean school have to take Korean language classes, but the Korean ­people who live with us ­don’t even know a word of Kreyòl.” The park was almost empty when we left at 2:30 p.m. P ­ eople w ­ ere busy working in the overheated factories. Benoit, like the peasant farmers of Caracol, resented the fact that high-­paying jobs went to non-­ Haitians. I told him I had read that half the CIP workers ­were now from the area, and that seemed to be an improvement for the local workforce. He replied with a hint of sarcasm and said that p­ eople who had settled in the region in 2011 and 2012 ­were now considered “locals.” ­A fter we finished looking at the CIP, Benoit gave me a r­ ide to the EKAM village, a workers’ settlement built by USAID in 2011. ­There, we drank a cold beer and talked about what he thought development meant. The conversation switched from En­glish to Kreyòl. As a businessman, he believed that export zones could be a good t­ hing for Haiti. However, he listed the type of infrastructure needed before any such zone could be opened: “We need to rebuild the Cap Haitian port, to build roads, an electric grid, a sewage system. . . . ​That’s what we need to do at the very least before building industrial parks. But with the CIP, they did every­thing upside down [tet anba].” His conclusion was laced with sarcasm: “When I see my beloved city t­ oday [Cap Haitian], drowned in trash [ak fatra nan tout kote], I’m thinking that ­there’s no bright ­future for Haiti. I’m ­doing good myself, but I want to see other ­people having a chance too.” He then looked around and said, “Our country cannot be rebuilt by p­ eople who ­don’t know our culture. Look at ­these tiny ­houses! No courtyards, no privacy.” The owner of the boutique where we sat also pitched in and told us that the ­houses made by the Americans ­were full of defects and that the building materials w ­ ere cheap. He exclaimed, “­There’s a wall of my h ­ ouse with a black stain, as if the walls ­were rotting!” As we sat and talked, surrounded by rows of identical, discolored ­houses, Benoit and the boutique’s owner once again underscored for me how deep the disconnect is between what p­ eople desired for the

Developing Disasters • 39

region and what was imposed on them—­from work regimes and industrial ­futures to inadequate housing. L ­ ater that day, Benoit and I visited the Korean school, and then he gave me a r­ ide back to Milot, where I was staying for a few days. We exchanged business cards and promised to keep in touch.

Working Conditions at the CIP In the days that followed my meeting with Benoit, I met ­people who worked in the garment factories of Caracol. I hired a friend of mine, Francis, to drive me around Limonade and Quar­tier Morin, where many CIP employees live. Francis and I first connected at the Cap airport in 2015 when another friend, from Port-­ au-­Prince, recommended we meet. Francis and his cousin run a small, informal car-­rental business not far from the airport. He is one of a large circle of chauffeurs who used to drive tourists around during the Duvalier era, and he knows ­people in ­every corner of northeastern Haiti. Now, he mainly rents cars to other chauffeurs, who often wait in vain for tourists at the Cap airport. Thanks to Francis, I met p­ eople from e­ very background in the region. Some of the ­people with whom I interacted closely include two of Francis’s distant relatives who worked in the CIP. Since 2015, I have also been in touch with a young man from Bodmè Limonade who worked as a line man­ag­er in one of the CIP’s large garment factories. I had met Tony Valcin through his older ­brother Pierre, a police officer who knew a close friend of mine in Port-­au-­Prince. Pierre left his stressful job in the antiriot police unit and now lives in the Bahamas where he works at a ­giant h ­ otel. Although Tony had an opportunity to join Pierre, he preferred to keep his job at the CIP. In addition to ­these men, I was able to talk with seven other CIP workers. Through their stories, I realized that what Benoit had told me about the working conditions was true. I first chatted with two w ­ omen related to Francis’s wife. We arrived at their ­house one morning ­under a cloudy sky that seemed to suggest the approach of heavy rains. “­Don’t count on it,” Francis said when I mentioned the potential rain. “It ­doesn’t rain anymore ­here!” ­A fter we walked down a dusty alley, we arrived in a small courtyard surrounded by candelabra plants and banana trees. Adelina and Wendy are cousins in their mid-­thirties who live next to each other in Quar­tier Morin, a small town ten miles from the CIP. They w ­ ere sitting with neighbors in the courtyard when we entered. Francis started the conversation by exchanging ­family news. Usually cheerful and expressive, he spoke with them softly and questioned ­whether the country could recover from its latest crisis. “Business has been non­ex­is­tent [pa gen aktivite] since the big strikes. Peyi a lok, lok, lok,” he added (the country is para­lyzed). Francis was referring to mass demonstrations in February 2019 that effectively slowed all work sectors in the country. Since July 2018, the Moïse administration has been unable to form a working government or to vote on a bud­get. This means that loans from IFIs cannot be granted and that urgent social programs

40 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

have been in­def­initely suspended. In the meantime, inflation has soared while salaries have stagnated—­over the course of one year, p­ eople lost more than 20 ­percent of their buying power. Haitians, w ­ hether they work in the formal or informal sector, cannot make ends meet. Holding a stable job in a factory no longer suffices. ­People often rely on remittances if any of their ­family members work outside the country, or on the produce they cultivate if they own a plot of land. For two years, from 2013 to 2015, Adelina worked in the industrial park. She quit ­after she injured her hand while sewing T-­shirts. Wendy started working at a CIP garment factory in 2014 and continues to work t­ here. We visited them on their Saturday off. We sat on the porch of Adelina’s small ­house, and Francis explained what I wanted to ask them. I then told them I was not a journalist and that I would protect their anonymity. As I learned in 2015, the situation was tense at the CIP, and p­ eople could easily be fired if their employers found out they had spoken openly with outsiders. Adelina started our conversation by saying that she was happy she no longer had to work on the factory line: Where I worked, they have man­ag­ers from Guatemala. They ­were mean with us, they shouted at us all the time. I could not even take a pause to go to the rest­rooms b­ ecause at the end of the pay period, they take a chunk of your salary for toilet expenses! The pay is low, and ­going ­there e­ very day, even on Saturdays, meant that my husband had way more work to do. Taking the ­children to school, cooking for them. B ­ ecause when I came home, I was too tired to do any chores. My husband owns land and has a large field [ jadin], but it’s far from ­here. He needs to get ­there early. Leaving my job was not r­ eally a prob­lem. Anyway, ­after I cut my hand, I d­ on’t even know if they would take me back.

Wendy, who is married but has no ­children, explained that she could not quit. Her husband is a schoolteacher who works in dif­fer­ent private schools in the region. She said: He’s making so l­ ittle money. . . . ​I need to work so we can pay the rent. It’s a small ­house, it’s nice, but I pay 15,000 HTG [approximately $200 at the time] to rent it ­every six months. I make 420 HTG [roughly $4.50] a day, but like Adelina said, they take taxes and all kinds of expenses when they hand you your pay check. I take a ­free bus to go to work, but I get to the bus stop with a motorbike. That’s expensive. I d­ on’t eat breakfast, but I buy my lunch ­there. We get paid ­every two weeks, and once you pay your bills, ­there’s not much left of your paycheck. Life became ­really expensive. If Adelina’s husband ­didn’t have a field, I ­don’t know how we would eat. The price of rice goes up all the time.

Wendy then explained how much food prices had risen in the past few weeks. Other workers I met shared the same anx­i­eties; the country’s recent wild

Developing Disasters • 41

inflation had made their lives much harder. Adelina then complained that the lunches sold at the CIP had become smaller and smaller over time. She said, “The end of the shift is hard. I get hungry, I get headaches from the noise and heat. I guess that’s how I got my hand ­under the sewing machine. I w ­ asn’t badly injured, but that was enough for me to quit. I just ­didn’t like it. The line man­ag­ ers shout at us at the end of the day, b­ ecause we need to go over our quota to make extra money. It can be very intense. It’s much better for me to help my husband in the field.” Both ­women talked about inflation several times during our discussion. I was unsurprised; rising food prices w ­ ere on every­one’s mind. The fact that most food in the region was imported from the Dominican Republic, partly ­because fields in Caracol and Limonade had recently been bulldozed, was also a source of anger and resentment for many. We ended our conversation by talking about pineapples that came from the Dominican Republic. For Wendy and Adelina, the pineapples symbolized every­thing that was wrong with the pre­sent situation—­they ­were big, expensive, tasteless, and full of pesticides. Francis noted that relying on expensive imports and quashing food production in the region was sacrilegious. He added, “You want to eat Haitian food [manje lakay] to support the country, but it’s impossible.” Francis and I left at the end of the morning and went to a small restaurant located in a ­house next to his garage in Cap Haitian. What food was available? We ate a plate of American rice and Dominican fried chicken as we talked about the morning’s events. The workers I met ­after I talked with Wendy and Adelina had similar experiences and invoked the same narratives in the conversations we had: low pay, companies that take cuts out of paychecks, man­ag­ers who are rude to employees, and physical pain on the job. However, when I returned to do follow-up visits in June 2019, something had changed. Justin, a young man I had met in March 2019, summarized the situation in an angry, worried tone: A few weeks ago, the government said it would raise the minimum wage. We make 420 HTG, and the government talked about raising the salaries to 1,000 HTG a day. I d­ idn’t see it, but I was told that trucks started to displace some of the Korean factory equipment to the Dominican Republic. The Korean bosses threatened to move to the Dominican Republic if salaries w ­ ere g­ oing up. I also heard that the recent strikes [peyi lok] could make them go away. Maybe it’s just politics, but lots of us fear that we could lose our jobs. I d­ on’t make much, but it’s all I have now.

When we first spoke in March, Justin was optimistic about and thankful for the job he had recently secured. As he said at the time, “I’m the first one of my ­family who ­doesn’t work in the fields. I never wanted to work in the fields, I was ready to leave for Port-­au-­Prince or to leave the country. This job is a blessing for me [grace à Dieu, m te jwen yon bon job].” A scant three months l­ater, the

42 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

country’s po­liti­cal crisis weighed heavi­ly on him and redoubled the stress he felt at work. Line man­ag­ers at the factories fared l­ ittle better. Tony Valcin, the man I first met in 2015, was optimistic when we chatted again in March 2019. He had become a line man­ag­er during the summer of 2018 and was making a bit more money. He said, “My f­ amily and I fi­nally moved away from my parents in Bodmè. W ­ e’re now in Trou du Nord. H ­ ere we have electricity, we ­don’t have to go far to fetch ­water, it’s a dif­fer­ent life.” However, Tony told me in March that he always felt tired. He was also dissatisfied that he paid lots of taxes and that his employers made cuts to his paycheck. His older b­ rother Pierre, who works in the Bahamas, sent him money once in a while. At the time, Tony was also reeling from the country’s sudden food-­price inflation and relied on his ­brother’s remittances—­a state that made him uneasy. When we met again in June, Tony’s optimism had dis­appeared. He said, “Workers demonstrated in Ouanaminthe [the other industrial park in the region] recently, and they ­didn’t get anything. They sent the UTMO [antiprotest police] on them. I fear that if we demonstrate, the factory ­will close and move to the Dominican Republic.” He put his hands on top of his head and added, “Vincent, have you seen how food is expensive? How can we keep up if they ­don’t raise our salaries? None of us can keep up [pa gen moun ki kap viv konsa].” Tony then handed me his paycheck and showed me all the deductions that ­were being made from his salary. Ouanaminthe workers demonstrated specifically against this practice of paycheck deductions. Some workers ­were losing as much as 25 ­percent of their salaries in vile cuts masked as mandatory contributions. Tony remarked, “We cannot say anything. The bosses made us sign ‘agreement letters’ when we started at the factory. It says that a­ fter two warnings—­for being late, for being slow on the line—­you can be fired. Th ­ ere’s a lot of turnover at the CIP. If they decide they ­don’t like you anymore, they make something up and fire you. Most of us d­ on’t want to protest. We ­can’t afford to lose our jobs.” This type of job instability was invoked in conversations I had with other workers. For instance, a ­woman who hailed from Port-­au-­Prince had worked at the CIP, and she expressed similar concerns. She was worried by the factory ­owners’ ability to fire ­people on a whim. She feared that she would have to return to Port-­au-­Prince where life, she said, was much harder. In most cases, jobs in the industrial sector do not benefit Haitians (Schuller 2009b; Sontag 2012b; Dupuy 2014). Instead, such jobs render Haitians vulnerable to global fluctuations in food prices and to broader economic inflation. In one report published in 2019, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs noted that “humanitarian needs assistance in 2019 concerns 2.6 million p­ eople” (UN OCHA 2020). Amid a severe drought and ongoing cholera epidemics, the state is “locked”—­people cannot access basic health ser­vices, and international large-­scale humanitarian and social aid is

Developing Disasters • 43

FIG. 6  ​Monsieur Saint-­Thoma’s only remaining cow. The industrial park is located 50 meters

away.

blocked. Food security remains a central prob­lem, and hundreds of thousands of ­people face food and ­water shortages. As Francis complained when we talked about the disappearance of small white Haitian pineapples, “the fertile land of the Cap region was mostly gone.” And as farmers in Caracol explained to me repeatedly, the location of their fields along the Trou du Nord River had allowed them to confront droughts—­before such fields ­were bulldozed to make way for the CIP. Hilère Favier, an eighty-­year-­old man I visited in Caracol in June 2019, echoed the sentiments of many p­ eople I met when he said, “You just need to look around you. Our beefs are ­dying, every­thing has dried up. It’s not with the salary of my grand­-­daughter [from CIP work] that we ­will survive.” As Francis and I drove across the region, we saw half-­starved h ­ orses and ­cattle along the road. Occasionally, we glimpsed dead c­ attle in the ravines adjacent to fields. Instead of helping ­people in the region, the CIP seemed to contribute to their mounting vulnerability to both slow-­onset and acute disasters. The farmers of northeastern Haiti have been among the first p­ eople in the country to bear the brunt of unfolding po­liti­cal, social, and environmental crisis in the con­temporary moment.

A Well-­Known Pattern The weight of historical evidence in Haiti demonstrates that one-­off industrial ventures do not develop Haiti’s economy. Instead, such industrial enclave schemes contribute to developing environmental and social vulnerability while transforming state relations with corporations in ways that are detrimental to most

44 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

Haitians. Even the small town of Caracol, where the CIP is located, has a violent past filled with a series of land grabs that started with Eu­ro­pean colonization of the Amer­i­cas. Caracol is where the Santa Maria sank and where the first Eu­ro­pean settlement—­La Navidad—­was built ­under the ­orders of Christopher Columbus in December 1492 (Morison 1940). Soon ­a fter, the Caracol region became a prime location for gold-­mining ventures, which quickly led to the genocide of Hispaniola’s indigenous populations. In the seventeenth ­century, ­a fter an entire ­century of exploitation, industrial activity dwindled on the island as Spaniards began invading continental Amer­i­ca in search of precious metals. However, the French conquest of the western part of the island began in 1665 and initiated another long period of industrial activity fueled by slave ­labor. ­Later the U.S. occupation of Haiti led to additional industrialization; in the 1970s and the 1980s, being “open for business” in the country meant that international businesses paid very l­ ittle tax and w ­ ere able to access a pool of low-­paid workers. For instance, from 1941 to 1942, the Haitian president Elie Lescot ran an antisuperstition campaign that targeted Vodou prac­ti­tion­ers and helped nullify re­sis­tance to an export economy that relied on cash crops. As George Eddy Lucien notes, both the regimes of Sténio Vincent (1930–1941) and of Elie Lescot (1941–1946) “constitute a period during which the bases of neo­co­lo­nial­ism w ­ ere laid. Their financial and commercial policies reflect this pattern. They obeyed American commands to the letter. Their politics is to render the country attractive to foreign capital. Their development politics rely on loans” (2018, 47). Assemblages between international lending institutions, the United States, and the Haitian government have been used to powerfully impose industrial proj­ects in the countryside. In his novel Les arbres musiciens, published in 1957, Jacques Stephen Alexis describes the pro­cess of déchoukaj (uprooting) through industrialization. The novel takes place in the early 1940s and follows a Haitian ­family associated with the pro-­A merican government and with American corporations that developed rubber cultivation in southern Haiti. It examines how failed attempts to cultivate rubber unfolded ­under the supervision of the unoccupied Haitian state. It also explores how destructive rubber cultivation was for Haitian peasants and shows how the Haitian government operated during this industrial venture. In par­tic­u­lar, it chronicles how planting 4,800 hevea rubber plants wiped out nearly 50,000 acres of residential areas, fields, and forests in ­Grand’Anse, one of Haiti’s most fertile regions, and destroyed solidarity networks established through Vodou practices. By creating the Society for Haitian and American Agricultural Development (SHADA), a private-­public venture financed by a $5 million loan from the U.S. Export-­Import Bank, American agronomists and businessmen paired with Haitian government officials to or­ga­nize what they thought would be a lucrative corporate venture. In 1941, SHADA was granted a fifty-­year mono­poly on the sale and export of rubber and “acquired land in vari­ous regions of the country for a total of

Developing Disasters • 45

133,400 hectares, or 21.5% of the total cultivated area of Haiti” (Dupuy 1989, 45). In the Cap Haitian region, plantation ­owners forcefully displaced thousands of peasants to create cryptostegia plantations. The interests of the Haitian state and of American corporations united to create an industry that only responded to the United States’ immediate needs for rubber (Gilbert 2016). In 1944, a­ fter an unusual drought and declining rubber prices, the already floundering rubber industry mostly vanished from southern and northern Haiti and left b­ ehind deforested lands, depleted soils, and landless farmers. As Alexis notes in his novel, Haitian officials from Port-­au-­Prince, allied with American businessmen, clearly intended to destroy peasant ways of life—­which they deemed nonmodern—­and they succeeded in their goal. The rubber experiment in Haiti reveals historical forces that have contributed to the country’s penchant for isolated, poorly coordinated, short-­term industrial proj­ects that considerably increase its vulnerability to “natu­ral” disasters and economic crises. What is happening in Caracol represents a repeating well-­known pattern in the country: dispossession and displacement through industrialization.

Experiencing Industrial Destructions and Resisting Dispossession Armand Pierre is a tall, thin man in his late forties. I met him in March 2019 while I was walking with Aland Joseph on the outskirts of the CIP, where farmers displaced by the proj­ect live. Armand and some of his neighbors had just finished digging a hole in front of his ­house to install a septic tank. He hoped to rent out a small one-­bedroom ­house that he was currently building. He noted, “Since I lost my land, I have no way to make money. For the past six years, I took construction jobs ­here and in Trou du Nord, where my wife is from. We saved enough so to expand our h ­ ouse. Now that t­ here’s electricity h ­ ere, w ­ e’ll put modern amenities in the h ­ ouse, you know, fans, lights. . . . ​We hope to rent this place to someone who works in the park.” Aland and I explained to the crew of men that we wanted to know how the CIP had affected this region. Armand told me that he and his friends w ­ ere ­eager to talk, but he asked me to come back l­ater, ­after they had showered. Aland and I returned an hour ­later and sat in Armand’s courtyard for an improvised focus group. Two of Armand’s friends sat with us. I asked them if I could take notes during our conversation and explained that I was an anthropologist looking at post-­earthquake reconstruction proj­ects. Armand told me that I had come at a good time since a new round of reparation negotiations w ­ ere u­ nder way with the Inter-­A merican Development Bank. He said, “We need ­people outside of Haiti to know what’s ­going on with the earthquake money.” Another man quickly replied, “Magouille, magouille” (trickeries, trickeries). As we waited for another man to arrive, Armand told us what happened to him during the park’s construction:

46 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

It was like a bad dream. . . . ​By the end of 2011, bulldozers came right where we all used to farm and flattened every­thing in four or five days. We knew it would happen, but we ­were given a five-­day notice. It was ­really sudden. Every­thing was gone, trees, fields, h ­ ouses [ yo kraze tout bagay net, yo kraze pyebwa, jadin, kay, tout bagay]. We ­were not even allowed to go t­ here and collect wood, which at least would have helped us a l­ ittle. I never thought it would happen so fast, that it would be so destructive. And soon, since t­ here was no shade, no grass, every­thing became dry, and our c­ attle died. They had cut the trees even outside the fence.

Over the next few weeks, I heard the same narrative over and over. No one was spared from the destruction, which contributed to quick economic demise among Caracol peasants. For instance, Armand talked about the three cows and two karo (about 6.5 acres) of land that he had cultivated since 1987. A third man, Edison, arrived on his bike and jumped into the conversation immediately: “Every­ thing grew t­ here. Peas, corn, plantains . . . ​They took every­thing and gave us nothing. Well, now we have electricity, but . . .” Armand then looked at us and told Aland to rec­ord our conversation with his phone to make sure our information was precise. I asked if they had benefited from the park in any way. As he sat on his bike, Edison said, “They gave us kouwan [electricity], but it’s so expensive! They add up a huge tax on it. A ­house­hold may pay 500 or 600 Haitian dollars [from $50 to $60] a month. They calculate the tax on the amount you consume, and if you ­don’t pay at the end of the month, they cut your electricity.” In nearby towns, ­people demonstrated to demand that USAID provide them with electricity through the power plant it had built. In Fort-­Liberté, the Haitian police repressed demonstrators in a rare violent confrontation during the park’s construction. Most of the homes I visited in the region did not use electricity. ­People had to rely on small boutiques, where they paid a small fee to charge their phones and lamps. The men all agreed that it was useless to try to complain about this prob­lem ( fè doleans); authorities said they would take care of it ­later, but they never actually did anything ( yo fè vire tounen). None of ­these men or their ­family members ­were able to get jobs in the new factories. Members of the Haitian government promised them priority of employment as well as affordable electricity and compensations for land loss. However, the compensations disbursed by the IDB and handled by the Haitian government ­were inadequate and halted in 2013. Some families received nothing, and ­others received only one or two payments instead of the five payments promised by Haitian authorities. One of Armand’s friend told us: Before they built the factories, we worked this land with our c­ hildren, our spouses. We grew plaintains, peas [gwo pwa], corn, cassava [maniok]. This allowed us to make a living, to have money to send our ­children to school, to buy an animal if we needed to. . . . ​We w ­ ere able to get the money we needed to

Developing Disasters • 47

live. They came and took this land. We ­didn’t fight or throw rocks at them. They told us that they would give priority for factory jobs to ­people who lost their land or to their c­ hildren if they w ­ ere too old to work in factories. But they ­didn’t re­spect what they said. It’s ­people who come from the other provinces of the country [moun ki soti byen lwen] who got the best jobs. Us who lost our land did not receive any kind of benefit [nou pa benefisye anyen anko]. You come at a time when we ­were told we w ­ ill be compensated again. At the beginning [from 2011 to 2013], they gave us l­ ittle money in Haitian gourdes [ yon ti krabinay]. But they kept the good money and gave us Haitian gourdes.

As I heard repeatedly, the way the Haitian government handled monetary compensations angered peasants who had lost their land. Three men complained that they ­were promised American dollars but instead received Haitian gourdes, which are subject to constant devaluation. Effectively, the IDB planned a compensation scheme that was not respected: in the best case, ­people received money for three years, but some families received nothing. Even with compensations, ­people who formerly worked the Tè Chabè—­the most fertile area of Caracol where the park now stands—­cannot make ends meet ­today. Although a few ­people from Caracol ­were recently hired for jobs in the Sae-­A factory, most displaced peasants in the region have not seen the CIP’s promised benefits materialize. As Armand said: Life became hard. If you have c­ hildren who go to school to Cap Haitian, it costs a lot of money. Since the state d­ oesn’t give us anything for the education of our c­ hildren, we have to pay to educate them. And we have to pay to take care of the elders. If you get a l­ ittle money, it goes away instantly. We d­ on’t have a hospital. If you have a health prob­lem, you have to go to Milot. If you d­ on’t find a car that can get you t­ here fast, you could die. We have nothing. Promises, promises, but we sank deeper into misery. It’s a crime! [Pa gen anyen menm. Pwomes, pwomes, nou vin plis nan mize. Se yon krim!]

In essence, the post-­earthquake period opened an opportunity win­dow that allowed international agencies and the Haitian state to ignore local authorities and communities and to implement their industrial plans. If Caracol’s landscape was a verdant patchwork of small fields in the past, it is now covered in g­ iant ware­houses that generate pollution and misery. Although evicting farmers from their land and crushing their livelihoods is not new in the region, the situation with the CIP did pre­sent a novel development: for the first time in the region’s history, the Haitian state and IFIs negotiated with the ­people they had displaced. The IDB even created a compensation plan and offered packages to displaced farmers. In addition, state officials went to Caracol to “educate” ­people about the benefits of the CIP; information sessions held by state representatives from Port-­au-­Prince took place before the park was

48 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

constructed (Shamsie 2014). However, as my in­for­mants made clear, the state’s compensation efforts ­were mostly empty promises intended to calm the local population. The promises backed by the IDB ­were not fully kept. And the compensations that did occur opened new fault lines in the Caracol community. Alain Petit-­Frère, a farmer, had a large plot of land and employed up to twelve ­people during harvest season. I first met him when Francis introduced us in 2015, but we reconnected during my fieldwork in 2019. When I asked him about the money he had received from the IDB when he lost his land in 2011, his answer was blunt: “Compensation? They gave us a l­ ittle bit of shit money. A l­ ittle bit of shit money [Yon ti kaka kob yo ban nou. Yon ti kaka kob].” Farmers displaced by the CIP never received what the IDB and the Haitian government promised to them. To this day, the IDB website states that “the 366 ­people who used to farm that state-­owned land on which the industrial park is being developed have received a total $1.2 million in compensation [about $3,500 per ­house­hold, or five times the Haitian per capita income]. All w ­ ere offered access to a nearby plot with similar characteristics that ­will be improved with irrigation. ­Those [who] expressed interest in learning a new trade ­were offered job training. In addition, the el­derly and more socially vulnerable received housing assistance” (IDB 2012). I had a copy of the printed document when I met with Alain Petit-­Frère in the front yard of his ­house in Quar­tier Morin in March 2019, at the time that I resumed my inquiries about the CIP. When I translated this part to Alain, he explained that he and the ­people he knew only received yon ti kaka kob (a ­little bit of shit money) and that 442 families ­were affected, not 366 as the IDB website claimed. He also said that, to his knowledge, no one in the area had ever received land with characteristics similar to the plots they had lost. “What they ­don’t understand,” he said, “is that the Tè Chabè was the best land around h ­ ere. Even during times of droughts, we would be able to produce food. I mainly cultivated peas. I had two harvests a year! I sold ­these peas to ­people from Cap Haitian. Not only I was able to make a living and to send my ­children to school, I also employed many p­ eople.” With anger in his voice, he added, “Development! Well, I know how to make development!” As he clearly explained, the way he produced food before his land was taken was ecologically and eco­nom­ically sustainable. He pulled a notebook from a backpack he had brought from his ­house and showed us numbers: the salaries he paid to temporary workers and the benefits he generated by selling produce w ­ ere indeed impressive. He repeatedly noted that Caracol was not a poor town before the CIP; it was a place where ­people could make a living by fishing or by growing food. Very few p­ eople in the area actually supported the proj­ect. Alain Petit-­Frère certainly did not. Alain, along with the ­people who ­were displaced by the park construction, demonstrated against the proj­ect in its early stages. They would stand by the park’s entrance and hold protest signs, but, as he noted, very few ­people had the courage to protest. To some extent, however, the dialogue between state representatives and local communities worked: one of my in­for­mants mentioned that,

Developing Disasters • 49

other than a single violent altercation between protesters and the police in Fort-­ Liberté in 2012, no conflicts occurred with Haitian authorities. Peaceful meetings took place, and a few months a­ fter the fields had been bulldozed, p­ eople began receiving compensations in the local currency, Haitian gourdes. Eventually, though, the Haitian government ceased the compensations, which ­were supposed to be disbursed over a five-­year period. At that point, communication between displaced p­ eople and the government broke down. “The government dis­appeared,” Alain said, “and that ti kaka kob (­little bit of shit money) too!” As another displaced farmer said, “in 2014, we formed a new organ­ization named the Komite Tè Chabè [Kolektif Peyizan Viktim Tè Chabè]. Since we ­couldn’t reach anyone, we asked Castin, one of the organ­ization’s found­ers to reach [out] to someone, a ­lawyer from the US. That way, we ­were able to contact the IDB. They started to investigate and investigate, and in the meantime, we ­didn’t receive anything. What we received before w ­ asn’t enough, they cannot replace the land that gave us food. It’s been five years we are mobilized.” One hot after­noon in March 2019, I went to a Kolektif meeting. Alain, who only mildly supported the work of the grassroots activists leading the new demands, had invited me. The leaders of the Kolektif ­were late, and dozens of farmers sat ­under the porch of the school where the meeting was to take place. The men I had met in Caracol a few days before w ­ ere t­ here, too. They introduced me to some of their friends, and I started talking with ­people about their experiences with the compensation pro­cess. Some of them said they had never received anything. A man in his early forties told me that his signature had been forged, and his compensation had simply dis­appeared. He said that many ­people ­were in the same position. Among ­others with whom I spoke, a majority received only one or two payments of the promised five, and no one received land or was given a job in the newly built factories. Alain then introduced me to Milostène Castin, the leader of the Kolektif, when he arrived. I explained my research, and Milostène, a man in his early fifties, appeared worried to see me. He walked to one of the corners of the courtyard and made some phone calls. When he returned to us, he asked me politely to leave the meeting. He explained, “­We’re in negotiations with the IDB, and part of our deal is to keep t­ hese negotiations out of public view.” I reassured him that I did not want to endanger the negotiations with my presence. We exchanged contacts, and I left. ­A fter this first encounter, I talked with Castin on the phone a few times and met him three months l­ ater in Trou du Nord. Milostène Castin is a longtime grassroots activist who founded the Action pour la Reforestation et la Défense de l’Environnement, an organ­ization created in 2004 to fight deforestation, protect biodiversity, and defend p­ eople against land grabs. In 2013, Castin had started meeting with peasant farmers displaced by the CIP and begun studying the compensation pro­cess that unfolded between 2011 and 2014. By talking with ­people and comparing their compensation amounts with what was promised in state documents, he discovered a ­great deal

50 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

of irregularity in the pro­cess. Milostène’s administrative work was impressive and precise. He amassed e­ very official document he could find and tracked public statements from key proj­ect stakeholders to describe the discrepancies between what they had promised and what happened on the ground. By d­ oing so, he was able to take the case to the In­de­pen­dent Consultation and Investigation Mechanism (MICI) of the IDB. I met with him again in Trou du Nord on a morning in June 2019. For two hours, we sat and talked ­under a tree in the backyard of a ­house that belonged to one of his friends. I took notes during our discussion and ­will reproduce excerpts of them ­here. Milostène first explained that he was currently fighting on two fronts—he demanded environmental and socioeconomic accountability from the IDB. He said: The IDB has given the Haitian state some funds to compensate the peasants who ­were displaced from their land, but the distribution of t­ hese funds was not well or­ga­nized and, at times, clearly fraudulent. I had witnessed p­ eople expelled from the land they cultivated in Limonade, when Moïse [Jovenel Moïse, the a­ ctual president of Haiti] built Agritrans. Many farmers ­were just chased away from the places they had lived and worked for a long time. It happened in Ouanaminthe in 2002 as well, when the government built an industrial park. I saw hundreds of peasant farmers disposed from their lands. This good, fertile land is replaced by factories that produce CO2 and that potentially pollute surrounding ­waters. When I started to talk with the farmers in Caracol, I felt we should or­ga­nize and fight back, and we did.

Agritrans was the first banana plantation in Haiti to be located in a free-­trade zone. A ­ fter the quake, Moïse, a close ally to then president Martelly, received the help of the state to displace more than a thousand farmers from the Limonade area. P ­ eople lost their livelihoods without receiving any kind of compensation. As Jennifer Vansteenkiste has aptly shown through her fieldwork in Limonade, the brutal displacement of peasant farmers who w ­ ere self-­sufficient before the earthquake contributed to a major food crisis in the region and to social instability. As she notes, land and trees are not replaceable; they are part of p­ eople’s cosmology (Vansteenkiste 2016). For many ­people in the Cap region, trees are sacred. Vodou deities—­lwa, often called zanj in northern Haiti—­inhabit the trees and form an essential ele­ment of p­ eople’s physical and social worlds (Bulamah 2018). As Vansteenkiste notes, “the loss of large trees such as mangos through land conversions is equivalent to dechouké, or the uprooting, of the Haitian belief system” (Vansteenkiste 2017, 22). Forested and farmed areas are complex spaces of strug­gle and re­sis­tance that symbolize a form of freedom. ­Here, Tè Chabè is an example of a place reclaimed by ­people who divided plantation land into small plots that enable them to be self-­sufficient. In her brilliant analy­sis of Ca­rib­bean arboreal landscapes, Mimi Sheller notes that studying trees and plants in their

Developing Disasters • 51

relation to ­humans enables us to track “a kind of citizenship from below the ground itself” (2012, 193). Trees are more than symbols. With their spiritual qualities, they allow p­ eople to create forms of belonging where ancestors are fully agentive. They also function as gathering places, shelters, and, in certain cases, as food providers. Wooded areas are also places where ­people can escape and hide. Trees fulfill multiple vital functions and indeed participate in the making of alternative citizenships. The northeastern region of Haiti, as Castin explained, has a violent history of land grabs. He said, “It started in 1927 with the Dauphin Plantation in Fort-­ Liberté, not far from Caracol. It was during the US occupation. American businesses took over the fertile lands of the region to produce sisal [a fibrous plant used to produce textiles.] The American army displaced thousands of farmers, forced them to work for ­little money in the sisal fields, or forced them to migrate to Cuba or the Dominican Republic, so they would work on sugar plantations. I think the sisal plantation lasted ­until the early 70s.” As the geographer Georges Eddy Lucien (2018) details, Andre De Coppet, a wealthy Wall Street financier, started the Dauphin Plantation in 1926 with the help of the U.S. military. To make space for the textile factories, the settlements of American workers, and the sisal plantations, the American army violently evicted peasants from their small farms and burned down the buildings, woods, and fields that stood in their way. Indeed, according to Suzy Castor, Americans displaced fifty thousand peasants to make room for this plantation, which she called a “classic colonial enclave” (quoted in Naimou 2015, 244). As Lucien puts it, the Haitian puppet government and their military and corporate allies tore away large swaths of land from the peasantry through newly in­ven­ted ­legal means and violent action, and, in the pro­cess, created a de facto mobile, homeless workforce that moves between factories and plantations in order to receive meager salaries (2018). ­A fter the U.S. Marines invaded and destroyed the region, it fell into a period of decay and hopelessness. Robert Pettigrew, the Dauphin plantation man­ag­er in the 1940s, described the enterprise when he said, “This is the story of a small corner of the Republic of Haiti and the development of a truly remarkable enterprise that revived it from the decay and hopelessness into which it had sunk through neglect, strife and ineptitude over the years since it flourished as a part of France’s richest American colony” (1958, 7). Pettigrew’s words echo Christopher Columbus’s first impressions of Hispaniola as a territory peopled by indolent, areligious communities (2004). This narrative strategy, depicting indigenous ­people as inept and negligent, allows for the erasure of their world. However, the Dauphin Plantation slowly declined. Once De Coppet passed away, American entrepreneurs bought it in 1953. The Dauphin Plantation closed in the early 1970s when the price of sisal declined. Even though U.S. companies eventually left the region in the 1970s, state-­owned companies continued to use the land in Caracol and in Fort-­Liberté to grow sugar and sisal ­until 1986. “Moreover,” Milostène continued, “the site where the CIP is built is sacred for us

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Haitian peasants. . . . ​It’s called Tè Chabè. U ­ ntil 1986 and the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, plantations of sisal and sugar occupied this land. Once the dictator was out, ­people reclaimed this land, ­because it was ours. It is officially state-­ owned, but Haitian peasants have historically reclaimed state-­owned land for themselves. Tè Chabè is where American occupants buried Charlemagne Péralte, a revolutionary leader who fought against the occupation. When they bulldozed our fields, they also erased our history.” Milostène paused and then said: “Péralte is a hero, but we cannot fight like him t­oday. We cannot afford to fight a violent strug­gle. I am a revolutionary, but I use pacific and l­egal means to reach my goals.” Tè Chabè was a concentration camp during the American occupation. In 1918, Charlemagne Péralte led a rebellion against the American occupants who had maintained a forced-­labor system called the corvée in the north (Bellegarde 1953, 270). Moreover, peasant farmers protested the massive displacements caused by the U.S. corporate invasion of their land (Castor 1978). Péralte led an army of more than 5,000 peasant farmers (les Cacos) in guerrilla warfare against the American occupants. According to the scholar Jerry Philogène, “­after years of resisting the U.S. occupying forces, Péralte was captured and killed on October 31, 1919, by two U.S. marines, Herman Henry Hanneken and William Robert Button, who infiltrated his camp disguised in blackface” (2015, 109). Caco rebels and displaced farmers ­were then imprisoned and sent to the Cap Haitian prison or to the Tè Chabè concentration camp.2 The Haitian historian Dantès Bellegarde has written that 5,475 prisoners died in the Tè Chabè camp. American authorities dismissed this massacre and stated that repressing Haitian “brigandage” evidently entailed the loss of Haitian lives (Bellegarde 1937, 56–57). Péralte’s body was buried in a concrete cast to prevent his followers from exhuming or resurrecting it (Michel 1996, 42; Philogène 2015, 112). Before that, however, the U.S. Army had publicly displayed Péralte’s body in ­Grand Rivière, so local Haitian officials and p­ eople who had known Péralte could verify his death. An anonymous U.S. Marine photographed Péralte’s body, which was tied to a door and partly covered in white cloth. The U.S. Army printed hundreds of copies and then disseminated the image by airplane throughout the countryside as a warning to Caco rebels. However, this image, which unintentionally evokes a crucifixion, became a symbol of re­sis­tance for the Haitian peasantry. The Cacos refused to back down and led a second war against the U.S. Army that ended in 1920. Across the country, Péralte became a symbol of re­sis­ tance, a symbol of Haitian peasant willingness to fight to preserve their autonomy, their lands, and their livelihoods. When they built the CIP on a site deemed sacred by many ­people living in Caracol and working the fertile lands of Tè Chabè, the Haitian government and the Clinton Foundation–­USAID assemblage may not have intended to erase this history. However, when they bulldozed one of the last strongholds of the Haitian peasantry and built factories on land where p­ eople had fought against the brutal return of the plantation system, local Haitians considered ­these acts an

Developing Disasters • 53

affront. In 2015, as I sat with Pierre and Tony Valcin in front of their home in Bodmè Limonade, they explained why land and trees ­were dear to them. “Bodmè is a pilgrimage site for Vodouyzan,” Pierre said. “­Here trees are very impor­tant. When you cut a big tree, like a mapou tree, it makes you sick. Gods live in trees [gen zanj nan chak pyebwa].” Farmers in other parts of Haiti told me the same ­thing, and ample scholarship has shown the spiritual and historical importance of trees to Vodou prac­ti­tion­ers (Beaubrun 2009; Tarter 2015; Bulamah 2015). Many of the zanj or lwa with which ­people interact are ancestors who have returned in spiritual form. Bulldozing Tè Chabè is, in the words of Vansteenkiste, a déchoukaj—an uprooting of the peasants’ cosmology, value systems, and social cohesion. It is also an indirect form of silencing history that has long been practiced by the Haitian Creole state. Although my discussion of Charlemagne Péralte’s gruesome death and the Haitian peasants’ rebellion to oust the U.S. Army may seem to be a historical digression, it is not experienced as a distant event by the ­people who live in the region. Rather, that period in time represents the apex of a war that involved, killed, or wounded f­ amily members of p­ eople who are currently displaced. From the beginning, ­those displaced by the CIP protested its construction. For them, the fact that the proj­ect was built on the site of a former concentration camp was a catalyst for action. The farmers I met ­were related to ­people who had died in the not-­so-­distant Caco Wars. As Roger Gaillard has shown in his brilliant oral history of the American occupation, narratives pertaining to the ruthless reimposition of the plantation system by the United States never left the Haitian collective memory (Gaillard 1982). Most of the p­ eople I met in Caracol w ­ ere angered by the loss of their sacred land, their history, and their livelihoods. However, b­ ecause the Haitian state has never hesitated to employ vio­lence against demonstrators and ­because negotiations with key investors ­were ongoing, ­people at the CIP protested peacefully. As Castin told me: We know the story of the Cacos very well. Many of us had f­ amily members fighting against the occupants. We know that using vio­lence did not yield good results. P ­ eople can get killed, like in Jean Rabel in 1987. It happened during the occupation, and it can happen ­today. When they built the factories in Ouanaminthe in 2002, the Haitian police used brutality against protesters. Before they started the proj­ect in Caracol, they built big police stations in Terrier Rouge and Caracol, which was a bad sign. So, we needed a new way to fight back. We cannot have violent protests where we throw rocks and ­bottles ­because it leads nowhere, and we could get killed. We need what I call a pacific and multinational revolution [revolusyon pasifik ak multinasyonal]. It needs to be strong on the l­ egal side, ­because this is where we are ­going to attack. Haitian peasants are not the ones who are violent, they are the victims of the state. ­There is an apartheid that is presently killing peasants.

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Compensating, Displacing, Dispossessing, and Fragmenting In January 2017, the Caracol farmers, through the Kolektif Peyizan, filed a complaint with the MICI, the in­de­pen­dent accountability office of the IDB. Castin and his allies submitted a scathing, extremely well-­documented report with help from ActionAid Haiti, an NGO that supports social justice, gender equality, and poverty eradication, and from the Accountability Counsel, a U.S. nonprofit organ­ization that enforces environmental and ­human rights accountability among IFIs. The Kolektif asked for a “new, meaningful consultation pro­cess, explaining the current environmental and social risks and impacts” of the CIP (Kolektif Peyizan 2017, 2). In the report, the Kolektif documents that the CIP has harmed both the p­ eople and the environment in the region, and it thoroughly describes past compensation pro­cesses. It also illustrates how ­these pro­cesses ­were marred by inaccuracies, lack of communication, and ignored deadlines. On December 8, 2018, the Kolektif reached a negotiated agreement with the Haitian government and the IDB. A ­ fter a year of meetings and investigations, the Kolektif and MICI negotiated new compensation terms. “This is very impor­tant,” Milostène said. “For the first time, the government and a development bank admitted their wrongdoing, they admitted to have harmed our community. The delivery of compensations is ­under way, it is taking time, but I see it as a major victory for the peasants of northeastern Haiti.” Notably, however, the recent compensation packages created new divisions among the Caracol population. Monsieur Saint-­Thoma, an eighty-­seven-­year-­old farmer displaced by the proj­ect, summarized the situation when I visited him in June 2019: “Without Castin and the Kolektif, we would have nothing. What they ­will give us ­will never replace our good land, but ­there is nothing ­else we can do. I ­will receive some money and some help to improve the charcoal selling business my f­ amily and I run from our ­house, this is the option I chose. Some neighbors are talking about taking back the land that is between our ­houses and the park’s fence, but I’m too old to consider this. Maybe it w ­ ill happen.” Monsieur Saint-­Thoma, who asked me to use his real name, lost his livelihood in 2011 like many other farmers. His wife became sick shortly a­ fter the CIP opened, and most of his c­ attle died from the desertlike conditions the park had created in his area of Caracol. At eighty-­seven, he felt as though he had no choice but to sell charcoal to local restaurants and from the front yard of his home. While Monsieur Saint-­Thoma seemed resigned to his fate, other farmers I met in July 2015 and in June 2019 complained about the new fragmentations created by the compensation plan. I met with Armand Pierre, Alain Petit-­Frère, and Maria Exilus in Caracol on June 6, 2019. Two days before we met, Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes presented the Petrocaribe Report to the senate, commented on the management of $2 billion from Venezuela’s oil program, and accused former government officials, including the current president Jovenel

Developing Disasters • 55

Moïse, of corruption. As we gathered in Alain Petit-­Frère’s courtyard in Quar­tier Morin, Armand Pierre said, “Now we know where our compensation money dis­appeared in the first place! Two billion American dollars from Venezuela! What did the government do with the IDB money that was meant for us?” Every­ one talked about the Petrocaribe Report, and mass protests throughout the country ­were scheduled for that Sunday. “It’s always the same ­thing,” Maria said. “I also had a small plot of land in Caracol, but I ­wasn’t in the country when they investigated who owned land in Caracol. I have never received any compensation, and I ­will have nothing from this new round of compensation.” Maria, who has two young ­children, relied on her land so she could pay to send them to school. Both Armand and Alain testified that Maria worked on a parcel of land next to theirs, but the IDB and government investigators ignored her grievances. As one negotiator told me on the phone, her case was a difficult one ­because they “­couldn’t prove she had land in Caracol. Including her in the negotiations could have endangered the w ­ hole pro­cess.” Armand and Alain w ­ ere included in the new compensation pro­cess, but they also felt excluded from the negotiations. “I had a lot of land,” Alain said, “and now all they have to offer me is professional training or a ­little bit of material to work a small parcel I still own in Limonade, like a ­water pump or some PVC. What I needed was some good land back. But only a hundred ­people ­will receive a karo [3.18 acres] of land. They need to find the land they want to buy in the first place, but ­there’s not much they ­will find, ­there’s not much good land for sale!” Armand added, “They selected the most vulnerable of us [moun ki nan sityasyon pi frajil] for land compensations. Since I lost my land, I have nothing but my h ­ ouse in Caracol! I have a son who lives in the US, but he cannot help us. I’m trying to rent a part of my ­house, but it ­will never make up for what I have lost!” Like other farmers I met that same month, they w ­ ere upset about the new compensation pro­cess. Alain hoped that one of his sons could get a job at the CIP but stated again that the salaries at the garment factory ­were far too low to help anyone in his f­ amily. As Francis and I gave Armand Pierre a r­ ide back to his h ­ ouse, Armand said, “What we received before ­wasn’t enough, they cannot replace the land that gave us food. It’s been five years we are mobilized. I spent so much money ­going to the meetings. Each time, I have to go with a moto taxi, and it’s expensive. [With the new negotiations], we ­won’t receive money. A hundred ­people who have no land at all ­today ­will receive land, the ­others ­will receive goods such as PVC, ­water pumps, like [Alain] Petit-­Frère.” Some farmers who w ­ ere not offered compensation through land or jobs vehemently claimed that the new negotiations excluded them. Armand Pierre’s son said, “Why only a hundred farmers? They think my ­family ­didn’t suffer ­after the evictions. All of us are poor, and we fell into misery ­after they stole our land [nou tonbe nan mizè lè yo vole tè a].” He also stated that he did not want a low-­paid job and argued that since he finished high school in Cap Haitian, he should be eligible for one of the thirty better jobs at the CIP that the IDB offered as a form of compensation.

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Ultimately, recent compensation efforts, as well as t­ hose from 2011 to 2013, created new hierarchies among the former peasant farmers of Caracol. In the past, before the CIP was constructed, the community was stratified according to the size of the plot each ­family owned and what they could cultivate on it. However, as the p­ eople I met recalled, farmers helped one another during harvest seasons. They exchanged tools, skills, and goods and often pooled money together when necessary. In contrast, the IDB compensation pro­cess created classes of “less vulnerable” and “more vulnerable” ­people as well as classes of workers who ­were divided into ­those with “specialized or non-­specialized” jobs at the CIP (MICI 2017, 1).

The Multiple Sides of Vulnerability The MICI report argues that corrective mea­sures w ­ ill lead to “livelihood ­restoration.” However, the MICI based this assumption on a very par­tic­u­lar definition of vulnerability. One IDB report states that vulnerability is the “exit door from poverty” (Ibarraran 2015). According to this perspective, the vulnerable class sits between extremely poor and middle-­class ­people. The vulnerable class risks sinking into poverty, but with help from development banks, which supposedly spur economic growth, vulnerable ­people may be able to join the ranks of the ­middle class. The IDB mea­sures vulnerability in terms of income and therefore ties notions of livelihood restoration to a vertical scale where financial means take pre­ce­dence. This understanding of vulnerability implies that disasters—in this case, the harm created by the CIP—­a re temporary and that p­ eople can recover if they have opportunities to create a source of income. In other words, according to the MICI report, vulnerability is reduced to a purely descriptive and prescriptive quantifying tool. As A. J. Faas notes, “vulnerability [in social sciences] was about describing how and why ­people w ­ ere vulnerable, but the concept is frequently defanged and stripped of its criticality” (Faas 2016, 23). For the past thirty years, many scholars have contested purely quantitative approaches to vulnerability and have proposed complex models for assessing vulnerability on social, geographic, and cultural characteristics (Cutter, Boruff, and Shirley 2003; Hewitt 2016; Bankoff 2001). It is thus puzzling, given the massive and diverse applied scholarship on vulnerability to see the IDB relying on simplistic, vertical vulnerability mea­sure­ments. According to the IDB criteria, a majority of ­people ­were already vulnerable prior to the construction of the CIP. However, the Caracol farmers themselves indicated that their well-­being could not be mea­sured in only monetary terms. They operated in what Jean Casimir has called a counter-­plantation system: a way of life that enabled them to produce sufficient food for themselves, their families, and extended social networks as well as to maintain a strong system of solidarity and collaboration that privileged mutual help when needed (Casimir 2020).

Developing Disasters • 57

As Alexis documented in Les arbres musiciens, the rubber cultivation imposed in the region in the past was accompanied by a fierce antisuperstition campaign that led to the destruction of dozens of Vodou t­ emples, the cutting of trees, and the extrajudicial killing of Vodou prac­ti­tion­ers. Although its impact is more subtle, the construction of the CIP repeated the same pro­cess. When officials destroyed trees and fields, they also disrupted belief systems. They ruined historical sites where ancestors (zansèt) who fought for the well-­being of their families and returned in the form of deities “live in the earth, in the rivers, u­ nder the sea, in the w ­ aters of lakes” (Alexis 1957, 346). As the anthropologist Rodrigo Bulamah has noted, zansèt should be interpreted as a native category that binds the country’s national history with members of kinship groups. Zansèt leave ­behind forms of heritage—­ideological and material—­that orient ­people in their daily lives. They also invoke the revolutionary past as a collective interpretive lens for con­temporary quotidian actions (Bulamah 2018, 319). Zansèt form part of complex belief systems in the region, and they are tied to land, plants, and trees that allow ­people to create livelihoods and to eat. They are also part of a complex cosmology that supports social stability and strong community relations. In relation to zansèt, vulnerability arises once trees are cut, fields are destroyed, and homes are bulldozed. From the perspective of the p­ eople with whom I worked, it is necessary to understand the deep relationship between Haitian farmers and their land in order to realize that land is not replaceable and that livelihoods cannot be “restored” through the type of compensation packages offered by the IDB. The CIP dislocated community bonds and separated ­people from their land, their history, and, in many cases, their ancestors. Critically, the vertical class framework of the IDB does not account for local forms of social and economic organ­ization. Drawing on their knowledge of and experiences with industrialization in the past, the peasant farmers of Tè Chabè knew all too well that the CIP would not offer ­viable life options and that factory work would not feed their families. They lamented far more than the loss of financial income. For t­ hese farmers, no form of reparation is v­ iable. As Castin told me, it is not pos­si­ble to separate social and ecological issues in Haiti. The peasant farmers of Caracol have spiritual and epistemological relationships with the land, plants, and trees they tend. They also remember the region’s intense history. For locals, Tè Chabè is imbued with the memory of Péralte and the thousands of farmers who died at the site’s concentration camp. In the area, small-­scale agriculture is more than a way to make a living or produce income. The counter-­plantation system that forms the heart of subsistence farming privileges polycultures over export-­centered monocrops. It privileges autonomy and land tenure over wage-­labor systems that foster dependence on food imports. And it privileges Haitian p­ eople’s values, desires, and practices over ­grand proj­ects designed by foreign technocrats. As Alexis notes in his novel, “land has secrets, values, and customs” (1957, 102). His argument about land is central to this book. Space is never a blank slate that

58 • Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

developers can reshape at whim. Nature, for many Haitian peasants, is more than a static frame where h ­ uman actions unfold. On the contrary, nature, and space more generally, is an agent that cannot be dissociated from h ­ uman life. H ­ uman and nonhuman borders are porous. In a country that was ravaged by the French plantation system, and again by the American latifundium system, the destinies of humankind and nature cannot be separated. This point has major implications when we consider the notion of dwelling. As Tim Ingold argues, “­human beings do not dwell on the other side of a boundary between society and nature but in the same world that is inhabited by creatures of all kinds, h ­ uman and non-­ human” (2005, 501). Nature and h ­ uman practices constantly shape one another and allow for the creation of places structured by belonging and memory. Modern development through industrialization and neoliberal trickle-­down illusions has repeatedly failed Haitians. For most farmers in rural Haiti, daily practices are born of the collective maximization of l­ imited means and allow them to create a thriving, produce-­based economy. However, their practices run contrary to ­those of international development banks and do not imply the attainment of one of the supposedly universal goals in development ideology: reaching “middle-­class” status. Haitian peasants in the many grassroots organ­ izations they have created throughout the country “are increasingly articulating alternatives in terms of food sovereignty, including advocacy of poly-­culture practices geared ­towards producing a range of healthy and nourishing foods in ways that regenerate the health of the soil” (Steckley and Weis 2017, 408). However, as I ­will continue to argue in the following chapters, the ideas peasant farmers advocate stem from economic practices forged on long-­term worldviews, from multiple engagements with the environment, and from spatial practices that bind together cosmology and social stability. Long-­term development proj­ects—in the case of the CIP, proj­ects spurred by a geo­graph­i­cally distant disaster—­f urther the vulnerabilities they pretend to dissipate. The low salaries and poor work conditions in the CIP undermine p­ eople’s abilities to face the mounting costs of goods, health care, and education. For most of t­ hose I know in Caracol, the IDB corrective mea­sures w ­ ill never replace the fertile land they lost. The creation of the CIP weakened food security, dislocated communities, uprooted p­ eople’s belief systems, and destroyed social cohesion. The compensations the IDB offered in response simply created new hierarchies between less and more vulnerable ­people through the institution of well-­meaning corrective mea­sures.

On Belonging, Dwelling, and Citizenship In June 2019, Francis and I sat drinking soda in a recently inaugurated “village” built in Terrier-­Rouge for the CIP workers. I recalled the conversation I had with Benoit about a similar village not too far from ­here. Francis laughed and said that Benoit was right. He looked around and said, “They spent more than

Developing Disasters • 59

$3 million to build ­these ­little ­houses. It’s okay to have a ­little ­house, but it’s not okay not to have a courtyard where you can sit in the shade. We Haitians live outside. If I stay in my ­house during the day, my wife, my ­brothers, my neighbors ­will think that I’m sick. They ­don’t represent our way of life. Look at ­these, if t­ here’s an earthquake, they would be flattened like pancakes [kasav].” The Terrier-­Rouge village is one of a handful of housing proj­ects built in the country ­a fter the earthquake. It forms a grid of identical rectangular ­houses spaced so closely that they seem almost glued together. The village has almost no trees, and many ­houses are unoccupied ­because of the high rent. Of the $3.5 million designated to construct ­these housing units, the IDB contributed 75 ­percent, and Food for the Poor, a Florida-­based Christian NGO, provided the remaining funding (Haiti Libre 2017). This village offered a glimpse of how U.S. urban planners envisioned daily life for the burgeoning proletariat of the region. It has ­little communal space, and the h ­ ouses are concrete cubical shelters of 450 square feet. As Francis argued, and as I w ­ ill show in chapter 2, t­ hese h ­ ouses are culturally and socially unfit for Haitians. Their strictly utilitarian form undermines collective life and excludes the possibility of spiritual practices that require both garden and ­house space. The stern ensemble of ­houses in Terrier Rouge, much like the EKAM village built by USAID, cannot make up for the homes and farms destroyed when costly, in­effec­tive industrial proj­ects w ­ ere implemented in the region. Domicide remains a power­ful tool of exclusion and citizenship denial. In Haiti, it has long been a pro­cess through which peasants are excluded from citizenship regimes. As noted above, state-­sponsored domicide targets vari­ous forms of dwellings that are constitutive of alternative forms of belonging. In the past, the systematic destruction of Vodou ­temples marked the forceful stigmatization and po­liti­cal exclusion of Vodouyzan (Ramsey 2011, 3). Likewise, the destruction of trees amounts to a form of domicide since they are home to spiritual entities, such as loa, zanj, or zansèt. Spiritual and material ele­ments are constitutive of the forms of citizenship forged by the Haitian peasantry. For instance, Vodouyzan not only belong to terrestrial ­human and natu­ral worlds but are also engaged with transnational, invisible realms that tie them to their land, their ancestors, and the metaphysical entities that intervene in their lives. The homes and farms destroyed in 2011 enabled ­people to dwell on their land. By dwell, I mean a situation in which ­people have mutually beneficial relationships with multiple nonhuman ele­ments that contribute to collective beliefs, history, and a general sense of belonging. Dwelling entails living in a given environment without dissociating from it. It also encapsulates places where p­ eople can live on their own terms and enact their cultural and social values. Belonging, in the context of dwelling, is not only an abstract category, an individual feeling, or an idea but also a spatial and spiritual practice. When we think of belonging in relation to dwelling, new ways of approaching the category of citizenship—in this case, what it means to be a Haitian

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citizen—­are opened. In l­ egal studies, a citizen is often defined as an unmarked, abstract, universal person who bears the right of po­liti­cal participation, a person whose nationality confers rights equal to ­those of other members of the same nation-­state (Balibar 1988, 724). Development policies based on abstract, vertical notions of class and well-­being tend to target ­these unmarked citizens. The notion of abstraction comes from the Latin verb abstrahare—to draw away. A strictly l­egal approach to citizenship as a horizontal leveling device that designates entire regions for equally indistinct development schemes, obscures the lived experiences and formulations of belonging and the differentiated regimes of citizenship that exist in Haiti. As detailed in this chapter, that approach also cultivates a form of vio­lence ­because it leads development companies to erroneously approach certain territories as blank slates. In the Haitian postcolonial context, two kinds of citizenships existed. For instance, from 1963 to 1995, birth certificates stipulated w ­ hether a person was a paysan or a citadin (Jobnel Pierre 2005). This institutionalized a clear line of discrimination between peasants who are characterized as moun andeyò (literally, ­people from the outside) and t­ hose who are called moun lavil or citadins (city dwellers). Mobility among peasants in rural areas was ­limited, and they needed formal authorization to s­ ettle in a city. Rural provinces w ­ ere largely isolated from the po­liti­cal and economic nerves of the country, and peasants had no say in the affairs of their own country, regions, and villages. In addition, repeated industrial incursions and concomitant peasant evictions and dispossessions affirmed the power of urban citizens, and mainly of urban po­liti­cal elites, over a rural majority that often continues to be considered backward and unmodern. Spatially speaking, developers have committed domicide in Caracol, and—­ whether they intended to or not—it has uprooted peasant farmers from their cultural, religious, and social worlds. When we approach citizenship spatially, we are able to illuminate the material apparatuses of exclusion. We are also able to see the vernacular forms of citizenship ­people create through deep engagements with their social and physical environments. The newly built village in which Francis and I sat was not an ensemble of dwellings; it was a symbol of domicide. In this chapter, I have started explicating how domicide breaks indigenous ways of belonging and creates new spaces of exclusion. In chapter 2, I ­will illustrate how domicide creates tangible limits to citizenship as well as violent landscapes of exclusion that negate p­ eople’s rights and aspirations. Given Haiti’s historical experience with repeatedly harmful industrial ventures and the con­ temporary example of the CIP discussed in this chapter, it becomes easier to see what role industrialization plays in this part of the world: industrial ventures do not develop the economy. They develop disasters.

2

Industrial ­Futures Abstract and Disciplinarian Landscapes in Post-­ Earthquake Haiti In April 2014, a retired agronomist, Gérard Defils, and his ­family moved into the Village Lumane Casimir, a new housing proj­ect built u­ nder the Haitian state’s supervision right ­a fter the 2010 earthquake.1 Located in an arid region north of Port-­au-­Prince, the village is a grid of 1,280 small cubical concrete h ­ ouses meant to ­house earthquake victims. As Gérard told me when I first met him in July 2014: I came ­here with a new TV set, hoping to watch the soccer World Cup. My ­daughters and I are big fans of Argentina. . . . ​Fi­nally, ­after many years without a place we could call home, we moved ­here thinking that we would lead a normal life again. The first ­thing I did was to plug [in] the TV set. We immediately found out that ­there was no power. I talked with an administrator who told me that electricity would come in June, just right in time for the World Cup. Well, we listened to the World Cup on my battery-­operated radio. To this day, we still only have two hours of electricity a day.

In 2011, the Haitian state ordered the construction of Village Lumane Casimir (hereafter Casimir) to offer housing to a small fraction of earthquake victims. This “village” was in the lineage of Bill Clinton’s 2010 “Building Back Better” 61

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post-­disaster plan for Haiti and was meant to h ­ ouse p­ eople who would work in newly created free-­trade zones. ­These zones ­were supposed to attract foreign and local investors to act as engines of economic growth that would, in turn, foster the reconstruction of the Port-­au-­Prince region. Yet t­ hese economic efforts failed spectacularly, and infrastructure that was built ­after the quake (such as the Jeremie Wharf) and was intended to generate economic activity remains ­today ­either half built or abandoned. Lured by the promise of upcoming industrial jobs and the possibility of a payment plan that might lead to h ­ ouse owner­ship, about five hundred families affected by the disaster moved to Casimir. However, the proj­ect is built in an area devoid of basic infrastructure and separated from employment centers. The jobs promised by the state never opened, and Casimir is t­ oday a residential area in a part of the country where economic activities are almost non­ex­is­tent. In 2018, p­ eople still paid prohibitive prices to fill their w ­ ater tanks, and electricity was available for only a few hours in the evening—on a good day. As Gérard Defils often mentioned, the lack of fans and cold drinks made it difficult to live in the overheated, small concrete h ­ ouses. For him, the lack of electricity was more than a ­matter of comfort. It also prevented him from pursuing individual business opportunities. Casimir’s administrators have restricted small business and have imposed community rules that create a climate of fear and suspicion. Gérard and his wife Mériane felt betrayed, isolated, and threatened. Touted as a key post-­earthquake housing and industrial proj­ect that would help revitalize the economy, Casimir is now a half-­empty grid of discolored ­houses that stands next to a semiconstructed factory. In this chapter, I focus on the experience of residents living in Casimir, the largest housing proj­ect built by the state a­ fter the 2010 earthquake. Casimir, newly constructed, stands out in a parched landscape that has been urbanized only since the earthquake. Urban planners have long thought of the northern regions of Port-­au-­Prince as pos­si­ble extensions of the capital despite the aridity of the land, the lack of potable w ­ ater, and the potential difficulties of importing electricity and h ­ uman activity into this sun-­scorched area (Katz 2012). Informal settlements that sprawled ­after 2010, such as Canaan, located a mile away, stand in striking contrast to Casimir; they pre­sent a patchwork of blue-­tarp roofs and half-­built gray cement structures on the other­wise desiccated hills alongside the national highway. Casimir is the materialization of what Henri Lefebvre named “abstract space,” or “the devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived, by abstraction” (Lefebvre 2006 [1980], 10). It is a place that was conceived abroad by urban planners who, as we ­will see, ignored its ecological realities. Inaugurated in 2014, Casimir is located in the Morne à Cabri area, a semidesert twenty miles north of Port-­au-­Prince. The government promised it would build basic urban ser­vices, a school, a clinic, a market plaza, a mini-­industrial park, and public spaces for sports and leisure. Other than an elementary school, none of t­ hese proj­ects materialized, and only concrete h ­ ouses that lack r­ unning ­water and electricity stand in the village t­ oday (Milfort 2016). Casimir, b­ ecause

Industrial ­Futures • 63

of its absence of distinctiveness and its geometric aspect, materializes a technocratic rationality of planners and state actors that renders space divisible, calculable, and controllable for a specific purpose: to enable social and economic domination. Similar housing proj­ects are usually part of larger industrial and infrastructural proj­ects where social control is linked to the fostering of individual productivity. However, Casimir does not offer such a perspective. As Gérard articulated, producing goods in this region would require major investments that the Haitian state cannot afford: building an electricity plant or port facilities ­will not happen. ­Here, I detail the experiences of a par­tic­u­lar ­family with whom I spent much time. I also draw on conversations with Casimir residents to understand how ­people feel, or affectively experience, the forms of vio­lence and constraint produced by a physical space that reflects the distant and abstract practices of urban planners whose work is founded on logics of neoliberal development. Centering the voices of residents also allows me to detail the needs and desires of ­those who wish to transform this ghostly residential area into a communal and commercial space. I argue that this controllable space, along with the set of strict community rules meant to deter individuals from creating new social and economic niches, materializes forms of modernist ideologies that reject peasantries and their systems of production and re­distribution. By contrasting the concealed vio­lence of abstract planning with indigenous practices of space, I detail assemblages of physical and ideological ele­ments that lead to the withering of economic opportunities and social exchanges linked to rural life. In turn, by listening to ­people and discussing what they wish they could do with this space, I open a win­ dow through which to view the indigenous practices and v­ iable ways of life I detail throughout the rest of the book.

A ­Family’s Experience of Casimir Since 2012, Constructora Hadom, a Dominican contractor hired by the Haitian state without soliciting bids, has completed 30 ­percent of the initial Casimir proj­ ect. ­Today, 477 of 1,280 of the completed ­houses are inhabited, but the remaining 803 units are already falling into disrepair (Charles 2015). The ­people I talked with in the village claimed that given the poor job this com­pany did, contractors and officials must have pocketed some of the funds meant to built ­houses. The Dominican journalist Nuria Piera claimed that Hadom, a com­pany owned by the Dominican senator Felix Bautista, gave more than $2 million in kickbacks to then Haitian president Martelly for the granting of three reconstruction contracts totaling $343.32 million (Ives 2012). The United States froze Bautista’s assets in 2018 for his acts of corruption linked to ­these reconstruction contracts in Haiti (Dominican ­Today 2018). Th ­ ese embezzlements are part of a much larger financial fraud associated with the mismanagement and siphoning of Venezuela Petrocaribe loans. As Claire Payton notes, successive Tèt Kale governments

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“misappropriated, wasted, and embezzled nearly $2 billion in Petrocaribe funds that had officially been earmarked for earthquake recovery initiatives. Village Lumane Casimir is but one example of hundreds of construction proj­ects that the government paid for since the disaster, but ­were ­either never started, never finished, or offered an anemic version of what had been promised” (2019, 182). The units are e­ ither one-­or two-­story structures. In the m ­ iddle of the village, a sports complex with basketball courts and community buildings is surrounded by barbed wire and is not yet open to the public. As the Haitian journalists who published a thorough report on the dense opacity surrounding the proj­ect note, “the public subventions the private” by creating an immediately available pool of workers “paid the lowest salaries in the Western hemi­sphere” (Ayiti Kale Je 2013). However, Constructora Hadom brought its own workers from the Dominican Republic, and the promised factory jobs never materialized in Casimir. In brief, the Casimir proj­ect did not result in imminent job opportunities for Haitians. To the contrary, it seems to have been a key proj­ect that enabled the siphoning of post-­disaster funds by members of the Haitian state and their corporate partners. In June 2014, my field associate Aland Joseph and I started to visit Casimir in order to document daily life in this housing proj­ect. While walking through the rectilinear grid of streets, we met Gérard Defils, who was listening to a battery-­operated radio in the shade of his h ­ ouse’s small porch. We greeted him and started a conversation. Defils was e­ ager to talk and invited us inside his ­house. ­Because he and his wife, Mériane, felt ignored by the media and the state administration, both felt compelled to tell us about the many difficulties they had faced in Casimir. We explained that we ­were not journalists but that we wanted to follow the evolution of Casimir over the long term, a proj­ect Gérard deemed impor­tant since both he and his wife ­were optimistic but concerned about the ­future of their new community. The Defils moved into the surrealistically monotonous Village Casimir in April 2014. As a ­family of four, they currently occupy a tiny ­house located at the edge of the housing proj­ect. Their side win­dow provides a view of the desert, an expansive land filled with cacti. A solid wood ­table takes up most of the space in the living room, and the beds completely fill the two white-­painted bedrooms. Gérard built shelves that he nailed to the walls, and a vase filled with yellow and red plastic flowers stands on them next to ­family photo­graphs. The f­ amily stores food in a chest freezer that is l­ ittle more than a box; they cannot use it as intended b­ ecause of the lack of electricity. Mériane complains often about the heat inside the h ­ ouse and the poor materials with which it is built: flimsy plywood doors, plastic pipes that are already broken, and a fragile plastic w ­ ater barrel that stands on the h ­ ouse’s flat roof (which was cracked when I visited in June 2015). The two-­bedroom, 280-­square-­foot concrete ­house includes a 50-­square-­foot covered porch where the kitchen and bathroom are located, a 6.5-­by 16.5-­foot living room, and two 8-­foot-­square

Industrial ­Futures • 65

FIG. 7  ​Gérard Defils’s collapsed apartment in Delmas 32.

bedrooms. The h ­ ouse is located in the m ­ iddle of a row of identical tiny h ­ ouses; ­there is a space of 10 feet between the rows and 7 feet between the h ­ ouses. Th ­ ere is ­l ittle space for trees to grow. Each of ­t hese hard-­edged, bunker-­l ike units is painted in shades of industrial pastel, and the untended spaces surrounding ­these structures are dusty and arid. As Gérard told me, “Port-­au-­Prince and Casimir are like day and night [c’est le jour et la nuit].” He explained that Casimir felt like a dead town compared to the bustling commercial arteries of inner-­city Port-­au-­Prince where street vendors sell goods on the sidewalks, and transportation is always available. While acknowledging that returning to their former neighborhood would be impossible ­because of the prohibitive rental prices, Mériane often told us that she missed the network of friends and vendors to which she had belonged since 2005. The Defilses mentioned several times that their mobility was l­ imited in Casimir and that they missed the always available tap tap, the painted buses or pick-up trucks that function as shared taxis in the capital. The deserted landscape around them made them feel isolated from the urban economic and social activities in which they had engaged before the earthquake. Gérard speculated that he had gained access to a ­house in Casimir not only ­because he was severely affected by the earthquake but also ­because two ­women in his f­ amily, his wife and his d­ aughter, could be v­ iable workers for the factory that was supposed to open in 2015. I had a few visits with Gérard and Mériane Defils in Casimir in June and July of 2014, and I recorded an interview with them on July 18, 2014. Gérard explained in both French and Kreyòl:

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FIG. 8  ​View of Village Lumane Casimir from the Defils’s rooftop.

I have been living in Delmas 32 [a dense neighborhood of Port-­au-­Prince] since 2005, when I retired. We wanted my two ­daughters to go to good schools. My wife also wanted to move to Delmas 32 when I retired, so she could do ti komès [small business]. She made tablèt [pralines] and sold other l­ ittle t­ hings from the ­house in Delmas. I worked for the state as an agriculture con­sul­tant and as an agronomy teacher for more than 30 years. We w ­ ere living between the Cabaret region and then Delmas before we moved t­ here for good. Delmas 32 was a good place for us: the rents ­were affordable and ti komès worked reasonably well. We had electricity most of the time, and we had access to clean w ­ ater nearby at a public fountain. On January 12, 2010, I was in my apartment, sitting in the living room on a chair, and my two d­ aughters ­were sitting on the floor. My wife was outside with our neighbors, downstairs. We w ­ ere watching TV when we heard a rumble [comme un long coup de tonnerre]. . . . ​The next ­thing I knew is that one of my d­ aughters and I ­were u­ nder some rubble. Half of the upper apartment had collapsed, and my other ­daughter was in the part of the living room that ­hadn’t collapsed. My wife and our neighbors helped us. My left leg was broken, and my knee d­ oesn’t work anymore, I can barely walk ­today. My youn­gest ­daughter lost a fin­ger on her left hand, and she still hurts. We w ­ ere cared for by a doctor in Croix-­des-­Bouquets. I am from that area, and I have f­ amily staying north of Croix-­des-­Bouquets.

Among many pos­si­ble and hidden rationales, first, the state-­operated Unit for the Construction of Public Buildings (UCLBP) selected par­tic­u­lar types

Industrial ­Futures • 67

of residents affected by the earthquake as candidates for access to the Casimir ­houses: priority was given to physically handicapped ­people. ­Because some ­people pretended to be handicapped to access ser­vices, Gérard had taken photos of himself in the hospital and had kept all his medical paperwork as proof of his physical impediments. Second, according to David Odnell, director of the housing department of the UCLBP, three criteria for se­lection had to be met: “1) You have to have been affected by the earthquake, 2) the person has to have a ­family of not more than 3–5 ­people, and 3) the person must have income” (Ayiti Kale Je 2014). However, Gérard knew that ­people had started to move into Casimir and that most of them did not meet any of the aforementioned criteria. Besides showing photos of his destroyed home and presenting all the required paperwork, Gérard exchanged ­favors with relatives who worked for the government in order to secure a home. He liked the Casimir proj­ect ­because access to schooling would be provided first in Croix-­des-­Bouquets through ­free transportation and ­later on-­site. When he signed the application for a ­house in 2012, administrators working in Casimir stated that ­people who lived ­there would be given a job and that a lease-­to-­own system would enable inhabitants to become homeowners. However, none of this information was in the contract Gérard saw, and nobody knew at the time what the price of the lease would be. It seemed clear to Gérard that the state picked families that would be able to work in the small industrial park and that the purpose of the village was far more than a way to offer housing to the earthquakes’ victims. In December 2013, President Michel Martelly officially inaugurated Casimir and, in a symbolic gesture, gave keys to the city to the seventy-­five police officers who would live ­there and run the police department. He also gave keys to a handful of potential residents. However, residents had to return the keys to UCLBP administrators once the journalists left (Ayiti Kale Je 2014). Many international donors and organ­izations backed the Clinton–­Martelly economic plan to grow the assembly and garment sectors, which was formulated during the 2011 Invest in Haiti Forum; therefore, they did not investigate or ask any questions about the opaque Casimir proj­ect (Yaffe 2011). As Clinton stated, “if we do this housing properly, it ­will lead to w ­ hole new industries being started in Haiti, creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and permanent housing” (Johnston 2014). Executive powers appropriated funds meant to “build back better” the existing cities and used them instead to build industrial facilities with adjacent housing that was poorly constructed. While the cap­i­tal­ist spirit is still clearly vis­i­ble in the sharp, controlled lines of the Casimir grid, the industrial component of the proj­ect dis­appeared quickly; construction of the industrial park ­stopped in May 2014. In the next section, I discuss this post-­ reconstruction proj­ect in further detail by sketching its construction pro­cess and the illusion of ­future growth that has sustained state-­sponsored post-­ disaster proj­ects for years.

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The Materialization of Abstraction Casimir is in the lineage of small-­scale, state-­sponsored housing construction proj­ects that never redressed housing shortages in Haiti but instead created vulnerable urban areas where p­ eople lack access to jobs and basic public ser­vices. As stated above, in 2010, the Haitian state received an advantageous $49 million loan from the Venezuelan government through its Petrocaribe program (Daudier 2018). Originally, the state requested funding for the de­mo­li­tion and reconstruction of Fort National, a downtown neighborhood in Port-­au-­Prince that was destroyed in the earthquake. The UCLBP had even published the master plan for the construction of apartment buildings in that part of the capital, but the proj­ect was quickly abandoned. In August 2014, I met one of the main state engineers working on this proj­ect. A friend of mine who had known him in high school set up the meeting. We met in the empty room of a bar in downtown Port-­au-­Prince. The engineer spoke on the condition of anonymity. I took down our conversation in French in my notebook, and I translate parts of it into En­glish ­here: We w ­ ere ready to rebuild the neighborhoods downtown, every­thing was ready: a plan for debris removal and a nice master plan. I was so excited. As a kid, I would go through this neighborhood e­ very day to go to school. But in July 2011, the president of UCLBP called a meeting and told us that the president had relocated the funds for a new housing proj­ect. A housing proj­ect in a desert north of Port-­au-­Prince! We ­were all speechless. But you know, what can you do? We have families to feed, we want to keep our jobs, so you shut up, and you go along with the plan. And h ­ ere we go, six months l­ ater, Casimir was off the ground. A Dominican com­pany built the ­houses, about a thousand of them. They did an awful job, they worked with cheap material. Each ­house cost more than 25,000 dollars, but I can tell you, each of them is worth less than 8,000 dollars. We have a constitution, and institutions like the one I work for are supposedly in­de­pen­dent. But in Haiti, the president can do what he wants, he can ­handle bud­gets the way he wants—­and you d­ on’t want to disobey.

Puzzled UCLBP administrators saw their funds for downtown housing reconstruction mysteriously vanish and learned that the most impor­tant state-­ sponsored housing proj­ect would be built not ­under their supervision but by an in­de­pen­dent contractor (Ayiti Kale Je 2013). When launching the first of ­these four major housing proj­ects in 2011, President Martelly declared his “­will to build new and sustainable communities in Haiti. This signals that our country ­will recover its capacity to put ­people back to work and that local businesses w ­ ill be able to be engaged in the pre­sent reconstruction” (Haiti Libre 2011). According to the United Nations, in order to qualify as sustainable, residential proj­ects must provide access for all to safe and

Industrial ­Futures • 69

affordable housing, basic resources such as potable w ­ ater and electricity, and possibilities for employment (Housing Rights Watch 2017). However, instead of being sustainable, t­ hese four proj­ects proved to be unlivable. They did not create jobs for Haitians or stimulate business for Haitian companies; t­ hese proj­ects ­were outsourced to Dominican companies that ­either brought their own workers or hired Haitian workers for low wages (Ayiti Kale Je 2013). At the end of Martelly’s mandate in 2016, p­ eople living in Casimir—­the largest housing proj­ect that I describe in this chapter—­did not have access to basic resources such as proper sanitation or electricity. As Odnell candidly stated, “when you build a housing proj­ect, infrastructures must be in place before you build the dwellings. When you plan a housing proj­ect, ser­vices must already be pre­sent. In [our case], it was the opposite” (Ayiti Kale Je 2013). Major post-­ earthquake housing proj­ects in Haiti are built in areas devoid of infrastructure; they are disconnected from the economic nodes of the country and comprise only crudely built, bare residences. In actuality, the state perennially has ­little capability to affect, or provide input for, the shaping of Haiti’s economic landscape: post-­earthquake donations ­were managed by an international interim commission, and most of the economic agenda—­especially when it comes to public spending—is guided by international financial institutions that provide loans only if the Haitian state re­spects bud­getary constraints. In other words, the Haitian state, with its depleted workforce and its tight margins of action, does not have much say when it comes to building infrastructure in the country. Hence, ­these housing proj­ects may be seen as mere facades of a regime that needs photogenic proj­ects to give the impression of action. It is therefore surprising to note that the Haitian state, given its few financial and management capacities, is the main actor in post-­disaster housing reconstruction. A ­ fter the earthquake, major international donors such as other states, nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs), and international financial institutions (IFIs) pledged billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Haiti, but only a small fraction of that pledge money went t­ oward Haiti’s most salient crisis—­ housing. The institutions in charge of disbursing international donations—­the World Bank, United Nations, and Inter-­American Development Bank regrouped ­under the Haiti Reconstruction Fund—­did not prioritize housing construction but instead funded temporary shelter camps and the creation of industrial parks. Only 3.58  ­percent of the $6 billion in relief went to housing reconstruction (Marks 2015). Consequently, the Haitian state remained the sole institution in charge of building social housing. Since only 1 ­percent of donor funds went to the Haitian state, the government contracted loans with Venezuela and the Inter-­A merican Development Bank to finance their construction proj­ects. In November 2011, President Martelly and his government created the UCLBP to oversee major infrastructure and building proj­ects. The UCLBP bypassed other state institutions in the management of housing issues and responded to the desires and whims of the executive power in a nontransparent fashion.

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Casimir stands in the liminal space of what Arjun Appadurai has called spectral housing, or “the space of speculations and specularities, empty scenes of dissolved industry, fantasies of urban planning, rumors of real estate transfers, consumption patterns that violate their spatial preconditions, and bodies that are their own housing” (2001, 635). A Canadian urban planning firm, Groupe IBI DAA—­a frequent beneficiary of the Haitian government’s contracts—­ designed the proj­ect. The same firm is responsible for many now-­abandoned or failed post-­earthquake reconstruction proj­ects in Haiti, such as the Jérémie Wharf or the Port-­au-­Prince downtown reconstruction proj­ect (Joos and Joseph 2014). Casimir is only one iteration of ­these failed post-­disaster proj­ects, but the logics that underscore its construction are representative of many ­others. ­Behind this housing proj­ect is an illusory, ill-­defined perspective on economic growth that is not only spectral but also material: it takes physical form through the grid of concrete blocks that regiment the lives of residents who ­were intended to become factory workers.

Disciplining Residents With the promise of jobs and basic infrastructure fading, residents of Casimir live in a place divorced from commercial and industrial activity. Even though the planned factories never opened in the area, p­ eople are nonetheless subjected to rules that usually regiment housing proj­ects linked to industrial parks. The excerpt of the interview I pre­sent below shows how ­people’s sense of alienation has been furthered through the breach of agreements, the disciplining of residents, and the nonimplementation of the few proj­ects that would have provided spaces of sociality. Residents moved to Casimir with an expectation that this well-­funded post-­disaster proj­ect would at least provide the basic necessities and ser­vices they could find in the capital. However, as Mériane Defils often said, t­ hese ser­vices only exist on the photocopied piece of paper they received once they arrived. Mériane often referred humorously to the papers she received from the UCLBP and to the training she and her f­ amily had to go through to compare official discourse and concrete details of life in Casimir: First of all, we had to get a loan from my sister-­in-­law who lives in Florida to move in. We received the news that we w ­ ere accepted in March 2014, and we had to move in quickly, within two months. They made us pay 11,500 HTG as “entrance fees” [equivalent to $250]. Then we had to pay upfront six months of rent: 9,000 HTG [$195]. A ­ fter that, we had to pay 2,500 HTG [$55] to activate electricity and w ­ ater ser­vices. On the suggestion of my sister-­in-­law, we also bought a new freezer, so I could open a small cold drink business. We thought we would not pay rent but installments t­ owards the owner­ship of the ­house, but we are still unsure. If this is a rent, it is much more expensive

Industrial ­Futures • 71

than renting a h ­ ouse in Delmas, where we previously lived. We signed up for a property, not a rental place. We have no deadlines, and we d­ on’t know if the rent prices ­will stay that way. Then we paid a fee for ser­vices, but so far ­there are two buses e­ very hour ­going to Croix-­des-­Bouquets: it is 20 HTG [$0.50] a roundtrip. This is the only ser­vice we have so far, and it’s very expensive. The bus ­doesn’t go far. It leaves you at a gas station where you have to take other means of transportation to go to places. Motorcycles, tap-­taps, and taxis are not authorized in the area. Th ­ ere is no way but to take the bus. It costs 40 HTG [$1] per day to send my two ­daughters to school in Croix-­des-­Bouquets, and they commute at least an hour and a half a day. Look at the paper! It looks pretty on the paper! I would love all of this: school, clinic, information center, transportation! But now, we c­ an’t afford to go to Port-­au-­Prince or to visit ­family in Croix-­des-­Bouquets too often b­ ecause it’s a tiring and expensive trip. We go when Gérard needs to see the doctor and when we go, we stay a few days to fix all we need to fix in town. Th ­ ere is no doctor ­here, even if they said ­there would be a health center. We paid for w ­ ater and electricity. First, electricity only comes from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., and sometimes it comes during the day and night at any time. We bought a freezer before I moved h ­ ere, thinking we could sell cold drinks and store food. But now it sits t­ here in the living room as a storage box. Then, the ­water they provide is salty. You cannot even wash yourself with it. If you do, your hair becomes all white, and your clothes get stained by salt, your body is itchy all day. I cannot even cook with that w ­ ater. The sink pipes are broken ­because of that salty ­water; it destroys all our appliances. It works in the rest­rooms, but we have to fix up the pipes often. E ­ very day, we have to walk about 50 minutes to get ­water. You can go by the road, but it takes more time, so we cross the dusty field right t­ here to get access to a public ­water fountain. Gérard cannot walk, so I go with the d­ aughters during daylight, so it is not dangerous. When they go to school, they bring back w ­ ater with them. Sometimes, I go by myself in the morning, especially if I see ­people I know heading to the ­water fountain The ­house is poorly built. It is not well-­ventilated. Beginning at 5 p.m., staying inside is unbearable, it is extremely hot. It is like a small oven [se tankou yon ti fou]. At night, mosquitoes invade the h ­ ouse. ­There are so many that they get u­ nder the mosquito net and make a lot of noise. The most outrageous for me is the size of the h ­ ouse. We never lived in big h ­ ouses, but 24 square meters is a very tiny space for four p­ eople. We ­were told 30 square meters. At least, if we could go on the roof to catch a breeze in the eve­ning . . . ​but we c­ an’t. We ­don’t want any prob­lems with the police. So many of them are living ­here right now! So, the girls have to sleep in the same bed when they thought they each would have a room. They are 13 and 16, and at that age, you need more privacy. We can hang t­ hings on the walls, at least it’s not forbidden! [laughing] I feel it’s the

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only t­ hing I can do to make this h ­ ouse more like my h ­ ouse [ fè ti kay sa ti kay pa m]. You have all t­ hese police officers living ­here, and still t­ hings are stolen. At night, I even have to take my charcoal and my cooking set inside. They promised us a gas stove, but I still cook with charcoal, as you can see. Thieves come at night, they steal pipes, toilets, anything they find. Some of t­ hese ­houses are squatted [in], but nobody is d­ oing anything about it. We have to lock ourselves in, and it d­ oesn’t help with ventilation.

This excerpt strongly indicates that the UCLBP does not re­spect the terms of the contract and, in effect, sponsors an expensive, restrictive form of housing that violates key clauses of the International Right to Adequate Housing pre­sent in many binding international treaties signed by the Haitian government since 1986 (Saint-­Pierre 2013). One of the most obvious violations is that by reneging on the promise of owner­ship and establishing an opaque rental system, the Haitian state creates conditions of instability that impede ­people from creating homes from which they can plan their ­futures. Moreover, placing this proj­ect in an arid region devoid of h ­ uman activity also creates many social and environmental prob­lems. Casimir’s small units and its placement in a fragile ecosystem unsuitable for ­human habitation combine to render the proj­ect woefully inadequate. First, the proj­ect endangers the local environment. Casimir is located south of the fragile ecosystem of Trou Caïman, a vast freshwater lake surrounded by saltbush flats and rice plantings. It is a bird sanctuary and an impor­tant source of w ­ ater for the entire Port-­au-­Prince region (Woods and Sergile 2001). Casimir itself is built amid a flat alluvial plain where tall cacti thrive and salty w ­ aters compose much of the phreatic ­table. Second, the notion of adequacy, determined in part by ecological, climatic, social, and economic ­factors, means the right to housing comprises much more than four walls and a roof. The right to adequate housing implies the “­legal security of tenure, availability of ser­vices, materials, facilities and infrastructure, affordability, habitability, accessibility, location and cultural adequacy” (ICESCR 1997).2 The families that live in Casimir demonstrated in front of the administrative office in May 2014 to claim their right to property. However, state officials made a m ­ istake when they offered residents the possibility of leasing-­to-­own their homes. B ­ ecause the housing proj­ect is built on state land, it is legally impossible to sell it to private citizens. Gérard did not want to attend the demonstration but supported the claims of his fellow co-­renters. The Defilses expressed worry over the presence of so many police employees, noting that they do not prevent theft and seem to be in Casimir for other purposes. When we discussed the paperwork and community training the Defilses received, they told me that police forces are h ­ ere to control the population living in Casimir rather than to protect them. Administrators of Casimir seek to regulate social aspects of life by tightly controlling economic opportunities and social relations in this place. Mériane provided me with some insights about the intrusion of the UCLBP administration

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and the state police into her private life. She noted that the training they provide is mandatory, and they constantly supervise her activities. As she explained: We had to go through a seminar to learn how to live in a community and to learn the rules of the village as if we ­didn’t know how to live in a community! In fact, they gave us plenty of restrictions and rules. First, we cannot use outdoor space: we cannot build anything, and we cannot even garden and grow vegetables or trees. We cannot even put a t­ able outside and sit. All that we do has to be on our small porch. We cannot use the roofs of our h ­ ouses for anything, not even to dry linen. Then we do not have the right to do any business [ti komès]. Gérard and I moved in with a freezer, drinks to sell, and many dry foodstuffs we expected to sell ­here. But this is forbidden. D ­ oing ti komès ­here can get you in lots of trou­ble. Anyway, ­there is no electricity, so selling cold drinks is not even an option. We cannot use the space we pay for to do what we normally do: selling ­things outside your h ­ ouse, sitting and talking with neighbors in the shade of a tree or an umbrella. We cannot even build a small gallery to store our t­ hings and have some shade for us.

A report published by the Observatoire du Logement en Haïti in 2015 corroborates Mériane’s insights. A ­ fter the 2014 demonstrations, the leader of the group, who sought clarification about the terms of the contract and the implementation of promised ser­vices, was arrested and sent to jail on the command of Harry Adams, then the UCLBP president (Mignot 2015). In the meantime, the ubiquitous police force—on the basis of a fictive debt—­evicted the leader’s ­family and humiliated them by throwing their belongings on the street in the rain. Moreover, “­people working for the UCLBP settled in the village and started to spy on residents or threatened them and told them to stay s­ilent if they wanted ­things to get better” (Mignot 2015). When I saw Mériane again in the summer of 2015, she confided that residents live in constant fear, and families that ­were vocal during the small protests have been evicted by members of the village’s growing administrative and security apparatus. “You have policemen living on ­every street,” she stated. “You also have new residents whom I think work for, or at least report to the UCLBP administration. That’s why we ­don’t talk any more about our frustrations. They evict ­people for minor ­things, and they humiliate them by throwing all their stuff on the street, in front of every­one.” However, the climate of fear is not the only community aspect that disturbs residents of Casimir. The fact that ­people cannot tend gardens or engage in informal business goes against what many Haitians normally do in and around their ­houses. The four families I know in the village complained about the exact same ­things; they felt it was cruel to forbid the residents to have commercial relations ­because, often, small businesses serve as gathering places and engage p­ eople in egalitarian gift economies. Eventually, t­ oward the end of

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2015, ­people started to open small stores and to cultivate produce. In September 2017, Carl, a young man I befriended during my visits ­there, told me on the phone that the situation in the village had improved. “The elementary school is open, t­ here are more stores open. The administrative center closed down, but ­there are still many policemen living h ­ ere. That d­ idn’t prevent new p­ eople to move in the unfinished building at the edge of the village. So, now, we have more ­people, more ser­vices . . . ​I think it’s better!” However, even with improving conditions, Gérard Defils de­cided to leave Casimir. He and his two ­daughters left the village in the fall of 2015 to go back to his ­family lakou in Fonds-­Verrettes. ­Because she did not want to live with her husband’s ­family, Mériane remained by herself in Casimir for a few months before they divorced in 2017. As she told Aland Joseph when he visited her in 2016, the stress and instability made Gérard leave the village. ­Here we see one of the key ironies of the neoliberal state at play: ­there is rhe­ toric that depicts the state as noninterventionist in the field of cap­i­tal­ist activity—­ “Haiti is open for business” was the po­liti­cal slogan of both the dictator Jean Claude Duvalier and President Michel Martelly (an apologist for Duvalier). By this, they mean the deregulation of tariffs, lowering of corporate taxes, and removal of other barriers to trade. Second, the state is far from weak: it operates “as man­ag­er, actuary, cop and controls dissent among citizens whose economic interests run ­counter to ­those of industry, and whose social rights impose unwanted and expensive restrictions on transnational commerce” (Goldstein 2012, 57). The Haitian state has the capacity to reactivate sectors such as security and infrastructure in order to foster its export economy and to preserve the interests of multinational corporations. In the case of Casimir, the state also invests substantially in public security as though controlling the housing proj­ ect’s residents w ­ ere an urgent national task. The Caracol proj­ect (as rendered in chapter 1), an im­mense industrial park built in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2011 in northern Haiti, proves the state has the ability to h ­ andle large-­scale infrastructure proj­ects. In Caracol, the eviction of more than four hundred farmers and the opening of polluting factories necessitated the assistance of special police forces when Caracol farmers protested the proj­ect (Shamsie 2014). This type of response is anchored in a long history of deploying troops or using police and paramilitary forces in Haiti to protect national and international private interests. Since 1915, such protection has included sudden evictions of peasant farmers from their land and the brutal repression of their re­sis­tance. Before analyzing Casimir’s disciplinarian practices, in the next section I describe historical ele­ments related to state-­sponsored housing that clarify the long b­ attle between national corporate interests and rural citizens whose values run ­counter to the export economy. Laws that protect renters and landowners exist in Haiti; however, industrialization cycles that happen during moments of intense foreign intervention or during periods when IFIs offer substantial

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loans to the state always disrupt the agrarian economy and marginalize rural citizens and rural mi­grants who live in cities.

A Permanent Housing Crisis and the Fight against Rural Dwellers To understand the peculiar infrastructural lack that made Casimir unlivable, one needs to understand Haiti’s perennial housing crisis and its links to international forces. Haiti’s urban housing prob­lems did not suddenly emerge a­ fter the devastating 2010 earthquake but have plagued the country since the “wild centralization efforts of the 1915–1985 period” (Anglade 1990, 276). During the American occupation, urban planning in the capital aimed to regroup all administrative, commercial, and industrial activities around the port in order to foster an export-­ based economy. To control the zones adjacent to the port, the Americans evicted residents and seized public and private property at whim (Corvington 1987b). While the population of the capital grew, housing became scarcer and less affordable, which led many displaced rural and urban residents to construct makeshift ­houses, especially around industrial zones. Vari­ous Haitian governments would eventually develop housing proj­ects, especially to relocate ­people living in the La Saline slum or t­hose displaced by large urban planning proj­ects (Payton 2018). However, ­these proj­ects never fully resolved the housing crisis in the capital. In 1965, the Haitian Statistical Institute estimated a shortage of 392,000 housing units nationwide (Weil et al. 1986, 61). As rural migration started to increase in the capital, the housing crisis in Port-­au-­Prince became the most vis­i­ble in the country. In the 1970s, finding decent lodging in the capital became very difficult, and dense neighborhoods of makeshift structures began to bloom along the outskirts of Port-­au-­Prince. ­People who moved to cities, in princi­ple, had rights that allowed them to access affordable housing in a difficult rental market. Legislation that prevented illegal evictions, as well as l­ egal frames that pertained to the right to housing, existed during the period of François Duvalier’s dictatorship (1957–1971). On July 19, 1961, for instance, the state a­ dopted a set of laws to protect its poorest citizens from evictions and rent increases. Many other laws pertaining to housing rights ­were incorporated into the Haitian Civil Code during the Duvalier era, especially when international NGOs started to forcefully intervene in state affairs ­toward the end of the 1970s (Saint-­Pierre 2013). However, none of ­these ­legal frameworks prevented the state-­enforced displacement of populations in rural and urban areas or the construction of hazardous dwellings in places unsuited for settlement. Executive powers used ­these laws in two ways: first, the laws allowed them to proj­ect a par­tic­u­lar international image—­a state that was mindful of its citizens’ needs. Second, the laws allowed executive powers to destroy residences in low-­income neighborhoods that supposedly failed to meet new housing norms. In brief, ­these laws enabled the Haitian state si­mul­ ta­neously to receive international funding for infrastructural proj­ects and to

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displace p­ eople to places such as Casimir, tightly controlled state-­built settlements alongside industrial parks in the Port-­au-­Prince region. The forceful centralization of administrative and economic activities in Port-­ au-­Prince had two main effects: unsustainable urban density and massive emigration. More than 200,000 p­ eople left Haiti during the Duvalier regimes (1957–1986), and more than 800,000 new p­ eople settled in Port-­au-­Prince, which had 140,000 inhabitants as of 1950 (Godard 1988). Many of ­these new arrivals built dwellings in the northern parts of the capital in places subject to floods and landslides. Th ­ ese neighborhoods w ­ ere often subject to state-­sponsored destruction, such as the 1967 de­mo­li­tion of La Saline, a neighborhood of “straw ­houses,” inhabited by more than 5,000 rural mi­grants, that was burned ­under the supervision of the Makout militia and the consent of the government that deemed the burning to be a form of national regeneration (Payton 2018, 103). The goal of t­ hese de­mo­li­tions was to clear space for industrial and commercial activities while relocating ­people to state-­built “cités ouvrières”—­workers’ subdivisions. François Duvalier’s economic system relied on personal patronage, heavy taxation of all citizens, and institutionalized corruption and never amounted to a politics of industrialization. Instead, it primarily implemented one-­off, frequently environmentally destructive, industrial proj­ects that did not create much state revenue but filled the coffers of Duvalier and his allies. Between 1979 and 1986, the Haitian state built about 4,000 housing units. Much of the construction was concentrated in two neighborhoods, Saint-­Martin and Cité Simone (Paul 2002). Both attracted thousands of p­ eople who w ­ ere hoping to find a job in the formal sector. However, most could not access social housing and built makeshift homes alongside state-­built concrete structures. Cité Simone, which was François Duvalier’s flagship working-­class housing proj­ect—­ today known as Cité Soleil—­has become the largest low-income area of Port-­au-­ Prince, and more than 400,000 inhabitants live in dire sanitary conditions. Cité Simone was supposed to ­house ­people who would work in the developing industrial parks in northern Port-­au-­Prince. Instead, as Simon Fass has argued, members of makout militias and state workers occupied the apartments and housing units of this new housing proj­ect (1988, 215). Th ­ ese residential-­industrial complexes quickly unraveled due to lack of maintenance (Payton 2018, 100). They multiplied in the early 1980s, when IFI-­imposed structural adjustments helped turn “Haiti into a supplier of the cheapest ­labor in the Western Hemi­sphere for the export assembly manufacturing industries established by foreign and domestic investors” (Dupuy 2010). Factory workers, and ­those who desired a stable job, settled in marginal areas of the capital and around former state housing proj­ects, changing the physical aspect of the capital for good. Between 1986 and 2010, more than a million Haitians converged on the Port-­ au-­Prince region to seek better opportunities and formal employment. The city’s population had roughly qua­dru­pled since the 1980s (Dupuy 2010, 17). The neoliberal reforms that started ­under the Duvalier regime in the early 1980s

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greatly accelerated ­after the fall of the dictator. As noted in chapter 1, neoliberal reforms led to the destruction of peasant agriculture, to a reliance on imported goods, and ultimately, to mass rural emigration. Urban centers grew denser as the countryside’s economic opportunities dwindled. The prospect of stable jobs in the capital and the availability of ser­vices w ­ ere major pull ­factors in rural emigration. According to Mark Schuller, neoliberalism destroyed 800,000 rural livelihoods. ­People “pulled” to Port-­au-­Prince often came b­ ecause of job potential but almost never found employment in the formal sector (Schuller 2015, 31). Moreover, Schuller notes, neoliberal mea­sures had a direct impact on ­people’s expenses ­because neoliberal structural adjustments drastically reduce social spending in the domain of health and education (2015, 32). School and health-­ care ser­vices are expensive and further the pauperization of low-­income p­ eople in the city. The industrial growth in the capital and its concomitant infrastructural development attracted an average of 75,000 rural mi­grants per year from 1982 to 2003 (Tobin 2013). However, ­people arrived in a city almost devoid of housing infrastructure and had to build dwellings “in any vacant space and peri-­ urban space of the city” (UN-­Habitat 2009). The southern part of the capital and its adjacent communes (the equivalent of incorporated towns in the United States) grew rapidly into dense urban areas. As a result of austerity mea­sures applied since the early 1980s, the state workforce dwindled. In other words, the state lacked the means to supervise construction practices, even though construction codes do exist in Haiti (Schuller 2015, 39). Hence, u­ ntil 2010, hundreds of thousands of structures “typically built quickly from cement, concrete, and bricks, by friends and f­ amily” spread on the mountains’ flanks surrounding the bay and in the agricultural and forested areas located between Léogane and Port-­ au-­Prince (Tobin 2013, 1055). The 2010 earthquake flattened more than 100,000 dwellings of this type. Haitians have mostly confronted housing issues on their own, and the state has built few housing proj­ects during the post-­Duvalier period. The few small-­scale housing proj­ects built between 1994 and 2008, during the Aristide and Préval presidencies, along with fragmented efforts by international organ­izations to build housing proj­ects, have been unable to redress the housing crisis in Haiti—­and ­were unable to do so even before the earthquake. Almost ten years a­ fter the earthquake, state-­sponsored proj­ects remain the most vis­i­ble efforts in the housing sector. International reconstruction efforts prioritize building infrastructures that w ­ ill supposedly trigger economic growth and industrial development. Bill Clinton’s “Building Back Better” United Nations 2006 report serves as the basis for international action in Haiti. The report contains many propositions that call for community-­driven, long-­term infrastructure construction that would primarily help populations affected by disaster. However, it seems that Proposition 8 of the report, which states that “governments and aid agencies must create the conditions for entrepreneurs to flourish,” has been the sole driver of the pre­sent reconstruction pro­cess (Clinton 2006). On the ground, “much of the so-­called recovery aid has been devoted

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to costly current programs, like highway building and H.I.V. prevention, and to new proj­ects far outside the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north” (Sontag 2012b). The ­actual “reconstruction” directly benefits the industrial sector through construction contracts as well as infrastructure that improves the mobility of goods and low-­wage workers. Yet the economy remains stagnant, and reconstruction efforts seem more like empty per­for­mances of neoliberal politics than actions that yield true growth. The highly vis­i­ble state effort to build social housing is at best superficial given the im­mense need in this domain. However, the same pattern is at play ­here: housing proj­ects emerge during industrialization periods and lead to the displacement of peasant farmers or to the suppression of their social and commercial practices when they s­ ettle in urban environments or planned housing proj­ects. Casimir is an example of a vis­i­ble proj­ect that is not actually meant to h ­ ouse earthquake victims (other­wise the proj­ect would have been completed) but rather to cater to international partners and to offer tangible proof of government action in the face of national disaster.

Preventing Indigenous Urbanization Forbidding ­people to tend gardens, grow produce, and conduct informal commercial exchanges may seem to be marginal details, but ­these actions actually reveal the authoritarian nature of the Haitian state. As I note in the preceding section, the suffocation of provincial market economies has been a leitmotiv for a state that works against its rural citizens and concentrates all its resources and ser­vices in the capital (Barthélémy 1990; Trouillot M. R. 1990a). The Haitian market economy is based on the tending of small plots of land primarily used for subsistence. ­Women sell surplus crops in markets and from their homes. Hence, domestic economies are part of the public realm. They promote skilled work that preserves in­de­pen­dence in a country where the work imposed by cap­ i­tal­ist systems is closer to animal l­abor. As the Haitian geographer Georges Anglade has written, Haiti’s low-­wage workers in factories are subjected to the harshest disciplinary techniques, and the state makes sure that workers do not rebel or or­ga­nize to ask for better working conditions (1982, 33). In the case of Casimir, the attempts to shrink domestic economies and confine them to the ­house­hold as strictly reproductive ­labor seem to be an effort to direct workers ­toward factory ­labor and to discipline a predominantly female workforce. However, t­ here is a conundrum h ­ ere: the factory proj­ect never materialized. While I am not able to clarify the goals of the disciplinary techniques used to kept Casimir’s population docile, this abstract landscape and this community reveal how the Haitian state functions in times of intense international meddling in its economic policies and orientations. I argue that the rationality and abstraction that infuse state-­planned housing proj­ects enable the actualization of symbolic and structural forms of vio­ lence. The Casimir housing proj­ect reflects a type of vio­lence that often appears

Industrial ­Futures • 79

concealed: the vio­lence of abstract urban planning. Through the proj­ect’s configuration its regulations prohibiting deviation from that form, and its mandates against opening ti komès, the Casimir proj­ect materializes certain ideologies—­ for instance, rational efficiency and productivism—­that are inscribed in the Haitian state’s pre­sent industrialization efforts. Further, through the forms of surveillance, discipline, and control that have been implemented within the Casimir proj­ect, ­those ideologies are imposed on Casimir’s inhabitants—­often to their significant detriment. The policies b­ ehind and spatial arrangement of the proj­ect thus actually foreclose residents’ economic opportunities. I suggest that the construction and management of abstract spaces within this disciplinarian landscape represent a form of bare vio­lence: the vio­lence of abstraction resides in the fact that t­ hese cultural and social premises are absent from the calculations of external urban planners who largely consider any geographic space to be a blank slate. In Casimir, planners did not even consider the ecological milieu in which they w ­ ere building. To understand the symbolic and physical vio­lence of abstract space, I want to interrogate the relations between urban planning, the fostering of export economies, and the disciplinary techniques that infuse the Casimir proj­ect. In the past de­cade, Haiti’s export economy has been fostered by trade agreements with the United States. The Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act of 2006 (HOPE I) enabled the United States to preferentially import Haitian apparel. In 2010, ­these trade agreements ­were extended ­until 2020 ­under HOPE II, along with the Haiti Economic Lift Program Act (HELP) of 2010, which improves U.S. access to Haitian exports (Hornbeck 2010). Th ­ ese agreements have promoted the creation of industrial parks in both the Haitian countryside and the Port-­au-­Prince region. Such factories are located in free-­trade zones and do not generate much revenue for the state. Industrial sites are generally built in joint ventures by the state, foreign nation-­states, and foreign investors. Hence, national po­liti­cal and economic agendas are geared ­toward the betterment of certain types of business activities in Haiti. The government is reduced to the role of a night watchman; it (supposedly) maintains law and order generally and property law for corporations, and it caters to the needs of the private sector in relation to fragmented efforts to build infrastructure. As the Defilses mentioned, the state strongly enforces rules that Casimir’s inhabitants must follow, such as the curtailing of domestic informal commerce or nonstate approved construction. However, in the Casimir case, t­ here are no industrial opportunities on the near horizon. The h ­ ouses are built on state land and cannot be commodified. Nonetheless, the state regiments p­ eople’s daily lives and resorbs their social and economic possibilities by prohibiting them from entering the “backward” spheres of subsistence agriculture and informal commerce. As the Haitian anthropologist Gérard Barthélémy (1990) demonstrated,

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the Haitian state—­namely, the Republic of Port-­au-­Prince—is composed of moun lavil (urban citizens) who characterize moun andeyò (­people from rural provinces—­literally “outsiders”) as stuck in traditional lifestyles that impede the economic and social pro­gress of the country. The state has used housing proj­ects and industrialization as the main means to integrate rural dwellers into “modernity.” To this end, the centralized Haitian state powerfully intervenes in the countryside by controlling regional bud­gets, but it also intervenes in the life of its rural citizens. Life in the newly built housing proj­ects is regimented by rules that circumvent the possibilities of reenacting economic and spatial practices linked to rural life. In Casimir, the state has the potential to intrude in the domestic sphere and to regulate activities like ti komès that have been the basis of autonomy for many families. The Haitian state regulates the private realm in order to reduce the functions of privacy to the tending of basic biological necessities. Therefore, domestic work—­mainly female work—is not recognized as an activity that contributes to a community’s social and economic needs. Hannah Arendt’s (2013) fraught distinction between ­labor and work is useful ­here for understanding the state’s field of intervention and its modernist ideology. According to Arendt, l­abor constitutes the repetitive, quasi-­animalistic activities meant only to sustain life, and it is regulated by a set of laws despotically administered by the h ­ ouse­hold head. ­Labor thus does not produce anything permanent; it caters only to individual biological needs. Work, however, “is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of ­human existence,” and it “provides an ‘artificial’ world of t­hings, distinctly dif­fer­ent from all natu­ral surroundings” (Arendt 2013, 7). This distinction is vis­i­ble within neoliberal economics where, for instance, subsistence agriculture is envisioned as an impediment to pro­g ress. Jovenel Moïse, elected as Haiti’s president in December 2016, promised to rid the rural countryside of subsistence activities and to turn Haitian agriculture into a national export. Subsistence agriculture forms the basis of most female work in Haiti, where the majority of ­women work as vendors in a vigorous produce market that still forms the backbone of the national economy. The reconstitution of the once-­ flourishing export economy of the colonial period is an agenda that has poisoned the Haitian state since its emergence in 1804. Violently suppressing rural practices that enable self-­sufficiency and autonomy has been a main tool used by the state to put ­people back to work in plantation-­like structures and to confine their domestic activities to the narrow realm of ­labor. The pattern of modernization through industrialization removes p­ eople’s life options and narrows their possibilities by negating the viability of lives built on domestic economy. Casting l­abor as an unproductive form of work marginalizes ­women and the key occupations they hold in the agrarian economy of Haiti. The state has constantly attacked the Haitian market system that stemmed from the revolution; it is a system the state often depicts as archaic since it does not fit with models of productivist agriculture. Culturally articulated around

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spiritual practices and Kreyòl as a common language, the nineteenth-­century Haitian peasantry created a system of self-­governance based on practices and values associated with a specific spatial feature: the lakou. The lakou is a courtyard around which several homes are gathered, where spiritual practices are performed and work is or­ga­nized collectively (Wagner 2014). Urbanization and spatial constraints do not allow urban residents to re-­create the spatial features of the lakou, but many ele­ments of the lakou system, such as credit procedures, social obligations within kinship groups, and commerce as the basis for autonomy, strongly endure in ­today’s Haiti. The lakou system is not a bounded cultural structure that defines the Haitian nation as a w ­ hole but a mode of autonomy and moral integrity that creates hierarchies and social and economic possibilities. It has enabled peasants to create families and to use the land as they wish, often for food production. Historically, this peasant mode of organ­ization has stood in direct opposition to global understandings of an export-­oriented economy (Gonzalez 2019). It is impor­tant to note that practices stemming from the lakou system are not totally adverse to the export economy. Haitian peasant farmers have always supplied goods for the export market and participated in the global economy by producing cash crops such as coffee or vetiver. The rural world is not entirely isolated from import-­export activities; in fact, the lakou system has enabled ­people both to participate in the global market and to sustain themselves. However, state-­sponsored industrialization negates the potentials of rural economic systems and imposes a quasi-­military discipline on the small pools of ­people who work in factories. ­Today, in residential/industrial complexes such as Caracol in northern Haiti or Casimir, disciplinary techniques aimed at resorbing domestic work resonate as attacks against a form of Haitian popu­lar autonomy in which female economic practices are the platform of self-­sufficiency. The industrial sector mainly targets female workers, and the trend within the sector to reduce ­women’s domestic activities forms a disciplinarian technique that supposedly transforms them into more productive workers. The spatial ideologies of urban planners in cases like Casimir clearly ­counter the lakou system and its concomitant spatial practices by imposing community standards that ultimately lead to exclusion and individualism. It is impor­tant to note that the pro­cess of separating lakou members accrued at many levels in the post-­disaster period. As Mark Schuller shows, the post-­earthquake moment led to a general dilation of lakou networks. Despatialized urban lakous are mainly structured by reciprocity and sharing. ­A fter the quake, ­people relied far less on their sharing relations with families, friends, and neighbors (Schuller 2015, 82). If the lakous’ extended h ­ ouse­hold was the basis of solidarity before the earthquake, major non-­Haitian actors who brought “aid” to Haitians disrupted endemic sharing and reciprocity practices by splitting up families in camps and allocating funds and goods in ways that completely disregarded Haitian relational realities. The Casimir proj­ect is the epitome of such social fragmentations.

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The Casimir gridiron plan is reminiscent of French colonial urban designs (Njoh 2017) and is representative of “the reductive technocratic rationality deployed in the production of abstract space” (Wilson 2013, 367). Designing urban space provides the opportunity to canalize and fragment daily life. In the Casimir context, this fragmentation is a po­liti­cal pro­cess in which reproductive ­labor and work become separated and autonomy based on communal management of resources is constricted. The values of the lakou and other collectivist traditions that are countercolonial are negated through the creation of a space where the geometric thinking of mathematicians permeates the methodologies of planners who rationalize life through the creation of “boxes, cages, or ‘dwelling machines’ ” (Lefebvre 2003 [1966], 122). As Henri Lefebvre argues, highly abstract housing proj­ects take their very shape from the “idea that the prob­lems of growth and the quantitativism which they involve are the essential prob­lems, and that the strategic objective is indefinite growth” (Lefebvre 1976 [1970], 100). Such geometric urban landscapes are alienating not only b­ ecause they impede the creation of places where ­people can reactivate collectivist practices but also ­because they obstruct life possibilities and stifle individual and communal development through a “strange kind of excess: a rage for mea­sure­ment and calculation” (Lefebvre 2003 [1966], 122). Casimir is a space of alienation where the neoliberal state attempts to separate creative and domestic l­ abor from “productive” work and to remodel the relationship of h ­ umans with nature and communities. The second comeback of Bill Clinton in Haiti marks the return of full-­fledged neoliberal practices. In 1994, Clinton ordered the return of President Aristide by invading the country with twenty thousand U.S. troops. Aristide agreed to follow Clinton’s neoliberal policies and slashed tariffs and taxes while laying off a ­great number of state employees. ­These shock mea­sures ­were meant to boost the private sector and grow the economy. However, it led to the dwindling of food production and the flooding of the food market by foreign imports. When Clinton returned to Haiti as the UN special envoy in 2010, he proposed the same types of solutions, and t­ hese solutions led to the edification of parks and housing proj­ects reflecting the crude and homogenizing neoliberal ideology at play during the so-­called reconstruction phase. The Casimir proj­ect materializes the ­will for rational efficiency inscribed in the pre­sent industrialization efforts. From the geometric forms of the housing proj­ect that allow for surveillance and control to the recasting of domestic work as ­simple l­ abor, the Casimir proj­ect stands as a disciplinarian landscape that conforms to a chimerical industrial ­future. Efficiently improving access to adequate housing does not necessarily mean focusing only on urban dwellings and their immediate and superficial prob­lems. It does not mean creating jobs at any cost while lodging workers in highly supervised industrial and residential parks marked by substandard living conditions. As Schuller astutely notes, “to focus on earthquake-­resistant housing design and construction only or even primarily as a technical solution to prevent further

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catastrophes misses impor­tant realities” (2016, 39). Rather, resorbing vulnerability to disasters requires viewing the larger horizon of possibilities that lie beyond alleviating only pre­sent suffering. It demands large-­scale decentralization and the growth of economies that enable the majority of Haitians to live in freedom and autonomy. Frank Dumont, a resident of Casimir, told us many times that allowing ­people to open a produce market in the proj­ect would be beneficial. Many p­ eople live in informal neighborhoods a few miles away from Casimir and would certainly take advantage of a nearby market instead of ­going to Port-­au-­Prince to buy food. To move t­ oward a more productive way of life for residents of places like Casimir, the state could retreat from its current level of control or at least allow citizens to participate in their own housing proj­ects and to create their own communities. As I discuss in the next chapter, p­ eople who have been allowed to transform their h ­ ouses in similar proj­ects have been able to create job opportunities and to render their villages alive. Individual modular ­houses are coveted in urban and rural districts. They allow ­people to express their aesthetic preferences and to use their h ­ ouses as they see fit for f­ amily life or business. Vernacular architecture also allows Haitians to use their building skills rather than being forced to occupy units built by foreign companies that disregard p­ eople’s desires and their full definition of “adequate” housing. The vio­lence of abstraction resides in the fact that ­these cultural and social premises are absent from the calculations of urban planners who consider space to be a blank state. In Casimir, planners did not even consider the ecological milieu in which they ­were building. The examples of canalization ruined by salty ­water or, more simply, the construction of poorly ventilated concrete boxes in a sun-­scorched region indicate the intrinsic vio­lence of seemingly neutral abstract practices. B ­ ecause of distant abstraction, the housing proj­ect itself did not meet the needs and desires of its residents, which, in turn, spurred short-­lived local re­sis­tance. Even if the industrialization of this region failed, Casimir remains a space or­ga­nized “according to a rationality of the identical and the repetitive that allows the state to introduce its presence, control, and surveillance in the most isolated corners (which thus cease to be corners)” (Lefebvre 2003 [1977], 86). The productivist tendencies of the Haitian state, crudely reflected in this failed housing proj­ect, induce the creation of spaces of alienation where the collectivist traditions of the moun andeyò are once again violently suppressed.

Abstract Space and Vio­lence I suggest that the way urban planners have designed the Casimir proj­ect (and other state-­sponsored housing proj­ects before the earthquake) has canalized and fragmented daily life for many residents. This fragmentation is not simply an unintended consequence of urban planning. Rather, it represents a po­liti­cal pro­ cess in which autonomy based on communal management of resources is constricted. Master-­planned housing proj­ects such as Casimir marginalize rural

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mi­grants in Haiti and limit their economic horizons by preventing the emergence of social and commercial exchanges. In par­tic­u ­lar, administrators in Casimir have implemented rules that regiment life and circumvent residents’ possibilities for reenacting economic opportunities and social relations linked to rural life. Crucially, the fact that ­people cannot grow food or trees or engage in ti komès, which goes against what many Haitians normally do in and around their ­houses, makes Casimir a space that alienates ­people, a space that obstructs life possibilities and stifles individual and communal development. Following the geographers Japhy Wilson and Henri Lefebvre, we can see that the rationality and abstraction infusing state-­planned housing proj­ects enable the actualization of “symbolic and direct forms of vio­lence” (Wilson 2014, 517). As Lefebvre mentions, this kind of top-­down planning proj­ect “conceals a programme for everyday life. Explic­itly or not, it refers to an overall conception of man, of life and of the world” (Lefebvre 2002 [1961], 79). In the cities analyzed by Lefebvre, the everyday is fragmented in “functioning, legible units” that are manipulated to fit technocratic visions of social life—­the goal being to transform the peasantry into an urban workforce by placing them into a radically new physical space. Likewise, Wilson’s analy­sis of the Plan Puebla Panama in Mexico—an im­mense inter-­American proj­ect that was meant to develop energy production, transport, industry, and telecommunication (2001–2008)—­shows how neoliberal reforms translate in spatial and infrastructural proj­ects that are used as tools for the erasure of indigenous communities and their agrarian and economic practices. In both its formulation and implementation, the Plan Puebla Panama used physical force and vio­lence concealed in abstract symbolic and structural forms, which generated widespread re­sis­tance (Wilson 2014). The France that Lefebvre has witnessed and the Mexico Wilson describes are, however, power­f ul players in the global economy, and both had the financial means to develop modernization proj­ects. In each case, the restructuring of ­economic activities (started in the 1950s in France and in 1994 in Mexico a­ fter the North American F ­ ree Trade Agreement) led to the weakening of peasant agriculture and to the loss of cultivable land. However, in the case of Casimir, the state quickly abandoned the construction of the mini-­industrial park that was supposed to create employment for Casimir residents. As a result, Casimir is a housing proj­ect unlinked with any form of functioning industrial development. The physical and symbolic forms of discipline that radiate throughout this housing proj­ect are not oriented t­ oward shaping a productive workforce since formal employment is not even available in the region. While the vio­lence justified by the imperative of economic growth is simply absent h ­ ere, state police forces nonetheless subject Casimir residents to rigid community rules and violently repress ­people who are simply asking administrators to clarify the contracts they signed. The Casimir housing proj­ect reflects the concealed vio­lence of abstract urban planning and the direct vio­lence that emerges from geometric, rationalized spaces

Industrial ­Futures • 85

that conform to developmental ideologies and that, ultimately, disjoint communities. Master-­planned mega housing proj­ects are part of a new wave of welfare programs in Latin Amer­i­ca. For instance, Mexico and Brazil have each built more than 4 million housing units since 2000. Venezuela, which finances the Haitian state’s own housing proj­ects, has built more than 1.5 million subsidized housing units since 2011 (Sliwa 2017, 1). In ­these proj­ects, ­people are allowed to convert part of their ­houses into “commercial and even small-­scale industrial uses” (Sliwa 2017, 2). Casimir’s design, with its regular grid pattern, resembles t­ hese mega housing proj­ects. However, Casimir is strictly residential. ­People are not allowed to use and transform their urban settings to fit their own economic and social needs. Residents of Casimir thus do not have the option to be part of an urban ecosystem—­conceived as the dialectic relations between h ­ umans and built and natu­ral environments—­and do not have the possibility to dwell. Dwelling, for Lefebvre, evokes urban living as becoming, as a dynamic and transformative experience where h ­ umans “take part in a social life, a community, village, or city” (Lefebvre cited in Al-­Nakib 2016, 185). Casimir is not a village. It is a residential microcosm where dwelling has been reduced to mere habitat. Dwelling “is an activity, a situation, whereas habitat is a function, a brutal material real­ity” (Elden 2004, 190). Dwelling means to engage in the transformation of a given environment, but abstractly designed habitats reduce life to mere function and individual creativity to mechanistic productivity. As Tim Ingold has argued, ­human abilities to represent, design, and put plans into practice do not mean that we craft a built environment out of a nature conceived as an initially empty space awaiting cultural transformation that would make it suitable to live in. In other words, we do not stand outside of nature, we dwell in environments ­because “the forms ­people build [or reuse and transform], ­whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings” (Ingold 2000, 186). In the case of Casimir, however, dwelling capacities are being denied to ­people who lack even the right to transform their ­houses in ways, for instance, that would make them more suitable for the climate. Dwelling entails the fashioning of always emergent livelihoods that adapt to socially and environmentally situated pro­cesses. It is an activity that entails creativity and transformation of the self and the built, which dialectically form one another. As Lefebvre writes, “each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space” (Lefebvre 1991, 169–170). The production of habitat stultifies the emergent properties of this dialectic pro­ cess, renders ­humans as self-­contained individuals, and forecloses the possibility of creating spaces of belonging and social exchange. To the contrary, in a region where colonial disciplinary landscapes w ­ ere the main tool for population management, the building of habitat echoes violent attempts to control a formerly in­de­pen­dent peasantry that Haitian elites and pro-­business foreign allies

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have depicted as savages unfit for modernity. Without the perspective of factory work, however, this attempt to control daily life through discipline and habitat cannot be readily anchored in the realm of a well-­discussed frame: cap­i­tal­ist colonization of daily life. As the residents with whom I spoke repeatedly argued, the right to transform their h ­ ouses into places that fit their needs and the right to engage in social and commercial relations with their neighbors would create a place where v­ iable livelihoods could be enacted. Even though p­ eople often disliked the appearance and quality of their ­houses, they cited many ways to improve them. Mériane Defils, for instance, i­magined opening a small restaurant simply by building a back porch and an outdoor kitchen. As she reminisced about the neighborliness of her former neighborhood in Port-­au-­Prince, she emphasized the need to create places in Casimir where ­people could meet and talk. Top-­down urban planning imposes certain ways of life and sociality through abstract physical forms. Allowing the ­people of Casimir to nest in and transform ­these bare-­bones ­houses to fit their ways of living, and permitting them to establish neighborly relations of all kinds, could open new possibilities. Crucially, ­viable social and economic activities emerge from the ways p­ eople dwell.

3

State Interventions Infrastructure and Citizenship On a Sunday after­noon in February 2014, my friend Widnel took me on a long ­ride to see neighborhoods in Port-­au-­Prince that ­were dear to him.1 In his battered minibus, we drove from the downtown street where his m ­ other worked as a cook to his childhood home in Martissant. On our way, we encountered many ­people he knew. We ­stopped to greet them as we wound through streets that passed his old schools, the Catholic church his ­family used to attend, and even the cinema where he had met his wife in the mid-1980s. He also took me to the neighborhood where our common friend Aland Joseph was raised. Aland had introduced me to Widnel, and we often rode around town together. Widnel is a genius mechanic who crisscrosses the city in his clients’ cars or in his minibus as he hops from one job to another. He is not very talkative, though. His silence has earned him the nickname “Calme-­Toi” (Keep Calm). That Sunday, however, we talked for a long time. Widnel reflected on his past and on what the city had looked like when he was young. He also spoke fondly about p­ eople he had lost during the earthquake. Once we reached his ­house and settled in its front gallery, Widnel picked up a photo ­album and said: My m ­ other was from the mountains, not too far from Port-­au-­Prince. She settled in the city with her older b­ rother in the early 1960s and then moved with my ­father when she married him in 1965, when I was born. My ­father passed when I was five. He left us a small ­house in Martissant. My ­mother worked hard. She first cooked and sold food in the street. She was an excellent 87

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cook, and she knew many p­ eople, including some famous politicians. She did so well that, with my u­ ncle, they bought a small restaurant not far from the ­Grand Cimetière. Her restaurant worked well, too. P ­ eople loved her food. She retired around 2005, but, in fact, she never retired. She trained my cousin, who now runs the place, but she was always ­there helping. She was t­ here in the courtyard cooking when the earthquake happened. She died while she was working.

­ fter a long pause, Widnel opened the a­ lbum. Most of the photos showed the A city during the days ­after the earthquake. In one, we saw his ­mother’s body in front of her restaurant; she wore a long, dark-­blue dress whitened with dust, and her head rested on a green towel. He also had a few photos of the restaurant. Although the building still stood, cinder-­block structures in the courtyard had collapsed and killed Widnel’s m ­ other. He continued: She lived in this h ­ ouse. This is where I grew up and where I live now. It’s a good building. It sustained the earthquake well, and it’s in a quiet street. My wife and I love this l­ ittle ­house. ­Later, my ­mother managed to buy another ­house in Thomassin. It’s way up in the mountains, about 45 minutes from Port-­au-­ Prince. That’s where she is from. She was supposed to spend her retirement ­there, but she loved being at the restaurant. So she preferred to stay h ­ ere, not too far from downtown. [Pauses and looks around] She also loved this small ­house.

Widnel’s ­house sits in a dead end near Route des Dalles, the main road that traverses the Martissant neighborhood. Houses prob­ably built in the 1950s and 1960s dot the block, and a few palm and mango trees rise ­behind the high walls surrounding them. This part of Martissant, where about 300,000 ­people live, differs from other areas in the neighborhood where small, cinder-­block ­houses fill the streets like a muted gray carpet spread across the side of the nearby mountain. Widnel and his wife Soraya have lived in this small, pale-­yellow, two-­story concrete building since they wed in 1990. Widnel’s ­mother and ­sister liked to spend time with Soraya in the front gallery, which is filled with potted plants and shaded by an almond tree in the m ­ iddle of the courtyard. As Widnel and Soraya often noted, this pleasant l­ ittle green space offered an escape from the violent world around them. Speaking of Widnel’s ­mother, Soraya said, “She was like a sacred tree [tankou yon gwo mapou]. Every­one respected her. Even during the worst periods, she managed to go to town, to work, and get food for every­one.” Aland also talked about Widnel’s ­mother and said Widnel used to be a calm but joyful man before she died. Since the earthquake, he noted, Widnel had been melancholic—­even absent: “He’s been through a lot, but he was always positive. His m ­ other was the world to him [sa mère, c’ était comme le centre du monde].

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He says that he stays t­ here to be close to his d­ aughter, who d­ oesn’t live far away. His ­daughter never goes to Martissant and wants her parents to move away from ­there. But the h ­ ouse reminds him of his mom. Same for Soraya. That’s why they stay t­ here.” Since the military coup that exiled President Aristide in 1991, waves of killing and kidnapping have repeatedly swept through Martissant. ­Every day ­after work, Soraya returned to the h ­ ouse at 4:00 p.m. and stayed inside a­ fter dark. Likewise, Widnel often went home before sundown, even though vio­lence receded a­ fter the earthquake. The c­ ouple often talked about moving to a better area. But Soraya and Widnel hoped their neighborhood would become safer as a result of post-­earthquake reconstruction efforts. Like many ­people, when they heard about the hundreds of millions of dollars pledged by international actors for disaster relief, they thought Haitians would fi­nally have a chance to rebuild their country and institutions. ­A fter we ­stopped at his h ­ ouse, Widnel wanted to show me some of his neighborhood. At the time, it had been four years since the earthquake. As Soraya noted, “since 2009 or so, we ­don’t hear gunshots anymore. The upper parts of Martissant are still dangerous, but even ­there, it seems to get better.” Widnel and I drove around the Martissant Park, a forty-­t wo-­acre urban forest that was recently fenced. Widnel pointed out the many tall trees surrounding us and then ­stopped by a gate as he said, “They are building a library and a garden h ­ ere. I never thought we would have a library in this neighborhood.” He then drove down a street to the newly inaugurated Nemours Jean Baptiste Square. The small park, surrounded by palm trees, provides much-­needed public space in a very dense part of Martissant. As we walked along its edge, Widnel said, “Do you notice something? ­There’s no trash! That’s one of the good ­thing[s] the new park brought ­here. P ­ eople have access to trash collection. The ravines are functioning and clean, the ­whole neighborhood looks clean. Less than half a mile away from ­here, it’s completely dif­fer­ent. Like day and night. Just next to Martissant, ­people swim in trash [moun naje nan fatra]. It’s true. If you have a big rain during the night, you w ­ ill wake up with tall piles of trash right in front of your door, even if you keep your corner of the street clean!” Indeed, as we drove back along a road by the shore, we crossed an invisible line. Just as we left Martissant, we saw mounds of trash lining the Boulevard Truman. We explored the streets of the Bolosse neighborhood and then ­stopped near the ravine bwadchen, one of the city’s most impor­tant drainage canals. It overflowed with styrofoam food containers and multicolor packages of imported goods. Widnel said, “Now we are anba lavil [at the city’s bottom]. Look around you, Vincent. It looks like an open-­air landfill!” The contrast between Martissant and Bolosse was indeed striking. ­Later, on our way to my apartment, Widnel praised the Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty (FOKAL), a large Haitian-­managed nongovernmental organ­ization (NGO) that had worked to preserve the park and renovate the neighborhood since 2007:

FIG. 9  ​A clean ravine recently rehabilitated in Parc Martissant.

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I thought they only or­ga­nized cultural events. They have their headquarters in a nice building downtown, where ­there’s a theater and a library. Every­one knows FOKAL in Port-­au-­Prince. It was a surprise when they started their proj­ects in Martissant. I ­didn’t know they did this kind of t­ hing. For the past few years, they helped save a big chunk of forest. Without them, p­ eople would have built ­houses in the forest a­ fter the earthquake. If you walk up the hills, you would also see how they cleaned the ravines, built roads and bridges. It’s not only them; I can tell you the name of dozens of NGOs that worked ­there at one point or another. But FOKAL is the one ­people mainly deal with.

I had visited FOKAL regularly since 2012 and had met experts who renovate heritage buildings in the city. Following Widnel’s advice, I began inquiring about urban renovation proj­ects in Martissant. I also contacted a friend in Bolosse since I wanted to understand what it was like to live in a neighborhood where state and NGO ser­vices ­were non­ex­is­tent. I noticed that ­people who live in Bolosse carefully observed what was happening in Martissant and worked together to bring ser­vices to their neighborhood. A ­ fter the po­liti­cal crisis in 2008, however, ­people in Bolosse felt completely abandoned by the state and international aid. In this chapter, I contrast ­these two neighborhoods to explicate how ­people practice and experience urban citizenship by transforming spatial settings (or not) and by creating and sharing infrastructure. By distributing ser­vices and building infrastructure, the state and its partners e­ ither include or exclude neighborhoods from the social and po­liti­cal life of the city. In places like Bolosse, where resources and ser­vices are absent, ­people form their own organ­izations to ensure security and to clean roads. Sometimes residents of t­ hese neighborhoods belong to or have relations with a baz (base), which is a block-­based assemblage of vari­ous grassroots organ­izations such as “­music groups, defense brigades, and development organ­izations” that emerged in the post-­Duvalier period (Kivland 2020, 213). However, t­ hese collectives cannot fix major prob­lems such as overflowing ravines, and p­ eople are often forced to live in unsanitary conditions. Recent initiatives in Martissant, such as cleaning and renovating ravines, rebuilding roads and sidewalks, and preserving public green spaces, are unique in Port-­ au-­Prince. Since 2007, FOKAL, working with grassroots organ­izations, has fostered the creation of groups of neighborhood volunteers who are heavi­ly involved in the sanitation and renovation proj­ects that have reshaped Martissant. The p­ eople whose stories animate this chapter ­were not only involved in proj­ ects that changed their immediate surroundings but also felt that they ­were part of larger national debates; they often characterized initiatives in their neighborhood as potential blueprints for urban planning in broader Port-­au-­Prince. ­People like Widnel and Soraya ­were cautiously optimistic when they spoke about what was happening in Martissant. As they often noted, receding vio­lence in the neighborhood was temporary. “The prob­lem of Haiti is impunity,” Soraya said. “Bandits are friends with policemen and politicians. They all know that

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nothing w ­ ill happen even if they commit horrible crimes.” Even though she ­recognized that dialogue between ­people from dif­fer­ent parts of Martissant dispelled some tensions in the neighborhood, she deeply distrusted state institutions—­especially the Haitian National Police. Nevertheless, p­ eople in Martissant had established respectful dialogue with state employees for the first time. The kind of dialogue that emerged between Martissant inhabitants and state authorities seemed to be ­limited, though, to this neighborhood. ­People in nearby Bolosse envied the state’s respectful engagement with ­those in Martissant; they clearly witnessed the Haitian state intervene beneficially just a few dozen meters away and wondered why it could not seem to do so in Bolosse. By working with the Haitian state, FOKAL sought to build administrative capacities in urban planning and management at the governmental level. The positive results of this collaboration—­preserving green space, building a new library, and renovating infrastructure in popu­lar neighborhoods—­illustrate the Haitian state’s ability to work with citizens to improve urban life and preserve vital environmental features in the capital. In contrast, the p­ eople of Bolosse witnessed what happens when the government implements piecemeal urban renewal: the city is further fragmented and new hierarchies are created in poor areas of Port-­au-­Prince. Even in Martissant, institutional goals often conflicted with individual or f­ amily needs and desires. As I show in this chapter, the assemblage of local and international institutions active in Port-­au-­Prince ultimately failed to implement better urban planning at a broader city level, even though they generated results in Martissant. Instead, such institutions introduced new anx­i­eties linked to the temporary nature of NGO work and the instability of Haitian institutions. Stated simply, when institutions respond to ­people’s needs at the level of basic ser­vices and infrastructure, no silver bullet exists: even small proj­ects have unintended effects. Despite this, the proj­ects in Martissant created new relations between ­people and institutions through material means. ­People’s experiences of citizenship transformed and communities solidified, as residents negotiated access to potable ­water or electricity with state institutions and then or­ga­nized neighborhood committees to manage t­ hese resources. P ­ eople in Bolosse longed for the same kind of relationship with the state—­a form of citizenship fashioned by transforming urban space.

Martissant, a Diverse Neighborhood Plagued by Vio­lence Socially and architecturally, Martissant is a very diverse part of Port-­au-­Prince. Widnel’s neighborhood is mainly inhabited by middle-­class families who live in decent h ­ ouses and apartments that often w ­ ere built before the 1980s. Its streets are paved, and ­people can access potable ­water and electricity, even though long blackouts are frequent. This part of Martissant borders the newly opened park—­a swath of urban forest gifted by three landowners to the state when FOKAL

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launched its preservation proj­ect in 2007. A dense, informal neighborhood extends below the park to the ocean and sits near other slums in Port-­au-­Prince that line the coast. Houses in this part of Martissant are mainly makeshift dwellings built with plywood, tarps, corrugated steel, and sometimes even pieces of cardboard. A few concrete ­houses stand between shabbier ones. Above the park, thousands of small concrete ­houses form a gray mass interrupted only by small corridors and steep staircases. In the upper reaches of the mountain, scattered ­houses are surrounded by vegetable patches, a sight similar to what you would find in the country’s hilly, rural areas. I have seen the upper parts of Martissant from afar, but Widnel and Soraya made me promise I would not venture t­ here. Although Martissant’s bourgeoisie left long ago, its current population remains diverse. ­People who have formal jobs and modest incomes coexist with ­those who work in the informal economy. Every­one, though, has a common prob­lem: ensekirite (insecurity). As Erica Caple James (2010) has noted, the military junta that assumed power in a coup (1991–1994) attacked pro-­democracy activists linked to exiled president Aristide, often accusing them of being members of gangs. By calling the many baz that rooted for Aristide’s return “gangs” or chimè, the military junta and their paramilitary allies established a long-­term stigmatizing frame on low-­income neighborhoods. While it is true that many baz members engaged in violent demonstrations and criminal activities such as kidnappings, the conflation between baz and gang is highly problematic as it negates their po­liti­cal claims. Chelsey Kivland notes, “As the fighting continued, some bases became involved in thievery and kidnapping, but the movement retained po­liti­cal intentions. Nevertheless, the po­liti­cal opposition and international community constructed base leaders, affiliates, and residents as criminal gangs. Targeting them as bandits rather than as militants, oppositional and intervening UN forces killed or imprisoned several base leaders and t­hose associated with them” (Kivland 2014, 677). The military regime reactivated Duvalier-­era methods in low-­income neighborhoods such as Martissant, which many considered to be a bastion of pro-­Aristide militants. According to James, “neighborhoods and slums supportive of Aristide w ­ ere targets of burnings and massive gunfire. Disappearances, beatings, assassinations, torture, and detention ­were once again modes of social control” (2010, 67). Aristide’s return in 1994 was accompanied by a U.S. military operation meant to reinstate democracy and stability. Likewise, Haitian police operations to remove “gangs” from Martissant in the late 1990s and early 2000s w ­ ere supposed to generate peace. However, they instead ushered increased vio­lence into ­these neighborhoods. Contrary to common portrayals in Western media, confrontations between so-­called pro-­democracy groups and pro-­Aristide armed baz members w ­ ere not the sole trigger of the vio­lence that engulfed neighborhoods such as Martissant, Bel Air, or Cité Soleil a­ fter President Aristide’s second exile in 2004. The situation was far more complex. The vio­lence that swept Haiti in 2004 was not a local pro­cess but an internationally backed po­liti­cal intervention. As Jemima Pierre

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has shown, starting in 2003, Haitian paramilitary groups trained “by agents in the Dominican Republic and l­ater by US special forces” (2020, 5) have assassinated Aristide supporters and civilians accused of supporting the former president in the countryside and the capital. In June  2004, the United Nations Stabilization Force (MINUSTAH) began following po­liti­cal instability instigated by ­these groups and by the Haitian elites who supported them. However, MINUSTAH’s fifteen-­year mission resulted not in peace or stability but in a disastrous, brutal occupation by foreign soldiers (Joos 2019). MINUSTAH incursions in low-­income neighborhoods also led to extrajudicial killings of civilians and increased the vio­lence against Aristide’s supporters in low-­income neighborhoods.2 From 2004 to 2007, UN soldiers, the police force, and paramilitary groups instigated a climate of terror across Martissant. As po­liti­cal opportunities dwindled and the economy collapsed, many baz members engaged in criminal activities that further accrued ensekirite in many low-­income neighborhoods. As Greg Beckett notes, ­people use the term “blakawout” (blackout) to describe what happens to their lives amid recurrent periods of shooting, sexual assault, and general insecurity. Indeed, blakawout is “a potent image of both the lack of basic ser­vices in urban neighborhoods and the lack of a sense of security, agency, or power to shape one’s life” (Beckett 2019b). Beckett’s poignant ethnography shows how p­ eople displaced from Martissant or forced to live t­ here during periods of intense vio­lence experience a “general lack of power” akin to the area’s sudden yet expected and frequent electrical outages. ­People who lead normal lives can lose every­thing—­home, health, work—in a moment. For instance, one of Beckett’s friends, Vincent, was forced to leave his home during the wave of burnings and killings that plagued the neighborhood ­after Aristide’s exile in 2004. As both James and Beckett have noted, the effects of insecurity are enduring and profoundly transform p­ eople’s daily lives—­even during peaceful periods. Blakawout thus represents more than a ­simple lack of agency; it also captures “the experience of a life shrouded in the possibility of its opposite, on the ever-­present fact of darkness” (Beckett 2019b). When I spoke with ­people who had lived or presently live in Martissant, discussions of insecurity w ­ ere inevitable. Partly, they warned me about g­ oing to certain neighborhoods uphill. But they also spoke about how successive waves of vio­lence had reshaped their experiences of social relations, daily life, and interactions with state authorities in a part of the city constantly shattered by what seemed random vio­lence, po­liti­cal repression, and so-­called stabilization missions. ­People characterized peaceful periods as short-­ lived moments of truce; they knew that vio­lence would inevitably return. Before 2007, state provision of ser­vices such as potable w ­ ater, street lighting, and trash collection seemed unthinkable for most residents of Martissant. ­These ser­vices offered new, indirect ways to tackle some of the prob­lems ­people face. The community experienced major results when vari­ous groups began dialoguing with each other and when lines of communication w ­ ere opened between the

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Haitian state and popu­lar organ­izations. Yet vio­lence lingered. Once I began reading about the neighborhood, I asked Widnel to talk more about his experience with urban planning. He complimented FOKAL’s efforts: When FOKAL came to do work in the neighborhood, I did not pay attention. I thought it would be the same, you understand? But Soraya went to a few meetings and got involved in a neighborhood committee. All of the FOKAL ­people spoke Kreyòl. She met p­ eople from the SMCRS [municipal trash collection], from DINEPA [State ­Water Supply and Sanitation Agency], from FOKAL. They told us how to form a committee, they provided spaces for the meetings. They talked to the good ­people [moun de byen] instead of working with bandits. The committee Soraya was a part of put proj­ects together and receives a l­ ittle money once in a while. That’s the way we received street lighting. P ­ eople showed exactly where the lights should go, they made the plans. FOKAL insisted on recycling education and helped us or­ga­nize trash collection with the SMCRS. Martissant is where the clean ­water of the city comes from. This is why we need to make sure ­there’s no dirty ­water or trash polluting the springs.

Widnel and Soraya both had jobs in the city and could not participate in their neighborhood’s many meetings. In June 2019, a few years ­after this conversation, I asked Widnel what he meant by bandits. He stated that new groups calling themselves baz ­were in fact gangs. “You have dif­fer­ent kinds of baz. Some get involved in the community and have ­things like soccer clubs or rara bands, you know. . . . ​But recently, you have groups like Baz Tije [an armed group that terrorized the Kafou Fey neighborhood in 2018]. They are not involved in the community at all, they are just bandits. They do horrible ­things! Beheading ­people [koupe tet moun]! In the southern districts, most baz ­today ­don’t engage in politics, they are just gangs [Nan moman sa a, pa gen anpil baz ki nan bagay politik].” Since 2017, Widnel observed that the new baz that had formed ­were led by inexperienced young men or teen­agers. Like many p­ eople, he was terrified by the videos of horrific assassinations and torture scenes that circulated on WhatsApp. However, before the recrudescence of crime that started in 2017, both he and his wife w ­ ere cautiously optimistic. FOKAL proj­ects created new win­dows of opportunity for them. Widnel and Soraya enjoyed meeting and working with neighbors to whom they had never before spoken, even though they ­were not optimistic about community security. Soraya said, “I’m gone from 5:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ­every day but Sunday, and I ­don’t like walking around in this neighborhood. It’s a dangerous place. In the meetings, we do ­things together. We work with one another to decide what should be done in the neighborhood. We have lights in the street ­because we all asked for it.” Moreover, beyond bettering the conditions of their neighborhood through participatory planning, Widnel and Soraya underscored the importance of keeping its spring ­waters clean. As

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Widnel noted, p­ eople repeatedly heard about the vital function of the Martissant springs. He was proud that his f­ amily and friends participated in preserving clean w ­ ater. Nevertheless, ­until they left Beny (their neighborhood) in January 2019, Widnel and Soraya continued to warn me that urban renewal alone would not ensure community security. Soraya echoed many of my friends from low-­income areas when she said that “without judges we can trust, without a tribunal that can render justice, we w ­ ill not move forward [nou pa gen juj, nou pa gen tribunal ki ban nou jistis. Nou pa kap vanse].” As an astute observer, she knew that NGOs could not render the justice for which she longed; to her, only a stable Haitian state could rebuild an enduring judicial system in the country. Widnel and Soraya understood that saving the Martissant springs was a crucial communal task, but their priority for the past twenty years remained consistent: security. Enduring disparity between the goals of citizens and institutions continues to create a sense of instability among many proj­ect recipients in Martissant.

Connecting State and Citizen When I spoke with FOKAL employees, many mentioned preserving supplies of freshwater in the city. They also noted that infrastructure engineering required more than simply coordinating vari­ous systems (e.g., sewage, roads) to ensure freshwater purity; it also needed a social component. Working on both fronts si­mul­ta­neously enabled FOKAL and its partners to intervene in what many have long called a no-go zone. Partnering with the French NGO Professionals for Fair Development (GRET), FOKAL’s goal was to “transform a physical space and, in the meantime, the practices of p­ eople who live t­ here in order to better their life conditions” (Couet and Grandidier 2014, 4). Key aspects of their efforts to transform the physical landscape included protecting the springs, reconstructing ravines, and opening a park. Th ­ ese changes ­were not imposed from above. A balanced plan of action that encompassed ­people’s desires and institutional goals grew from dialogues and compromises with grassroots organ­izations. Many outsiders agreed that preserving the urban forest and opening a public park ­were excellent moves. However, many who lived in Martissant underscored more pressing infrastructural issues, such as repairing mountain roads damaged during power­ful storms or installing lights in the area’s corridors. This dissonance unfolded in the streets of Martissant; ­people opposed canal rehabilitation during meetings and in graffiti. A ­ fter weeks of dialogue, stakeholders fi­nally reached an agreement: both roads and ravines would be rebuilt at the same time. ­Because FOKAL receives funding from international institutions (e.g., the Eu­ro­pean Union or the French Development Agency) and partners with NGOs and state institutions, its efforts to coordinate institutional goals with the needs and desires of ­people from Martissant have been difficult. Notably, new lines of fragmentation have emerged between neighborhoods b­ ecause NGOs and state

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institutions often use accountability systems that privilege vis­i­ble outcomes such as building new schools. For instance, Soraya said her friends who live farther from the renovated ravines felt no major life improvements, which fueled acrimonious debates. The capital’s many urban renewal and reconstruction pro­ cesses form a projectorate—­a social organ­ization, ­shaped by the temporality and geo­graph­i­cal limits of proj­ects, that creates new hierarchies of recipients while reinforcing the dominance of internationally funded groups (Rodríguez-­Carmona 2009). As other scholars have noted, NGO projectorates lead to urban dissonance by increasing inequalities within and between neighborhoods while undermining the state’s capacity to intervene in the public sector (Lombart, Pierrat, and Redon 2014). Although few NGOs question their roles in weakening state institutions, FOKAL employees and leaders do so explic­itly. In fact, the neighborhood’s renovations ­were primarily enabled through FOKAL’s efforts to establish relationships between Haitian institutions and community organ­izations. Moreover, b­ ecause FOKAL is led by Haitian w ­ omen who have governmental experience, it is a hybrid organ­ization that operates as both an NGO and a governmental actor. The Martissant rehabilitation pro­cess is ­limited in space and time and embodies prob­lems with the projectorate model, such as demands from funding institutions for short-­term results, dwindling funds in the ­middle of proj­ects, and changes in institutional goals. Even u­ nder major constraints, FOKAL’s members used their diplomatic talents to effectively manage and coordinate many distinct proj­ects ­under the umbrella of a flexible, participatory, holistic urban-­renovation plan. As a result, changes in the neighborhood are notable. Sidewalks, stairs, and bridges allow ­people to walk around ravines and to create new meeting spaces in densely built areas. However, security prob­lems persist despite the connections created between ­people through neighborhood proj­ects and the multiyear efforts of the NGO Concern Worldwide to build peace in the area. As one FOKAL employee told me, “Concern Worldwide and many other organ­izations worked on the income prob­lem. ­People who are in deep poverty have sometimes no choice but to join a gang. But no one is able to offer mass employment to fix the mass employment crisis [Personne n’est capable de faire une offre massive d’emploi face à la crise massive de chômage].” Like many o­ thers who spoke with me, the employee believed that efforts to increase quality of life in the neighborhood would fall short without a proper justice system and a trained police force p­ eople could trust. Although FOKAL’s efforts have not alleviated deep poverty in the neighborhood, the organ­ization has built trust by employing locals and engaging with grassroots organ­izations on topics such as the urban forest. In the 1990s, ­people began moving into the neighborhood’s forest, which caused issues with soil permeability and threatened the densely wooded area. Although forest preservation efforts started well before FOKAL’s involvement in 2007, area insecurity prompted large landowners to leave and quashed p­ eople’s preservation hopes. As

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Beckett (2019a) has shown, rival groups of young men ruled the area, and their turf wars rendered stable lives impossible for ­people who lived t­ here. In May 2014, I interviewed Lucie Couet, a French city planner who worked for FOKAL and administered many aspects of its Martissant Proj­ect from 2007 to 2016. Lucie played a key role in preserving the park and the nearby springs. With her excellent grasp of local and national culture, she tirelessly engaged with all stakeholders. In speaking about this, she said: I arrived in Port-­au-­Prince in 2007. When I arrived, the security situation was tense. The year before, waves of kidnappings terrified the population; you could still feel this. P ­ eople w ­ ere very cautious. The Martissant Proj­ect was just starting when I arrived. We had the possibility of continuing an existing conservation proj­ect. The ­actual director of FOKAL is Lorraine Mangonès, one of the descendants of architect Albert Mangonès, who owned and conserved most of the natu­ral park. The Mangonès ­family left in 2004 when the living situation was untenable ­because of the vio­lence. They nonetheless wanted to preserve this amazing natu­ral space they managed to preserve for many years. They got in touch with anthropologist Katherine Dunham’s ­lawyer, since she owned the majority of the park. The Mangonès knew that the park could be quickly urbanized, which would put the many spring ­water sources that feed the capital in peril. They presented a proj­ect to the President Préval administration. Préval de­cided to compensate the p­ eople living on the premises in order to create a park in this part of the city. Martissant is very impor­tant for Port-­au-­Prince. U ­ nder the Route des Dalles, t­ here is an impor­tant network of canalization that brings ­water to a ­great part of the city. It was built at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury. It’s a strategic zone. It’s the only southern exit of Port-­au-­Prince with lots of ­people who work in the center of the city. Martissant is a neighborhood at the heart of the capital. We used the park as leverage for the betterment of the neighborhood infrastructure. In August 2007, FOKAL started to work with the state and asked for funding from the Eu­ro­pean Union, which arrived in 2008. A ­great number of FOKAL experts went to work for the government at the time—­ they led FOKAL, an NGO, and did politics at the same time. It had only been a few months since I got ­here, and my directors w ­ ere leaving FOKAL to work for the state. It was an in­ter­est­ing transition. Michèle Pierre-­Louis, director of FOKAL, became prime minister, and some of my colleagues went to work with her.

Partly b­ ecause FOKAL intervened in Martissant well before the earthquake, it gained the trust of large funding agencies and many locals. Notably, prominent FOKAL employees have ties to the neighborhood and, more importantly, with the state. As Lucie notes, FOKAL’s director is a former prime minister who not

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only maintained connections with state institutions but also intended to reinforce long-­term state capacity. Although the Haitian government currently seems largely nonfunctional, trash continued to be collected in Martissant in 2019. This indicates that state and municipal authorities are able to function normally as perennial public-­ service providers. With one foot in the government and another in a large national NGO, FOKAL leaders leveraged Martissant’s transformation to reinforce state capacity in many domains. For instance, p­ eople who lived in the park ­were not, for once, violently evicted from their ­houses; instead, they negotiated with the Haitian Revenue Ser­vice. As Lucie said, “the Internal Revenue Ser­vice indeed took this proj­ect in hand and went on, ­doing a good job at compensating p­ eople. This is rare in Haiti, maybe the first time that state compensation worked on a large scale. Eighty p­ ercent of the p­ eople that have been compensated for the loss of their home have relocated in the area and have a stake in the betterment of the neighborhood.” Widnel agreed and said the park proj­ect was the first time he had seen the Haitian state intervene nonviolently in his neighborhood. The strong ties FOKAL employees forged with community organ­ izations and the bridges they built between locals and state agents enabled this shift. For once, p­ eople who lived in Martissant ­were not treated like bandits. In 2008, the Eu­ro­pean Union funded a large construction proj­ect to renovate the ravines while FOKAL partnered with other organ­izations to increase its educational proj­ects on recycling and begin neighborhood trash collection. ­These efforts took a long time to or­ga­nize since many ­people live on inaccessible areas of the mountain. Sometimes, residents must walk far to reach trash collection sites that trucks can access. As Soraya said, “the SMCRS [municipal trash collection] d­ oesn’t want to come ­here ­because it’s a dangerous zone. Each neighborhood committee had members who ­were in touch with FOKAL and SMCRS employees. That’s how they de­cided where the trash pick-up sites would be.” Once again, enabling communication between local p­ eople and state employees was key to solving the prob­lem. Lucie also spoke about this: Building relations of trust was instrumental. One of the issues emerging from our discussions was the prob­lem of trash collection. In 2010, we requested a grant for this proj­ect, and this way we ­were able carry on our work in the area. This is how we started our first large construction work on the ravines. In parallel, the GRET did some work, too, on ­these ravines and on the well, above the park. They had done a study ­there in 2009 and launched the proj­ect in 2010. Fokal and GRET had a close relationship: GRET’s director was also the president of the board of directors of Fokal and the secretary of [the] health department u­ nder Préval. Before the earthquake, sponsors w ­ ere not interested in urban issues. That changed with the quake. They de­cided to finance our Martissant proj­ect. As far as the government, we work with the cabinet of the prime minister. In the park

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proj­ect, we act as a contracting authority for the government, including the following departments: Public Affairs, Social Affairs, Economy, and two ­others. So t­ here is an institutional umbrella in action. We have no formal agreement, though. We work with the Department of Health within their regular work. It is very difficult to work with the government b­ ecause it is weak, has no internal resources, financially. The City Hall is usually clueless about its function, objectives, and role.

Lucie clearly notes that infrastructural proj­ects cannot be dissociated from social interventions. FOKAL, a unique governmental nongovernmental organ­ization, connects ­people and their physical environments through building state–­citizen bridges. Martissant is now plugged into city ser­vices, which entail many ­human and nonhuman relations. But the limits of FOKAL’s proj­ect are geo­graph­i­cally vis­i­ble. Building long-­term state capacity is FOKAL’s main objective, but its proj­ ect in Martissant is small in content: it builds state capacity (such as trash collection) in only a small part of Port-­au-­Prince. Although municipal and state employees now enter Martissant, they still consider surrounding neighborhoods to be no-go zones. As I noted ­earlier, ­limited urban renovation leads to city fragmentation. For instance, the bordering neighborhood Bolosse has received no municipal ser­vices since 2008. Unevenly implemented renovation creates spaces of difference: some neighborhoods receive financial, material, and infrastructural support as well as job opportunities while ­others lack even basic ser­vices. Some neighborhoods, such as Martissant, are filled with newly state-­recognized citizens who actively engage with the government. O ­ thers such as Bolosse, however, ­house p­ eople who are citizens in name only. In the example of Martissant, we see evidence of the Haitian state compensating p­ eople who live in areas it wants to use or access. The state was able to do this; its representatives respected residents’ desires and worked long term to help them benefit from essential new ser­vices. FOKAL’s efforts to build state capacity ­were meant to ensure the permanence of t­ hese ser­vices since most NGOs are pre­sent for only a short time. Further, institutions such as the Eu­ro­pean Union and NGOs seek short-­term results ­because quickly completed proj­ects allow organ­izations to appear productive in yearly reports. This pro­cess spatially fragments urban policies and creates vastly dif­fer­ent neighborhoods in condensed spaces. Strong dissonances exist between the short-­term needs and desires of impoverished populations and the long-­term goals of institutions that prioritize the building of collective structures. P ­ eople who participate in urban-­renewal proj­ects face many prob­lems; they are often perceived as recipients of state ­favors, and ­favors can create new neighborhood hierarchies. In addition, the possibility of broad action in a neighborhood is undermined when too many actors exist; they often have dissonant goals, time horizons, and spatial visions. Bolosse, the neighborhood next to Martissant, reflects t­ hese disconnects and offers opportunities to illustrate the relational and infrastructural aspects of citizenship.

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Bolosse, an Abandoned Neighborhood Route des Dalles is a busy two-­way road that separates Martissant from Bolosse, a neighborhood comprising five large, densely populated ave­nues crossed by smaller streets, corridors, and ravines. Although most of Bolosse was paved in the 2000s, the neighborhood now seems to have been abandoned by state authorities and international institutions alike. Dirty ­water and trash regularly flow down Quatrième Ave­nue, a large street in Bolosse carved into the flank of a hill, and ravines meant to drain wastewater and rain instead overflow with textiles and plastics. Evens Hilaire, a forty-­two-­year-­old man, told me about his move to the neighborhood a­ fter the 2010 earthquake: “I lost the h ­ ouse I rented in Rue Joseph Janvier [a downtown street] in the earthquake. I would love to find a place to stay downtown, but now it’s way too expensive for me. The earthquake made every­thing a lot more expensive. So, I had two solutions: ­going to Canaan where my s­ister lives or finding a place in Bolosse. Canaan is too far away from job opportunities. Bolosse was the only suitable place for me [se sèl katyie ki à peu près].” I met Evens in October 2013 at a dinner party held in a French NGO’s base camp in a posh Port-­au-­Prince neighborhood. My friend Jean-­Luc Pascalin, a young Haitian urban planner, worked intermittently with the NGO and asked me to attend the party so I could meet other p­ eople in his field. P ­ eople drank heavi­ly at the party and loudly bemoaned their work. I left quickly and waited for Jean-­Luc outside. Evens and I sat together for a ­couple of hours near the entry gate; we would do this often in the weeks to come. Evens was hired as a security guard ­after the NGO’s base camp was burglarized in the summer of 2013. His job entailed twelve-­hour shifts and was, he said, extremely boring: “I take a walk around the ­house ­every 15 minutes, and then I sit ­here in the shade with my gun, opening or closing the gate as ­people come and go. I listen to the radio on my phone. I call my d­ aughters once in a while. Then I go home and sleep, and I come back. I only have my Sundays off.” Evens used to work in the h ­ otel industry in the Dominican Republic and speaks French, En­glish, and Spanish fluently. While t­ here, he saved enough money to build a nice ­house in Verrettes, a small town in the Artibonite region, where his ex-­wife and his ­daughters live. When he spoke about returning to Haiti, he said, “I came back to Haiti in 2006. It was a terrible moment to come back, t­ here ­were waves of kidnapping and vio­lence in the streets. But I ­couldn’t bear living in the Dominican Republic anymore. I h ­ adn’t see[n] my f­amily in a long time, and I had enough [of] being treated like a dog ­there.” Evens often complained that he acted as a tour guide and translator in the h ­ otels but was paid as a janitor. Once again, b­ ehind the gate of the NGO’s base camp, Evens felt unappreciated: “I take calls in Creole and translate into French for them. I do the shopping b­ ecause they cannot speak Creole. I take the calls in En­glish once in a while, too, since a lot of them d­ on’t speak En­glish. I can speak, read, and write in four languages—­and I write perfect Creole, which is rare! I w ­ on’t complain, b­ ecause

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I’m making money. But ­here we are, I’m sitting in the shade, ­doing nothing.” What ­really both­ered Evens, though, was that he had to return to Bolosse ­every night. He was angry that he could not afford to live closer to his workplace even though he had a formal, decently paid job. He said, “­People in the part of Bolosse where I live are alright, t­ here are no bandits. Since I moved t­ here, I d­ idn’t have security prob­lems. However, I had to buy a motorbike to go to work. That was a big expense, and it stresses me out to have my bike at night on the sidewalk.” Evens lived in Rue Saint-­Léger, a small street perpendicular to Quatrième Ave­ nue. Rue Saint-­Léger was built beside a small, deep ravine that overflows when it rains. Three blocks away in Martissant, similar ravines are clean, prevent floods efficiently, and are now covered with bridges and lined with safe sidewalks. That is not the case in Bolosse, even though Rue Saint-­Léger is clean; ­people sweep in front of their h ­ ouses or apartments several times each day. The buildings on the street range from derelict wooden h ­ ouses and small concrete structures to freshly painted apartment complexes. I was able to visit Evens on several Sunday after­ noons. We walked around the neighborhood or drank beer with his friends next to his one-­bedroom apartment. Monsieur Martial, who had lived in Bolosse for more than sixty years, described the area: “It is a quiet neighborhood, t­ here are a lot of retired p­ eople, workers, some storekeepers, artists, and lots of unemployed ­people, unfortunately. We or­ga­nize ourselves and manage to get electricity. We ensure the safety and the cleanliness of our streets. But it’s hard ­because nobody cleans up the ravine. It’s 12 feet deep and filled with detritus. We have mosquitoes all the time ­because the trash is always wet. The odor is unbearable. It used to be cleaned up regularly, but the trash ser­vices in this part of town have completely dis­appeared since 2008.” When rain falls, homes around the ravine are flooded with wastewater, and trash sweeps into h ­ ouses when rain is heavy. P ­ eople complain about working all the time to keep their homes clean. The neighborhood is socially and architecturally diverse. Large ­houses and courtyards full of plants and flowers are common. ­People have also built many ­houses along the ravine in the past twenty years. The neighborhood’s density increased ­a fter the earthquake in 2010, and makeshift ­houses now line the very edge of the ravine. They are difficult to access ­because they adjoin a narrow, rocky path that overlooks the deep ditch. Multiple small pipes that link ­houses to the ­water reservoir uphill leak onto this thirty-­inch “sidewalk.” Nevertheless, ­people ­here do their best to manage their trash. Evens takes his trash to his workplace where a private trash-­collection com­pany stops twice a week. O ­ thers place trash in small mounds in the ravine and burn it at night. Every­one I met complained that trash collection had dis­appeared ­after 2008. Monsieur Martial often said that all ser­vices s­ topped in his neighborhood a­ fter police violently repressed ­people who w ­ ere protesting rising food prices in the summer of 2008: “No trash collection, no more electricity. They ­don’t clean up the ravine anymore. Thank God we have access to tap w ­ ater!”

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Monsieur Martial, who has lived on Rue Saint-­Léger since 1956, often visits the state trash-­collection department to protest about the detritus flooding his neighborhood. He is a respected elder on the street and directs informal efforts to keep the place clean. In February 2014, he took me on a tour of the ravine. As we watched pigs eat trash, he explained in French: When you see a plastic b­ ottle or some kind of plastic package somewhere, it comes from the ravine—­not from the p­ eople living h ­ ere. You see, uphill, you have a somewhat affluent neighborhood, and ­there is a heavi­ly trafficked road ­going by the upper side of the ditch. Trash comes from t­ hese places. ­People in cars w ­ ill come by and throw plastic bags filled with trash into the ravines. Instead of carry­ing the wastewaters away, like it used to, the ravines are now an open-­air landfill. Back in the old days, even some 15 years ago, you ­didn’t see all of this. First, we d­ idn’t have ­these kinds of products ­here in Haiti, ­things like drinks in plastic b­ ottles. . . . ​When you drank a soft drink, you returned the glass b­ ottle to the vendor, that was it. We do our best, but we feel abandoned by the state. Bolosse is an old neighborhood; t­ here are many ­people who have lived ­here for a very long time. Back in the days, it was full of trees. It’s not the same anymore. We know each other well, but w ­ e’re not the kind of p­ eople who ­will go protest in front of the National Palace. We would like to have a dialogue, but we never see anyone. We go to the offices of the municipal ser­vices, but nothing happens. This ravine is a cancer for every­one ­here! We would like to get help from the state.

The ravine he mentions is a canal with cement walls where w ­ ater flows constantly. It turns when it intersects Rue Saint-­Léger, where the stale ­water is supposed to flow under­ground. But it cannot; a massive pile of humid trash pollutes the area and blocks passage. The ravine overflows when it rains, and trash and foul liquids spill onto surrounding streets. Sometimes, the situation is dramatic—­ mountains of garbage flooded streets in the Solido neighborhood in June 2014. One day, Madame Sabine, who lives close to the ravine, calmly explained, “­Here, the ravine is 10 feet deep. But one cannot see the bottom ­because it is always full. When it rains heavi­ly, my ­family works all night to keep the dirty ­water away from our ­house. We heightened our ­little fence, we did every­thing to keep the w ­ ater away, and we are still invaded by garbage. We always have an ill person at home. Mosquitoes . . . ​we are normal, good p­ eople. What did we do to deserve this?” With the cholera epidemic that was unfolding at the time, ­people knew that curing ravines and preserving clean ­water was a ­matter of life and death. As mentioned above, the MINUSTAH UN peacekeeping mission that lasted from 2004 to 2019 contributed to heightening insecurity and instability in Martissant. P ­ eople resented the MINUSTAH for its extrajudicial deaths of civilians. The fact that it also brought cholera to Haiti nine months a­ fter the earthquake

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FIG. 10  ​A view of an upper section of ravine Saint-­Léger.

renewed t­ hese tensions and felt like the ultimate injustice. The UN first tried to cover up and deny the fact that a base camp of Nepalese soldiers was the source of the epidemic. The journalist Jonathan Katz and his assistant Evens Sanon indeed discovered that the raw sewage ­water of the base was simply dumped into large pits that overflowed into the Meille River, which is connected to the most impor­tant river in Haiti, the Artibonite River (Katz 2013a). Cholera spread quickly and the epidemic took the lives of more than nine thousand over ten years. The UN first refused to admit its responsibility and admitted its wrongdoing only in 2016. Meanwhile, the UN offered ­little help ­toward ending the epidemic. Graffiti stating that “MINUSTAH = Kolera” abounded on the city walls. My Haitian friends, from all social categories, did not mask their anger when speaking about the disastrous work and deeds of the MINUSTAH. In March 2019, while listening to the radio with Jean-­Luc Pascalin in his home in Port-­au-­Prince, we heard that the MINUSTAH had spent $7.5 billion in fifteen years. “Imagine this, w ­ e’re talking about 7,500 million dollars,” said Jean-­Luc. “Simply and clearly wasted money! [de l’argent purement et simplement gaché]”. In Bolosse, ­people wanted to avoid any kind of interaction with the MINUSTAH, even though they ­were open to working with vari­ous foreign actors if need be. During the many conversations I had with residents of Bolosse 4, they clearly noted that they would like to open a dialogue with government officials. For instance, Monsieur Martial said, “The prob­lem is not new, but the quantity of garbage has largely increased since 2010 to the point that we cannot control it

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any more. The government should take care of this prob­lem just like it used to. If NGOs want to get involved, no prob­lem. But I think most of us would like to deal with our national institutions before anything e­ lse. We had NGOs working h ­ ere in the past, but they can dis­appear overnight. SMCRS goes to Martissant. They should come ­here, too.” ­People ­were often irritated when they saw none of the Port-­au-­Prince reconstruction they had heard so much about during the 2011 presidential election. Some talked about how capable the government seemed when it addressed Martissant’s sanitation issues. Many p­ eople in Bolosse are ready to invest in the neighborhood and to participate in proj­ects such as waste pro­cessing and recycling. Popu­lar organ­izations already exist in low-­income neighborhoods. For instance, a folklore-­music organ­ization and a computer club allow youth on Ruelle Watson, a street near the ravine, to partake in educational activities. ­People also run small businesses and know very well how their neighborhood functions. However, the orga­nizational structure FOKAL used to establish state–­citizen dialogues in Martissant is latent in Bolosse. ­People in Bolosse want to connect with the state through its potential ser­vices. For them, such ser­vices are m ­ atters of life and death. Residents of Bolosse know the health risks of living near trash-­fi lled ravines. The rainy season starts in May and always promises sanitation catastrophe. In 2014, the chikungunya epidemic elevated p­ eople’s health concerns to the level of priorities. Madame Sabine wisely observed, “Soon, many ­will get sick ­because of the mosquitoes. Many ­will give work to the doctors of the Health Center of Portail Leogane, when the illnesses could be prevented by a big cleaning of the ravine. What costs more: health care for hundreds of sick ­people or prevention?” Many ­people acknowledged that simply cleaning the ravine would be a temporary solution, but they often shared Madame Sabine’s opinion: something must be done immediately instead of waiting u­ ntil more sustainable solutions are implemented. As Monsieur Martial recalled, the ravine could function. Its retention basin, dug in the 1960s, would normally prevent w ­ ater overflow in the absence of rain. However, it is currently filled with mountains of textiles and plastic. As Monsieur Martial also noted, one quick look at a pile of trash in the ravine tells a tale of globalization: products unavailable in Haiti before 1986 abound, including boxes of Egyptian cheese imported via the Dominican Republic, cans of fruit juice made in Mexico, and Juicy Fruit gum packages and plastic Bella-­ soap wrappings from the United States float among the remains of other imported products. Before, when less trash was produced, ravines in Port-­au-­Prince worked as sewage systems. Open-­air drainage ravines have been the primary means of wastewater and rain evacuation since the colonial period (McClellan 2010, 89). Building an under­ground sewage system may have been too expensive for the French government and too difficult to execute for colonial urban planners who lacked construction materials. However, during Haiti’s American occupation (1915–1934), parts of Port-­au-­Prince benefited from modern infrastructure

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designed by American engineers. As General Gerald C. Thomas, who worked in the Provisional Marine Brigade in Haiti from 1919 to 1921, wrote, the city had “an electrical system, a trolley line, paved main boulevards, and a reasonable sewage system, at least in the affluent suburbs and government buildings” (cited in Millett 1993, 77). The under­ground sewage system in neighborhoods such as Pacot and Turgeau, where most American occupants lived, still functions even though its iron manhole covers ­were stolen long ago, and dangerous holes pockmark roads and sidewalks. U.S. occupants built modern infrastructure in downtown Port-­au-­Prince as well as fifteen miles of reinforced-­concrete open-­air drains in peripheral areas—­such as the ravine in Saint-­Léger (Marley 2005, 142). In Monograph of the Republic of Haiti, compiled in 1932 by members of the Division of Operations and Training in the U.S. Marine Corps, we learn that in Cap Haitian, “the American Scientific Mission has done splendid drainage work of a semi-­permanent nature, which should reduce the infections from Malaria to a very low figure” (United States Marine Corps 1932, 601). This “splendid” and “semi-­permanent” work, however, has been in place for almost one hundred years and currently breeds mosquitoes. U.S. occupants reproduced the social and racial segregation patterns of American cities by creating a double system in Haiti: open-­air drainage canals in marginalized neighborhoods and under­ground sewage infrastructure in the affluent neighborhoods where they lived. ­These sewage-­ infrastructure remnants represent debris from a colonial and imperial past that continues to actively harm impoverished communities. The anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler argues that we should think about ­these imperial relics as active agents of ruination: “Imperial proj­ects are themselves pro­cesses of ongoing ruination, pro­cesses that ‘bring ruin upon,’ exerting material and social force in the pre­sent” (2013, 11). In Bolosse, semipermanent infrastructure is not only an animated material ele­ment of the past but also a force that currently perpetuates the social and racial divisions built into the city during the U.S. occupation. ­These ravines have long-­lasting social and po­liti­cal effects. In par­tic­u­lar, they continue to harm excluded populations and maintain segregation. ­People in Bolosse live in a state of abjection, which is, according to Nikhil Anand, a “social and po­liti­cal pro­cess through which par­tic­u­lar populations are pushed beyond the biopo­liti­cal care of the state or other institutions, even as they remain central to the constitution of such social (or po­liti­cal) collectives” (2012, 489). In his ethnography of w ­ ater infrastructure in Mumbai, India, Anand shows that ­people are not simply unconnected from vari­ous infrastructure grids but are actively disconnected or “pushed down, or cast out of social and po­liti­cal systems they could once access and claim. Disconnected by procedures and practices that would entitle them to claim ­water as legitimate citizens of the city’s municipal ­water department” (2012, 490). For Annan, marginalization is a discursive, ­legal, and material pro­cess that actively fashions “abject” populations. We see this same pro­cess in Haiti. As I noted in chapter 2, urban citizenship was a category inscribed on birth certificates u­ ntil 1995. Legally, such categories

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have since dis­appeared. But the former state-­mandated dividing of ­people between urban citizens and moun andeyò continues to shape social hierarchies in the country. B ­ ecause the state distributes ser­vices and infrastructure unevenly—­a pro­cess ­shaped by colonial and imperial legacies that are still inscribed in the city’s built environment—­hierarchies are maintained. When the U.S. occupants built infrastructure in the old colonial grid, they perpetuated the urban compartmentalization established by French settlers. Marginal urban spaces have been created over time through connections to and disconnections from such infrastructure. In the city, belonging is determined by who is connected to ­these systems. Urban citizenship can be read through material connection or disconnect. But an impor­tant point remains: even though p­ eople may want the state or other institutions to intervene in their neighborhoods, they also want to control the connections they make. Fi­nally, many ­people also experience anx­i­eties about the potential for the state to recognize their neighborhoods as ­legal settlements worthy of ser­ vices. If their neighborhoods ­were legally recognized, state institutions would enter places where illegal connections to w ­ ater and electricity grids abound.

The Quest for a Solution On an eve­ning in April 2014, I walked along the ravine in Bolosse with Jean-­ Luc Pascalin and Thomas, a Swiss engineer I befriended while I hung out with Evens at the NGO. We sought to understand how the ravine worked and what could be done to restore it. I had promised Monsieur Martial that I would return with experts and write a short report that included photo­graphs. Jean-­Luc and Thomas worked for several impor­tant organ­izations. They often passed but did not enter this area and wanted to explore this infamous ravine beyond NGO maps. We met with Evens and Monsieur Martial. I clearly explained my documentary role to Monsieur Martial and noted that I would provide him with a detailed report and photos of the neighborhood that he could use during negotiations. I also reiterated that I was not involved with NGOs or the state. We walked along the ravine with him and Evens. When Thomas began talking with Monsieur Martial, he used the vocabulary and tone of an expert: ­ ere are two vis­i­ble prob­lems: one is that the leaks in the abduction system Th push the trash to the bottom which leads to the constant humidification of the area. The other prob­lem is that the leaks of the ­water pipes keep multiplying, and the ­water debit reaches its maximum close to Saint-­Leger Street where works of laying of culvert [busage] and drainage w ­ ere done some 10 years ago, I would say. They seem to have been done well, but the huge quantity of clutter blocks drainage. We must think of a solution for the long term—­doing a hydrological study in the area; focusing on waste pro­cessing, communal w ­ ater outlets; and discussing with the concerned populations. But before fixing a wound, the first t­ hing to do is to stop the bleeding.

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The two experts agreed that a short-­term solution was necessary. Cleaning up the ravine and unblocking the canals as fast as pos­si­ble would help prevent illness during the rainy season. Monsieur Martial concurred with this immediate goal. However, they debated the proposed “holistic solution.” Thomas argued, “The ravine is so full that it is difficult to see what shape the construction is in. Before envisioning long-­term solutions, ­there is a need for the DINEPA [State ­Water Supply and Sanitation Agency] to fix up all the ­water leaks of all the pipes that traverse the neighborhood.” Monsieur Martial replied that the government, if it intervenes, should only clean up the ravine as it did in the past. With a worried tone, he explained that DINEPA would discover that p­ eople do priz dlo—­ that they illegally deviate potable ­water pipes to route ­water into their homes without paying the state—if they entered the neighborhood to fix leaky pipes. Monsieur Martial was fully aware that having access to clean ­water was vital. Jean-­Luc remained ­silent, but Thomas continued as if he had not heard Monsieur Martial: I agree. As a first step, the authorities should take urgent mea­sures. The SMCRS and the Public Works Department should step up to help residents clean the ravine. We know that resources are ­limited and that the situation is difficult for all Haitians, but we should insist that this is an emergency and that the government should get involved right away. But step number two is to fix the w ­ ater leaks. Other­wise, humid stuff w ­ ill clog the ravine again and again. We need a holistic solution with educational programs around trash and recycling. ­There is a need for fixing up the small prob­lems that lead to the big prob­lem.

Monsieur Martial and Evens strongly disagreed. The ­whole neighborhood would be angry if Thomas’s holistic solution ­were applied. Many might be penalized if a state agency explored the neighborhood. Thomas was obviously unaware of how ­people dealt with the state in the past and why they ­were wary of official incursion into Bolosse. What most residents requested was ­simple: they wanted the state or another organ­ization to clean the ravine with machines ­because they could not do so themselves. They felt the water-­leak issue was impor­tant but impossible to fix at the time. For instance, Alfred, a fifty-­year-­old man who had spent his entire life in Bolosse, joined the conversation as we stood near the ravine: “You need to convince ­people first. And to do so, you must start with proj­ects that please the community: picking trash up, opening schools and clinics, and then you can talk about the leaking situation. If you deprive ­people of the only ­thing they can truly enjoy in this neighborhood, having ­water ­running from a tap located in your h ­ ouse, you w ­ ill only stir up trou­ble!” Most of t­ hose who spoke with me only wanted the state to clean the ravine and provide access to electricity. They wanted to avoid jeopardizing their advantageous informal connection to the ­water system. Jean-­Luc understood this point and reassured the group of

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men that nobody would call the DINEPA. He agreed with the men who lived in Bolosse—­the prob­lem was primarily social but also infrastructural: If p­ eople have an income, they w ­ ill be happy to pay for w ­ ater or electricity. But first you need something to happen: if c­ hildren can go to school, if work positions are opening up for ­people from this neighborhood, t­ hings w ­ ill start to change. I have lived in Port-­au-­Prince for 40 years, and I know that if you say, “I am from Bolosse, or I am from Cité Soleil,” you w ­ on’t get a job. The neighborhood has a bad reputation. ­People say it’s dirty, it’s dangerous. Cleaning up the ravine is a priority, that’s for sure, and we all agree. But then, you need a proj­ect like the one in Martissant where you start by giving employment to a few ­people. It’s an income prob­lem, as usual.

Although some ­people in Martissant have been able to participate in its slow renewal, residents of Bolosse can only speculate about the possibility of decent urban lives. Jean-­Luc’s words struck a chord with Evens, who smiled and said that Haiti needs experts like Thomas but then added, “We have educated ­people who could teach h ­ ere in a public school. Picking up the trash is not for every­one, but still, it could create jobs. We have a city to rebuild and ­people ready to work, but it seems that very few Haitians get good jobs. A ­little cash for work proj­ects ­here and ­there, but the only ­thing we have since the earthquake is not jobs, but stress! That’s all I know in this neighborhood: stress!” Evens often told me that his stress was permanent, but he rarely mentioned that he lived in Bolosse b­ ecause of the stigma attached to it. Waste was on many ­people’s minds—­not only the detritus that polluted their streets but also the fact that so many talented young ­people lacked chances to build better lives b­ ecause of where they w ­ ere born. I returned a week l­ater with the report and photo­graphs for Monsieur Martial. He and Evens read it and said it needed no changes. In it, I described the ravine and noted that it needs to be cleaned. Monsieur Martial thanked me and told me he would show the report to a few state employees he knew. He was also excited b­ ecause he had managed to convince a TV crew to come to Bolosse to film the ravine. Indeed, Tele Ginen arrived soon a­ fter with a full camera crew. They interviewed Monsieur Martial and a few of his neighbors who live along the ravine. ­A fter that day, Monsieur Martial repeatedly went to the SMCRS to request ser­vices but to no avail, even with the momentum he had gained from being on TV. This denial of public ser­vice is also a denial of the basic right to live in the city. ­People who are denied in such ways are andeyò (outside) of any institutional reach. Henri Lefebvre argues that a person’s right to a city “should modify, concretize and make more practical the rights of the citizen as an urban dweller (citadin) and user of multiple ser­vices. It would affirm, on the one hand, the right of users to make known their ideas about the space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the center, a privileged

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place, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos (for workers, immigrants, the ‘marginal’ and even for the ‘privileged’)” (1996, 34). Citizenship is only an abstract category if a set of defined relationships between p­ eople and public ser­ vice providers does not exist and if neighborhoods are deliberately excluded from infrastructural grids. The geographer Charlotte Lemanski (2020) aptly proposes a term to move beyond rights-­based discourse and to think materially about state–­society relationships: infrastructural citizenship. According to Lemanski, “The lexicon of citizenship offers a potentially more egalitarian perspective that does not privilege the rights of citizens over the rights of the state, while also recognizing the responsibilities of both groups. Furthermore, citizenship offers a more global language that can avoid the regional determinism of rights-­based approaches, while also pointing to the long-­term temporality of the state–­society relationship” (2020, 117). This notion of citizenship allows us to think about ­those relationships in a fluid, dynamic way as they are (un)made by the distribution of infrastructure. In the case of Port-­au-­Prince, the moun andeyò are prevented from fully joining urban citizenship through the state’s perpetuation of l­imited infrastructural grids. The state’s infrastructural practices reinscribe the urban compartmentalization established by colonial and, l­ater, imperial authorities. FOKAL’s ambitious urban renovations in Martissant have opened new possibilities for activating citizens’ rights and recognition. However, new hierarchies of connected and disconnected residents may be created if such participatory urban planning is geo­graph­i­cally l­imited. When too many institutions and NGOs work in the same neighborhood on the same issues, the long-­term prospects of vari­ous proj­ects are threatened, and infrastructure–­society relationships are rendered unstable. Haitians who live in poor neighborhoods in Port-­au-­Prince cannot afford a semipermanent form of citizenship—­one that forecloses ­people’s f­ utures and threatens the stability they need to rebuild their lives in a post-­disaster setting.

Back to the Thomassin Mountains On a late after­noon in March 2019, Widnel picked me up from the Champ de Mars plaza. I was surprised to see him driving a construction truck. When I hopped in, Widnel said, “Welcome to my new office! This is where I work now!” We had not spoken in six months, and much had changed in his life. In October 2018, his ­daughter, son-­in-­law, and grand­son had to vacate their ­house in Carrefour Feuilles, a neighborhood near Martissant. Widnel noted: ­ ere’s a lot of vio­lence and killings in Kafou Fey now; it’s prob­ably fueled by Th politicians. That’s why Dyéla had to move. For weeks, they heard p­ eople shooting in the streets. One night, they shot bullets in the walls of their h ­ ouse by accident. ­A fter that, they c­ ouldn’t sleep anymore. The child ­didn’t want to

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go to sleep. They w ­ ere very scared. In the meantime, we heard of killings and kidnappings in Martissant. The situation in southern Port-­au-­Prince is very tense. We d­ idn’t want to go through this again. That’s how we de­cided to move to Thomassin. It was a hard decision, b­ ecause it’s far away from the city.

When his ­sister died a few months ­after the 2010 earthquake, Widnel became the sole proprietor of a spacious two-­bedroom h ­ ouse in Thomassin. However, his ­family resisted moving to the h ­ ouse for as long as they could. First, the drive from the h ­ ouse to the city center is forty-­five minutes on a good day. Second, Soraya feared the isolation of mountain life—­especially if another earthquake occurred. Although the neighborhood was inhabited in the past by rich families, the p­ eople who worked for them, and the peasants who had cultivated the green mountains for years, it had only one access road. Last, Soraya worried about her tense relationship with Dyéla and thought moving in with her and their grand­son was far from ideal. Dyéla’s devotion to Adventism often led her to argue with her parents, who are Catholic and, in Soraya’s case, Vodouyzan. But ­after the mass protests in July 2018, stability in many of Port-­au-­Prince’s low-­income neighborhoods was once again impossible. According to Widnel, the pre­sent government had armed new gangs to terrorize the population. “They ­don’t want ­people demonstrating in the streets. Where [do] all t­ hese weapons and bullets come from? Politicians!” Indeed, reliable reports by the Haitian ­human rights organ­izations Fondasyon Je Klere and Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains confirm that armed groups comprising corrupt policemen linked to the current president Jovenel Moïse’s party have been terrorizing low-­income neighborhoods since 2018. In May 2020, Jimmy Chérizier, a former policeman also known as Barbecue, and the group of young men he leads burned ­houses and killed seventy-­t wo ­people in the La Saline neighborhood (Fondasyon Je Klere 2020; National H ­ uman Rights 2020). Chérizier t­ oday presides over the alliance of nine armed groups that seek to help the party in power win the elections scheduled in 2021 (Charles 2020b). Since 2018, ­these armed groups, which often participate in electoral politics, have created chaos in Bolosse and Martissant too. Soraya and Widnel ­were heartbroken to leave their ­house and professional lives b­ ehind, but, ultimately, they prioritized their f­ amily’s security and moved. ­A fter r­ unning errands in town, Widnel and I meandered up the hills in his truck. We drove in the fog of a cloud for a while before we reached the entrance of his new neighborhood, which is located on the flank of a mountain. The eve­ ning was pitch black, and a cold breeze swept dust from the road as we arrived. The contrast with his h ­ ouse in Martissant was stark. Widnel parked his truck and said, “Rony [a mutual friend who owns and rents large h ­ ouses to NGOs] helped me with buying this truck. I transport construction stuff like rocks, cement, cinder blocks. Business is good, every­one is building h ­ ouses h ­ ere in the mountains. Maintaining the truck is expensive. I need to change the tires often,

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given the poor state of the roads ­here.” Dyéla and her son Karim watched TV as we entered the ­house. We chatted with them for awhile and then headed outside again. Widnel lit a cigarette and told me that the f­ amily situation was difficult: “Dyéla c­ an’t find work. Her husband works but spend[s] his money on other ­women. Anyway, we never see him. My ­family is from ­here, and I have work, but it’s hard to make ends meet.” Soraya also strug­gled to adapt to the new situation. She was gone when I spent the night at their h ­ ouse, and Widnel explained, “I d­ on’t see her often b­ ecause she spends a lot of time with her f­ amily in Port-­au-­Prince. Now she’s gone to the Dominican Republic with her ­sister. They are checking some markets. They buy stuff that they resell in Port-­au-­Prince. Now they are looking for shoes, but they also buy food in bulk.”3 Soraya spent much of her time traveling with her ­sister and usually slept at her s­ ister’s apartment on Lalue, a central artery in the capital. Widnel said, “I worked for years on our ­house in Thomassin ­because I thought I would rent it. That way Soraya and I would retire or at least work less. But life in Port-­au-­Prince is impossible, Vincent. ­We’re ­going to be 60 years old soon, but it’s like ­we’re starting new c­ areers. That ­wasn’t the plan.” Insecurity had once again pushed p­ eople out of their neighborhoods. At the time, according to Widnel, a turf war between gang members of Baz Pilat and Baz Gran Ravine created a climate of terror. By the end of 2018, Widnel and his ­family ­were unable to walk around their own neighborhood. Likewise, Evens was forced to move from Bolosse to a tiny apartment in Delmas 24 in order to avoid security prob­lems. Unfortunately, many of my friends have told me the same ­thing: city life became too dangerous a­ fter 2018, and envisioning a f­ uture in Haiti has become more and more difficult. Indeed, as I write t­ hese lines in July 2020, armed men who operate in Bolosse, Cité de Dieu, and ­Grand Ravine—­areas in southern Port-­au-­Prince—­are kidnapping ­people and filming horrific scenes of torture to scare their rivals (Duval 2020). P ­ eople are increasingly moving away from the southern districts of the city, which has again become a dangerous place where they cannot safely live or work. Many of them reluctantly move to the surrounding mountains. The next morning, ­after we ate a hot plate of akasan (sweet corn porridge), Widnel and I took a long walk around Thomassin. I had visited it once in 2014 but now I could barely recognize it; so many cinder-­block h ­ ouses had been built. Widnel showed me the h ­ ouses of wealthy p­ eople, including a villa that used to belong to the dictator Jean-­Claude Duvalier, and said, “Only rich ­people used to live ­here. It’s easy to block the road, so they felt more secure, I guess.” As we stood next to a steep slope, he continued, “It used to be only nature ­here. Now ­people are cutting old trees down and are building ­houses. Bad h ­ ouses that ­will collapse even with a small earthquake!” He explained that middle-­class p­ eople build h ­ ouses in supposedly protected mountainous areas b­ ecause the city is crowded, and life in Port-­au-­Prince is untenable. In Thomassin, however, most ­people lack electricity and potable ­water. Th ­ ose who can afford the ser­vices of

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private companies rely on them for trash collection and water-­tank refills. Widnel managed to find work ­because of the area’s housing boom but felt he could not escape what he experienced in Martissant. He said, “Thomassin w ­ ill be crowded soon. Since t­ here’s no jobs h ­ ere, I fear that new gangs w ­ ill appear. It’s just a ­matter of time.” Across time, the layout of Haiti’s infrastructure has revealed lines of division and in­equality. In addition, the con­spic­u­ous absence of infrastructure in certain geographic areas has fueled compounding crises that now render life impossible for many Haitians—­people such as Widnel, Evens, Monsieur Martial, Madame Sabine, and their families.

4

Inhabiting Port-­au-­Prince ­after 2010 Indigenous Urbanization, History, and Belonging In 1949, soon a­ fter the end of the American administrative occupation (1934– 1947), the Haitian poet and journalist Magloire Saint-­Aude published a short documentary called Parias.1 In the first part of his quasi-­ethnographic work, Saint-­Aude describes Port-­au-­Prince’s central districts and diverse populations— or “pariahs,” as he calls them. At first, Parias focuses on two middle-­class men who walk along the streets and cultivate ephemeral relationships with objects, places, and p­ eople. The tone is resolutely pessimistic. Low-­income areas in downtown Port-­au-­Prince seem like mazes where disease and death are part of the quotidian social fabric; they are where pariahs live. In India, pariahs are considered a “class of outcasts, untouchables, ­people on the lower level of the social ladder . . . ​, wretched and under-­privileged” (Pawlowski 2012, 60). The term Saint-­Aude uses as the title of his book allows him to highlight the caste structure that forms social and racial hierarchies in Haiti. Pariahs cannot escape their social fate nor can they ascend the social ladder ­because they are—­spatially and symbolically—­confined to a caste. In the first part of his book, Saint-­Aude describes inhabitants of low-­income neighborhoods in western Port-­au-­Prince: the unemployed and the lumpen proletariat. He only uses the word “pariah” in the second part of the book when the main character, Desruisseaux, a journalist who clearly resembles Saint-­Aude, 114

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begins a romantic relationship with a white French ­woman who is married to a member of the Haitian bourgeoisie. Saint-­Aude depicts a bourgeoisie full of wild partying and heavy drinking to which Desruisseaux does not belong. He is a pariah, even though he works for a prestigious newspaper. The cityscape allows Saint-­Aude to describe the lives of outcasts who are marginalized in the city and rendered abject simply ­because they live and work in areas devoid of infrastructure and ser­vices. Parias depicts the kind of city that emerged ­a fter the American occupation. ­Because the United States privileged light-­skinned Haitians in positions of po­liti­cal and economic power (Bellegarde-­Smith 2015), Port-­au-­Prince became a socially and racially segregated place with two opposing populations: low-­ income and middle-­class Haitians on one side and a set of international entrepreneurs, politicians, and administrators consolidated during the U.S. occupation on the other. According to the geographer Georges Eddy Lucien, the U.S. occupation “sowed the seeds of [Port-­au-­Prince’s] current vulnerability” (2018, 63). Between 1921 and 1930, 70 ­percent of the country’s bud­get went ­toward developing Port-­au-­Prince. The port and the neighborhoods where U.S. occupants lived and worked ­were targeted for renovations and improvements. However, the quality of life for most urban dwellers was barely considered. Instead, proj­ect goals focused on fostering economic growth and U.S. profits. By embellishing administrative and tourist areas with modern infrastructure, U.S. occupants segregated the city and added small zones of privilege to preexisting ones. Even a­ fter the occupation ended, urban planning that focused on prestige continued to promote social exclusion. During Estimé’s presidency (1946–1950), one of the capital’s largest urban planning experiments transformed the seafront. As the historian Claire Payton writes, “President Dumarsais Estimé commissioned the construction of a chic waterfront development along a wide boulevard that included 57 pavilions, plazas, and parks, complete with an artificial lake and a reflecting pool” (2018, 81). The waterfront development engendered evictions, which exacerbated the city’s growing housing crisis. Lucien (2018) noted that urban planning efforts to ameliorate the lives of middle-­class Haitians only materialized during the Magloire administration (1950–1956). At that time, housing proj­ects and infrastructure w ­ ere built to better the lives of many Haitians, but the rental or lease-­to-­own rates for many ­houses remained prohibitive for most low-­income workers and ­those who ­were evicted when the world’s fair was constructed in 1949. However, t­ hese efforts led not to social mingling but to reinforcing the city’s social compartmentalization. The Duvalier dictatorship also failed to change the social geography of urban planning in Port-­au-­Prince: the state cleared or destroyed slums and built small, photogenic housing proj­ ects. In the mid-1960s, the capital’s population began to grow steadily and low-­ income neighborhoods expanded. However, access to basic infrastructure and ser­vices did not improve.

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According to many p­ eople I knew in the formerly bourgeois neighborhoods west of the Champ de Mars, the years of the Duvalier dictatorship ­were full of terror and exile. Large Victorian h ­ ouses often owned by members of the national elite, who assumed power during the U.S. occupation, ­were abandoned or sold to p­ eople associated with Duvalier. Houses in the Pacot, Turgeau, and Bois Verna neighborhoods, which continued to be central districts inhabited by the wealthy and power­ful, contrasted with t­ hose in the former colonial grid. A small, Black ­middle class formed during the Estimé presidency and the Duvalier dictatorship, and the grid became a residential home for its members. Saint-­Aude’s dichotomous depiction of the city’s landscape continues to hold somewhat true. ­People in the dwindling ­middle class, which comprises teachers, professors, ­lawyers, and artisans, still inhabit the former colonial grid and increasingly share residential space with low-­income residents who lost their homes during the earthquake. However, neighborhoods on the hills transformed radically ­after the 2010 earthquake when victims moved into old, sometimes dilapidated Victorian h ­ ouses long vacated by ­owners. ­People also settled in the courtyards surrounding ­these structures and currently build small cinder-­block ­houses in the empty spaces between properties. The “pariahs” who now live in t­ hese neighborhoods are creating spaces where they can work. In this chapter, I lead readers through the streets described by Saint-­Aude and into several heritage buildings and vernacular ­houses. Along the way, readers may glimpse urban life in Port-­au-­Prince. The p­ eople I discuss have often been pushed away from the neighborhoods they now inhabit by forces that range from state pressure to disasters. Their lives contrast starkly with ­those of the p­ eople discussed in chapter 3. Many live in heritage buildings that seem derelict. However, they transform the buildings to suit their needs and desires. P ­ eople’s use of old buildings that echo past regimes and aesthetics warrants attention; ­these architectural forms are not simply inanimate objects but also agentic forces that shape daily life and belonging. Unlike Village Lumane Casimir’s grid of concrete ­houses, Port-­au-­Prince’s architecture is astonishingly diverse, echoing complex, shifting social hierarchies and relations. Many buildings I describe are in disrepair, and some could be considered ruins. However, they survived many disasters and still serve as dwellings for their occupants. When p­ eople use h ­ ouses labeled as ruins or “endangered species” (Phillips 2000; Langenbach 2011), their actions indicate that ­these dwellings are not static objects but—as I argue—­ animated spaces that partially shape social and po­liti­cal practices and discourses. The symbolic meanings and material agency of buildings changes over time. Ruins and old structures are not only symbols of past historical pro­cesses but also proof of changing regimes of power and economy. Therefore, they potentially disrupt chains of legitimacy based on notions of heritage by providing spaces for ­humans to engage with material fragments and spectral traces. Vernacular ­houses in Port-­au-­Prince borrow many features from rural Haitian dwellings, and their technical and decorative ele­ments confer rural character.

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Notably, spaces such as galleries, interior courtyards, and front porches allow ­people to reproduce certain spatial practices that are essential to rural life. Rural mi­grants—­the vast majority of Port-­au-­Prince inhabitants—­recognize familiar material settings in such ­houses and can reterritorialize rural social pro­cesses in heritage buildings. Open areas in vernacular h ­ ouses allow p­ eople to create fluid private–­public spaces that are essential for work and f­ amily life. This chapter and chapter 5 show that when ­people are connected to a reliable grid of ser­vices and infrastructure, and when they live in dwellings that accord with their cultural values, they are able not only to work and live decently but also to reproduce social and economic practices that have contributed to freedom and autonomy among most Haitians for more than two hundred years.

The Gingerbread Neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince On the hills east of the Champ de Mars stand the Bois Verna, Turgeau, and Pacot neighborhoods. They ­were built ­toward the end of the nineteenth ­century on green hills that used to form part of the capital’s rural outskirts. Between 1911 and 1944, this part of the city was the site of a private urban planning experiment. Power­f ul local businessmen hired private contractors to clear a square mile of wooded hills next to the po­liti­cal center in order to build large asphalt streets and residential areas (Corvington 1987a, Marley 2005). This land, located one mile east of the National Palace, was divided into large parcels, and a wide variety of polychromatic and richly ornamented wooden houses—­g ingerbread houses—­were erected in the center of each (Corvington 1987a; Godard 1988). They do not open directly onto public streets and are often hidden b­ ehind fences or high walls. However, they have deteriorated for de­cades b­ ecause their ­owners abandoned them long before 2010. Many well-­ off Port-­au-­Prince residents left or ­were exiled ­a fter waves of arrests and executions in the 1960s that targeted members of the intellectual bourgeoisie and economic elite who opposed Duvalier. In addition, ­these neighborhoods became denser as Port-­au-­Prince’s population increased. O ­ wners of gingerbread ­houses left their homes ­either to go abroad in exile or to build new homes in the mountains—­notably in the small town of Pétionville. This period was neither the first nor the last time that waves of vio­lence shattered ­these neighborhoods. As Georges Corvington noted (1987b), ­people in the Pacot neighborhood burned h ­ ouses inhabited by U.S. officers in the 1920s to protest the U.S. occupation. To this day, Pacot remains the most exclusive neighborhood in the center of the capital. Pacot is quiet and residential. It is also threaded with thick concrete walls that are sometimes painted brightly and sometimes topped with forbidding barbed wire or thick, thorned bougainvillea to deter potential climbers. Recently, the number of walls in Pacot has increased; gang vio­lence accompanied po­liti­cal vio­ lence ­after the Duvalier dictatorship. According to Jean-­Daniel Beauregard, a

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man in his early sixties who has lived in Pacot his entire life, the Duvalier era only presented an appearance of peace: “Only the police and militia men [makout] had firearms. This did not mean we ­were safer. ­These men ­were real bandits. However, we d­ idn’t deal with the random vio­lence of gangs. We lived in insecurity, but it was a very dif­fer­ent type of insecurity.”2 Beauregard owns and lives alone in a ruined six-­bedroom gothic-­style ­house that belonged to his grand­ father, a doctor who lost his job during the Duvalier era but never left Haiti. When we spoke in 2012, Beauregard said: In this h ­ ouse, life took place outside, on the side galleries where we ate, played, and spent time with f­ amily and friends. We played soccer on the street, rode our bicycles. Th ­ ere ­were no fences or walls around the h ­ ouses. We wandered everywhere we wanted. All the ­mothers on the street w ­ ere my ­mothers. One time, I crossed the street with my bike without paying attention. A w ­ oman yelled at me and slapped me on the butt! She told me, “Sit h ­ ere and d­ on’t move!” and gave me a lecture. It was pos­si­ble in ­those times [the 1960s]. This ­doesn’t mean life was all peaches and cream. Duvalier’s repression was terrible. I ­don’t know anyone in the neighborhood who ­hasn’t gotten a member of their ­family “dis­appeared.” It could be through random makout [paramilitary] vio­lence. Makout used their power for all sorts of reasons. If they w ­ ere jealous of your w ­ oman, your car or what­ever, if they just d­ idn’t like your face, well . . . ​ you would dis­appear. You d­ idn’t need to be a big bourgeois or to do politics to end up at the Fort Dimanche prison. Nonetheless, h ­ ere in Pacot, it was like a jungle. Trees everywhere, we left all doors open at all times. ­There ­were trash pickup ser­vices, we had tap ­water. Our ­house was surrounded by tall mango and breadfruit trees from which we ate. When Aristide came back to power in 1994, I had some of the trees cut down, and I built high walls topped with barbed wire all around the h ­ ouse. I was attacked three times by gangsters between 1994 and 2005. Point-­blank each time! I’m not ­doing politics or anything. I lost my job long ago, so I d­ on’t have any belongings but my small TV set so I can watch soccer with friends. Once they stole an old crate of m ­ usic cassettes! Walls grew quickly in the early 2000s as the neighborhood was often the target of random vio­lence. Aristide pointed to us with his fin­ger. You know, he said something like, “If you are hungry, you know where to find responsible ­people!” He meant h ­ ere and Pétion-­Ville . . . ​I never lived a year without terror. Yes, we sat outside at night when I was a kid, listened to folktales elders told us, we had a rich f­ amily life, a ­house wide open on natu­ral won­ders. And yet we ­were terrified. All my ­family lives abroad. All my neighbors left the neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s. I only have one neighbor I know from my childhood days. We all live b­ ehind closed walls, we d­ on’t know each other. Many NGOs [nongovernmental organ­izations] have settled in the neighborhoods and transformed places into military camps. It’s ­simple, the more

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foreign money that arrives in Haiti, the poorer Haiti becomes. It’s a tremendous business. Prices of rent in the neighborhood have soared since NGOs came in throngs a­ fter the 2010 earthquake. It’s the best neighborhood in Port-­au-­Prince, many ­people want to live ­here and work h ­ ere. It’s easier to do your ­little ­things in Pacot than ­going to the downtown neighborhoods and helping the ­people who ­really need help. I could sell my ­house for a lot of money, but I d­ on’t want to. It’s falling apart. I d­ on’t r­ eally care. A ­house lives and dies. That’s her last years . . . ​I ­don’t care about it being restored.

Beauregard quit his job in 2004 and survives on small remittances that his ­brother, who works as a policeman, sends from abroad. His quiet h ­ ouse is haunted by subtle yet power­ful examples of state vio­lence that are materialized in the high walls that surround the villa, photos and documents of ­people who dis­appeared during the dictatorship, and absences of f­ amily members who left their homes to build new lives abroad. The ­house itself could be the subject of literary or artistic romanticizing. It is surrounded by a gallery that is eight feet wide and paved with black and white tiles. The tops of the poles supporting the gallery are finely sculpted, and many details inside and outside this ­house reflect the savoir faire of Haitian carpenters. Th ­ ese same ornamental motifs—­especially the “gingerbread trims,” pierced and finely cut frieze boards that adorn the ­house’s upper edges—­suggest the structure’s indigenous character; such motifs are ubiquitous among small, vernacular ­houses in the countryside. However, the ­house’s decrepit appearance seemed to align with Beauregard’s pessimism. He thought renovating it was useless b­ ecause life was no longer sustainable in a country suffocated by NGOs and detrimental aid systems. The ­house began to collapse as Beauregard’s f­ amily members died or left the island. Yael Navaro-­Yashin argues that objects and places reflecting vio­lence indicate a loss that “lingers uncannily” and mediates spatial melancholia (2009, 16). Beauregard’s h ­ ouse points to both social ruptures and past ambitions through nonhuman, material remnants that infuse the area with melancholy. Many decrepit gingerbread ­houses in the neighborhood are also melancholic objects that transform the pre­sent by exuding senses of loss and rupture. They echo the bourgeoisie’s downfall and the gradual fade of a unique vernacular aesthetic. In the 1950s, American tourists named ­these vast, elaborate residences “gingerbread ­houses” (Langenbach 2011, 16). They ­were somewhat similar to American Victorian Painted Ladies, but they w ­ ere far more than pale copies. Haitian architects, trained in France, designed them at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury and incorporated indigenous aesthetic ele­ments. Three key architects launched this architectural fashion: Georges Baussan, Léon Mathon, and Joseph Eugène Maximilien combined features from the French seaside architectural style and from the American Queen Anne style with Haitian vernacular techniques and forms to build ­houses suitable for tropical settings. Gingerbread ­houses channel several international cultural traits through national architectural sensibilities,

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FIG. 11  ​A Gingerbread h ­ ouse in the Pacot neighborhood surrounded by elevated walls and

razor wires.

and the result is distinctly Haitian. For instance, they include inventive ornamentation handcrafted by local master carpenters who reproduced similar designs at a smaller scale in working-­and middle-­class neighborhoods in downtown Port-­au-­Prince. Many features of ­these ­houses, such as galleries, porches, courtyards, and large openings for win­dows and doors, w ­ ere common among rural dwellings well before the gingerbread style became fash­ion­able. Although members of the bourgeoisie owned t­ hese h ­ ouses at the beginning of the twentieth c­ entury, they are now occupied by ­people from e­ very segment of the Haitian social spectrum. In the same neighborhood, a passerby may see luxurious mansions inhabited by prominent members of the elite as well as lopsided ­houses packed with several squatting families. Farah Hyppolite, a Haitian architect in charge of a restoration proj­ect for FOKAL, a large Haitian-­led NGO, knows very well the more than two hundred gingerbread h ­ ouses in Port-­au-­Prince. As she told me, each one differs, but they have one ­thing in common: most withstood the earthquake in 2010. Farah told me about a potentially fruitful approach for dealing with reconstruction in her native city: restore such h ­ ouses. As we walked through the gingerbread neighborhoods and talked about the usefulness of preservation, Farah noted that old ­houses in Port-­au-­Prince reflect ­viable architectural designs and house-­building knowledge. As construction experts have shown, traditional structures in Haiti proved to be disaster-­resistant in 2010 (Audefroy 2011). Farah places Haitian workers and their traditional skills at the heart of reconstruction pro­cesses:

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The gingerbread ­houses are well designed. Almost none of the 200 structures we cata­logued collapsed during the earthquake. The walls have strong timber frames that are often vis­i­ble. This allows for flexibility. It is a technique widely used in regions subjected to seismic activity since the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. They could offer blueprints for the reconstruction of the capital. They are built on elevated floors to avoid floods and humidity. Their high ceilings and many doors allow for good ventilation. Their steep roofs are perfect to sustain the heavy rains that batter the city in the summer. They sustained earthquakes, hurricanes and are a testimony of Haitian artisanal savoir faire. [I then asked Farah about preserving shotgun ­houses] I love smaller ­houses with the same architectural patterns and wish to extend our proj­ect to the w ­ hole city of Port-­au-­Prince. If we could build small structures with designs adapted to our country, it would be a big step forward. We are now training local carpenters by renovating a home in Bois Verna that w ­ ill serve as an annex of FOKAL. It’s a long, long-­term proj­ect!

As we walked down Rue “O,” a narrow alley perpendicular to the busy central Bois Verna artery, Farah showed me parcels of land where no fewer than five small gingerbread h ­ ouses had been bulldozed in two months. She said, “The land is worth more than the h ­ ouses themselves. ­There is tremendous financial pressure to get rid of the gingerbreads. In t­ hese times when we have lost so many of our landmarks, the state should offer a ­legal framework to protect our cultural artifacts and help proprietors keep their historic homes alive.” Since 2010, private ­owners have destroyed more than twenty historical ­houses in order to build apartment complexes or to sell the land. Often, private security guards ensure that nobody squats on the empty space. Sometimes, dilapidated h ­ ouses remain on land where o­ wners have built new structures—­such as the former president Louis Borno ­house. Although the current owner of this ­house allowed me to visit and photo­graph it in 2014, he did not want to discuss it. The inside of the h ­ ouse was filled with crates of old papers that spilled across the floor. Again, melancholic objects abounded: old photo­graphs, banknotes, and personal letters ­were scattered in some of the rooms of what must have been an elegant ­house in the past. They indicated that ­family life at the Borno ­house may have been shattered suddenly. An atmosphere of decay and abandonment filled the place and seemed to reflect the own­er’s resignation. Many of the gingerbread h ­ ouses, however, have escaped the fate of the Beauregard and the Borno ­houses. They offer safe shelter and comfort to families. They also provide access to central locations in the capital. My walk with Farah on May 8, 2012, ended in the living room of a h ­ ouse owned by Etzer and Bernadine Georges. The Georges f­ amily lives in a tall bright-­ yellow gingerbread ­house nestled in a retreat on a busy ave­nue in the Bois Verna neighborhood. It comprises three bedrooms, has about one thousand square feet of living space, and is rather small compared to other gingerbread ­houses nearby.

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FIG. 12  ​Inside the Borno ­house.

Etzer is retired, but Bernadine works as a geologist for the state and interacts closely with local and international actors who tried to fix the public fountains in Port-­au-­Prince a­ fter the earthquake. She said, “The relief efforts ignored the ­middle classes. In this neighborhood, we could only rely on ourselves to find food and ­water in the first weeks ­after the quake. Instead of fixing functioning neighborhoods, NGOs displaced ­people in camps. Fortunately for us, the ­house held up r­ eally well.” Several of their extended f­ amily members still lived in the h ­ ouse in 2012, and many of their friends often visited during the day. As Bernadine mentioned, relief from international NGOs was poorly distributed and caused families and long-­established solidarity networks to dissolve by urging p­ eople to live in temporary tent camps where they could access food and ­water. B ­ ecause the state offers no social net, and an un­co­or­di­nated mosaic of NGOs in Haiti provides ser­vices that are often maladjusted, ­people rely on networks of ­family members and friends to survive. Fictive kinship within extended families is the norm in both rural and urban Haiti. However, earthquake relief efforts ignored t­ hese cultural anchors when they distributed aid and relocated ­people. ­People across the country form many kinds of overlapping social circles. For instance, regional enclaves are often reproduced within cities when ­people from the same region s­ ettle in a neighborhood. As Laura Wagner powerfully described, “In Port-­au-­Prince, ­people from the countryside try to hold onto the lifeways of home. If they have a ­little patch of land, they plant vegetables and herbs brought from the provinces. . . . ​In Port-­au-­Prince, regional enclaves form: ­people from Grand-­A nse come together at the Guerite beyond the sinking old

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train tracks in downtown Port-­au-­Prince, at the Wharf, in so-­called Cité Jérémie in Cité Soleil, and even within post-­quake camps” (2014, 80). At times, the Georges ­house­hold felt like this kind of regional, rural enclave. However, Etzer mentions a kind of rural countryside that no longer exists in Port-­au-­Prince. Con­ temporary Haiti is not a place where binary city–­country frameworks are pos­si­ ble; bound­aries between rural and urban dissolved long ago. Etzer talked about this when he spoke of his ­house: The ­house came as a kit from E ­ ngland in 1898. It was built by Louis Nicolas, who was Haiti’s consul in New York City. He was married to an En­glish ­woman who had roots in Jamaica, Catherine Crosswell. She planted the Jamaican palm trees you see in front of the ­house ­because it reminded her of her island. She left the h ­ ouse to her d­ aughter, Alice Nicolas. Alice was my godmother. She passed when she was 91 years old. She took care of me as if I ­were her son. She left me the ­house and some of the land around it, but she possessed much more than what you see ­today. In the 1960s, this place was like the countryside. ­There ­were h ­ orses and carriages. The land went from Impasse Rigaud to Rue Duncombe, it was about two acres! I have fond memories of Alice, and I had a beautiful childhood h ­ ere. It was like the countryside. . . . ​ But in a way, I can say that t­ here never was a golden period [une période d’or]. Each period had its prob­lems.

Although the ­house came as a kit, it contains the wooden ornamentation often seen on gingerbread h ­ ouses. It also shares features of rural vernacular ­houses: sculpted ventilation wood panels above doors and small roofed porches on the sides and back of the h ­ ouse. The Georges abode was a place of transnational flow, and ­people from all walks of life inhabited and inhabit it. When I visited gingerbread h ­ ouses, I often noticed that current residents ­were related in some way to the original ­owners—­for instance, as workers, extended ­family, or fictive kin. Etzer’s home triggered a certain nostalgia. But positive feelings associated with gingerbread ­houses do not erase the fact that regimes of terror in the public sphere made life difficult for every­one in the country. Nonetheless, the Georges h ­ ouse seemed like a shelter that allowed generations of ­people from vari­ous backgrounds to dwell, to belong, and to survive po­liti­cal and natu­ral disasters. Their living room and courtyard act like a lakou—­a space prevalent in rural Haiti where p­ eople autonomously manage religious, social, and economic relations away from state institutions. In a lakou, many ­people come and go as they exchange information, ser­vices, and goods. They also help each other, especially during difficult periods. To paraphrase the geographer Georges Anglade (1983), the p­ eople who use the lakou system maximize their minimal resources and privilege collectives over nuclear families. In the past, the Georges ­house could have been considered a bourgeois lakou where an extended f­ amily

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FIG. 13  ​The Etzer ­house in the Bois Verna neighborhood.

lived and worked. Etzer’s characterization of his rural Port-­au-­Prince childhood was common among other ­people I met; it is a leitmotiv for ­people who lived in ­these neighborhoods before they became dense urban enclaves. In many ways, rural culture traverses the city and continues to shape daily urban life. This becomes apparent when we explore a few more h ­ ouses and other places where senses of belonging are rooted in practices s­ haped over the longue durée—­and when we further discuss the urban lakou.

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Transforming the Gingerbread Houses ­ fter the 2010 earthquake, p­ eople transformed many large gingerbread ­houses A into apartment buildings and commercial spaces. For instance, eight families live in a twelve-­bedroom gingerbread h ­ ouse in the Turgeau neighborhood, which is just below Bois Verna. The ­house is managed by Monsieur Invité, who was born in its courtyard and has lived in the gingerbread all his life; his parents also worked for its proprietors. Monsieur Invité is a short, stocky man who sells rum, cold beer, ­water, sodas, and dry goods from a metal kiosk next to the gate of his home in Turgeau. Often, small groups of ­people congregate around the kiosk to talk with him. He knows endless jokes and entertains his clientele with witty descriptions of street life. Currently, Turgeau is the densest area in Port-­au-­Prince and sits next to the capital’s center, where schools, gas stations, state ministries, restaurants, and commerce buildings coexist with Haitian residences across the social spectrum. Even with its intense traffic, Turgeau’s one-­way main street is pleasant to walk. It is lined with old, elaborate gingerbread ­houses compressed between functionalist concrete buildings, and it steeply climbs the Morne l’Hôpital mountain. Rural Port-­au-­Prince is still vis­i­ble h ­ ere in the urban archive. As Monsieur Invité stated: Before the 1970s, this w ­ hole place looked like the countryside. Turgeau was a dirt road. You had big ­houses surrounded with gardens. They looked like ­little farms. ­People grew corn, eggplants, greens [ fey]. You found all kinds of fruit trees: mango, kenep, abriko, korosol, cachiman. . . . ​You had ­horses and donkeys in the front yards of t­ hese large properties. I remember the sounds of birds in the morning and the frightening sounds of bats, frogs, and insects at night. You had so many trees that you w ­ ouldn’t go outside at night, it was just scary, pitch black. . . . ​During the day, you would hear all kinds of street vendors chanting. Soda vendors would use their ­bottles to play ­music. Ting Ting Ting! I knew every­one who lived on Turgeau, the rich, the poor, the old, the young. . . . ​My m ­ other worked for a w ­ oman right h ­ ere, in the big h ­ ouse ­behind me. The owner was like a white ­woman, but you know, she was Haitian. She was Syrian and Haitian. They sold food in bulk. Her husband was never ­there. I ­can’t even remember his face. They ­were good to my parents. They allowed my ­mother and me to remain on their property. I still live in the h ­ ouse where I grew up. They left Haiti in the early 1970s. By then, the sons, who lived in New York, rented out the ­whole ­house. They divided the rooms into small apartments and rented the place. I collected rent for them and made sure every­thing was alright, security-­wise. All the p­ eople who live ­there t­ oday have been t­ here for a long time. We never have security prob­lems. When they need something to be fixed, or what­ever, they call me. I sell stuff h ­ ere all day and

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night, so I can see who comes in and out. ­A fter the 2010 earthquake, one of the ­owners came and told every­one to stop paying rent. He left us the w ­ hole property. We just pay for the electricity we use, that’s it.

The two-­story gingerbread ­house Invité talks about was built at the turn of the twentieth c­ entury. Lodged at the bottom of a large courtyard, the twelve-­room ­house is invisible from the rest of Turgeau. Though it seems as if it might collapse, the h ­ ouse withstood the 2010 earthquake. By the agreement Invité mentioned with the owner, seven families live in it without paying rent. A few ­things have changed, though, since Invité became sole man­ag­er. The large courtyard where he used to host soccer games on weekends is now filled with cars and auto parts. As he explained, some of his younger f­ amily members had lost every­thing in the earthquake and had nowhere to live or work. One of Invité’s nephews moved his workshop to the courtyard and repairs trucks and cars ­under the shade of mango trees. However, he does not live in the ­house; he erected two sturdy tents on wood pallets in what used to be an interior courtyard. He was one of the many ­people I met who ­were uncomfortable sleeping if they ­were surrounded by walls. Monsieur Invité and his wife live one hundred feet away from the gingerbread ­house in half of a white-­and-­blue shotgun h ­ ouse. Their ­children and grandchildren live in the other half. Invité allows his close network of ­family members and friends to use the property for business but limits what they can do. He said that “the ­house should remain a ­house” and should not become a commercial space for ­people from the street. Like an older man who is responsible for organ­ izing his familial lakou in the countryside, Invité manages a ­house surrounded by a large, dusty plot of land. He is proud of the h ­ ouse’s beauty and is deeply attached to what he calls his katye jeneral (headquarters). Invité acted as a gatekeeper and h ­ ouse man­ag­er, but he did so with the input and approval of other residents. Most of the residents had lived together for more than twenty years and worked together to balance security and business options within the limits of the courtyard. Residences that doubled as small businesses ­were common in the area. According to one report, 23 ­percent of the gingerbread ­houses in Port-­ au-­Prince are used for commercial activities or for educational or cultural purposes (GSAAP 2016). Notably, 94 ­percent of ­those ­houses are currently occupied, despite being in disrepair. Haitian master builders and architects have used local materials and have refined their techniques to make ­these dwellings disaster-­resistant and culturally appropriate. ­Every ­house I visited had unique features. Even industrially produced ­houses like Etzer’s have been transformed to suit ­people’s specific needs. Nonetheless, each ­house incorporated common traits in Ca­rib­bean dwellings: they had a porch, a gallery, or some kind of covered outdoor space to meet sociocultural needs for gathering in ­these liminal spaces. As Jason Herbeck argues when he describes Haitian gingerbread architecture, vernacular ­houses

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survived many disasters and remained in place precisely b­ ecause “they evolved locally over time as a continued and ever-­renewed response to site-­specific historical, geo­g raph­i­cal, and climatic conditions” (2018, 37). De­mo­li­tions occur often in Port-­au-­Prince, but many vernacular h ­ ouses are preserved and cherished by the ­people who inhabit them—­not only ­because they are disaster-­proof but also b­ ecause they meet ­people’s social needs. Many of the h ­ ouses I visited have been modified to respond to the post-­ earthquake situation. Instead of settling in tent camps in the disaster’s aftermath, many ­people wanted to remain in their neighborhoods or move to the inner city where they could access ser­vices such as tap w ­ ater, electricity, and schools. Often, ­humble shotgun ­houses w ­ ere extended to accommodate new dwellers, and large gingerbreads ­were divided into smaller apartments. In one case, a f­ amily in a gingerbread h ­ ouse used some of the metal and wood from a decorative turret to build a chicken coop in an unused part of the ­house gallery. In another instance, ­people demolished a gingerbread’s wall so the kitchen would open onto the back gallery. Preservationists who think such buildings represent the past would deem t­ hese transformations sacrilegious. However, gingerbread houses—­which once symbolized the Haitian bourgeoisie—­seldom shelter nuclear families t­ oday. More often, networks of extended families and friends reshuffle the interiors of ­houses to create spaces that meet collective needs and desires. According to Jill Stoner, ­these refurbished ­houses represent a form of minor architecture, or “the making of spaces within the already built” (2012, 16). Minor actions that transform buildings also deconstruct power hierarchies inherent to structures. Stoner notes, “Works assumed to be finished are cast back into a state of becoming” (2012, 76). In other words, by concretely engaging with the past through modifying heritage buildings, ­people collectively challenge power structures and hierarchies. They affirm their presence in neighborhoods from which they long have been excluded. More importantly, they reterritorialize the built environments they inhabit by reinventing bound­aries between inside and outside space, private and public life, and residential and commercial activity. Through t­ hese spatial practices, p­ eople renew, blur, and remake divisions according to their own (often collective) values and affirm their right to inhabit the city on their own terms.

The Shotgun Houses of Port-­au-­Prince Compared to neighborhoods with gingerbread ­houses, central areas east of the Champ de Mars are heavi­ly trafficked and densely populated. Monatuf, in downtown Port-­au-­Prince, is a desirable neighborhood b­ ecause electricity is always available. Since the area is near the National Palace and the Champ de Mars, it also boasts trash collection ser­vices. Monatuf is part of what used to be called “La Ville” during the colonial period. Unlike rural areas around the colonial grid, La Ville formed around the harbor, which originally comprised

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the port, merchant ware­houses, and the Croix-­des-­Bossales market where produce, resources, and Eu­ro­pean goods w ­ ere sold alongside enslaved p­ eople. The market area, built on swampy land, was also the main cemetery for enslaved ­people. ­Today, it remains the main market in Haiti and the center of economic activity for most p­ eople. Renovation proj­ects have not changed the squalor of this enormous market where the products of the peasantry’s hard ­labor are sold with minimal profit. Beyond the shore, French urban planners built streets in a gridiron pattern and divided them based on land-­use activities. Two socially segregated residential areas ­were built: one to the east in the commercial area along the port and one to the west in the administrative district. French authorities carved out spaces for large streets, and private parties built their residences in the hills of Bel Air, an area reserved for white elites and planters. In 1751, the Morne-­à-­Tuf neighborhood (Monatuf) was erected on a flattened mound of soft volcanic rocks that ­were ­later used as construction material. Large rectilinear streets ­were created to facilitate the mobility of ­people and goods. Before 1804, white menial workers, f­ ree and enslaved craftspeople and workers, shop­keep­ers, military officers, and lesser administrators coexisted in Monatuf and formed an “urban population that works hard all day long to make ends meet without getting the opportunity to enjoy distractions” (Corvington 1992, 54). Monatuf fostered forms of urban life and sociality that differed vastly from the narrowly regulated modes of existence at plantations. Po­liti­cal ideas moved quickly ­there, and demonstrations w ­ ere common. Habitable land in Monatuf, divided into rectangular parcels with ­little frontage but ample courtyard space, still remains. Building facades are usually no more than sixteen feet wide. Despite many periods of destruction, residential parcels in Monatuf have retained their original shapes and dimensions. The neighborhood grid is about one kilo­meter long and five hundred meters wide. Its three large streets run parallel to the coast and are bisected by smaller perpendicular streets that hold dozens of narrow rectilinear buildings. Th ­ ese buildings often have side galleries and hide a maze of slender corridors and alleys that create many routes throughout the capital. As a result, authorities have strug­gled to control the area, which has been the epicenter of many po­liti­cal and revolutionary activities. Ethnographic analy­sis of daily life and h ­ ouse­hold economies in Monatuf reveals that downtown dwellers are attached to this neighborhood and to their modes of existence. Although most h ­ ouses in Monatuf are not technically shotguns, I call Monatuf a shotgun neighborhood b­ ecause most of its buildings are rectangular and have roughly the same facade length as shotguns. In 1974, the folklorist John Michael Vlach conducted fieldwork in the central neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince and detailed the dif­fer­ent types of shotgun ­houses he found. Although Vlach did not describe daily life in and around the shotguns, his findings w ­ ere nonetheless groundbreaking. The shotgun ­house is the quin­tes­sen­tial

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working-­class residence in the rural southern United States and is often associated with African American material culture. Vlach, through archival work and detailed mea­sure­ments, proved that this cultural hallmark of the American South originated in Haiti, where the oldest examples of this architectural form have been found. ­A fter the Haitian Revolution, more than ten thousand ­people left Saint-­Domingue (and ­later Haiti) and settled in New Orleans. Between 1805 and 1840, many of them built and lived in elaborate shotgun h ­ ouses similar to ­those on their home island (Edwards 2009). Shotgun ­houses have a small street facade that enables dwellers to conduct business or socialize on front porches. In 1936, Fred Kniffen described shotgun ­houses as “one room in width and from one to three or more rooms deep, with frontward facing gable” (186). Th ­ ese train-­like ­houses may have very dif­fer­ent forms and can be built with a wide range of materials. The rectangular two-­ bedroom base structure represents the basic floor unit, but adding galleries or extra rooms at the back, on the side, or even on the roof of a h ­ ouse is relatively easy if space allows. In brief, the shotgun model is modular and evolves according to the needs of the p­ eople who inhabit them. As Meredith Kahn states, “the structure’s modular design allowed it to be combined with other units to form a variety of building types, including structures with courtyards and long, multifamily h ­ ouses” (2007, 53). They are h ­ ouses in permanent evolution that fit no defined architectural form. They are built by “invisible architects” and reflect “a knowledge that is transmitted hand by hand in communities, and a beauty and intelligence that belong to the Collectivity and to the expertise of the anonymous” (Garcia and Trabaud 2018, 139). As Vlach argues, the architectural origin of shotguns echoes the transnational savoir faire of craftspeople who are able to use local materials to build structures that are well adapted to both the climate and the social needs of communities. Vlach also argues that shotgun h ­ ouses invoke “long migrations, the conduct of the Atlantic slave trade, the rise of ­free black communities, the development of vernacular (folk) and popu­lar traditions in architecture, and the expansion of American [and French, in the case of Saint-­Domingue] industrial needs” (1986, 59). Its name seems to come from the word “to-­g un,” which means “a place of assembly” in the Southern Dahomey Fon area (modern Benin), a region from which many enslaved ­people in Saint-­Domingue originated (Tate 2010, 2). Shotgun ­houses and their dif­fer­ent iterations have also been popu­lar in the Haitian countryside for a long time. For instance, many shotgun structures are pre­sent in Aquin, a small town in southern Haiti, and in Ti Rivyé, a town two hours north of Port-­au-­Prince. They are ubiquitous across the island and often have the same ele­ments as gingerbread ­houses; some scholars even argue that gingerbread ­houses provided models for rural ­house builders (GSAAP 2016). However, rural shotgun ­houses, with their steep roofs, elevated floors, and complex structures in brick and timber, predated gingerbread h ­ ouses. Shotguns have been prevalent in Saint-­Domingue since the early eigh­teenth ­century (Edwards 2009). As a

FIG. 14  ​A shotgun ­house in Rue Saint Nicolas, Port-­au-­Prince. Photo by Aland Joseph.

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result, this ­humble rural ­house may be the primary model for urban architecture in Haiti—­including for the bourgeois gingerbread h ­ ouse. As Vlach argues, the shotgun is inspired by Yoruba ­houses that African enslaved p­ eople adapted to new settings in Saint-­Domingue. Vlach shows that many Yoruba dwellings in Africa ­were two-­room modular structures with a single entrance. Although wattle and daub structures are still built in rural Haiti and ­were ubiquitous in the outskirts of Port-­au-­Prince u­ ntil large rural migrations in the 1980s, shotgun ­houses built with Eu­ro­pean half-­timber structures to resist earthquakes feature most in urban centers. Vlach also mentions that the Arawak, who peopled the island before their mass extermination by colonists in the sixteenth c­ entury, influenced this impor­tant form of Haitian architecture. ­Under their gables, shotgun ­houses have large front porches that are strikingly similar to Taino and Arawak bohios (Vlach 1976b). Essentially, this style, favored by ­free and enfranchised Blacks during the colonial period, stems from a syncretic vernacular architecture that borrows cultural and spatial practices from West Africans and island natives and uses Eu­ro­pean construction techniques. According to the architectural historian Louis Nelson, however, Ca­rib­bean vernacular buildings have not merely reflected African or indigenous spatial practices that would “emulate deeply embedded cultural structures” (2011, 193). Instead, the multiform shotgun was first and foremost the architecture of the ­free Black ­people of Saint-­Domingue that is “better understood as a pragmatic, creative, and resourceful resolution to very real social, economic, climatic, and other considerations” (Nelson 2011, 193). Besides their modular potential, vernacular buildings in Port-­au-­Prince pre­ sent many other pragmatic benefits. Gingerbread and shotgun h ­ ouses share an impor­tant ele­ment that is essential to daily life in the Ca­rib­bean, where most activities take place outside: they do not confine living space to the interior. The galleries and gabled porches are intimate spaces where both public and private life unfolds. B ­ ecause shotgun h ­ ouses w ­ ere arranged in a grid, they also allowed ­people to create corridors that functioned as spaces of relative freedom for oppressed communities in both urban Saint-­Domingue (and ­later Haiti) and the U.S. South. The rear door of shotguns, which opens onto courtyards and corridors, was an impor­tant feature that enabled p­ eople to access places “away from the supervision of the slave owner or white authorities” (Wade 1964, 61). For instance, in colonial Jamaican cities with small vernacular buildings similar to shotguns, ­free Black communities “resisted the institution of slavery by harboring runaways [and used] a labyrinth of small, highly permeable spaces known intimately by ­those colluding, but bewildering to authorities” (Nelson 2011, 189). The Jamaican colonial assembly even passed laws that ­limited black ­people’s ­houses to a single door. Colonial Port-­au-­ Prince was similar. T ­ oday, p­ eople in the capital still use corridors and alleys to hide and to escape authorities, especially when UN soldiers or the police attempt “peacekeeping” operations.

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Exactly forty years a­ fter Vlach’s research, when Aland Joseph and I conducted fieldwork in the neighborhoods Vlach had documented, we found the shotgun ­houses he described in his publications. The shotgun h ­ ouses that dot Monatuf are still coveted spaces where commerce and private life unfold fluidly. Nelson (2011) has astutely noted that they allow ­people to craft intimate spaces while maintaining fluid private–­public spaces in front rooms or on front porches, which are ideal for conducting small business. However, when shotgun h ­ ouses are demolished in downtown Port-­au-­Prince, they tend to be replaced by commercial buildings such as funeral parlors, beauty salons, restaurants, garages, and ware­houses. During one of our many conversations, Boss Arold, a man who lived in a pink, three-­bedroom shotgun ­house, said, “Rue de l’Enterrement used to be full of ­these l­ ittle wooden h ­ ouses. Mine may date back to the colonial period, the Haitian Institute for Preservation workers told me. It’s a trace of our presence as ­free ­people in Port-­au-­Prince from e­ arlier times, and it should be preserved so ­people ­don’t forget who we are. Enslaved ­people who fought and won their freedom. The rumors of de­mo­li­tion make me sick.” Boss Arold recognized the historical value of his ­house and proudly talked about its national heritage. The Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National employees who visited his ­house and painted a sign on its front wall to recognize it as a historical building told him a lot about the ­house. Although it may not predate the Haitian revolution, the h ­ ouse was clearly built before 1925—­the year the capital’s mayor forbade wooden construction ­because of the many fires that destroyed parts of Port-­au-­Prince. The ­humble shotgun building symbolizes middle-­class workers, including state employees, teachers, and ­lawyers, who inhabited neighborhoods such as Monatuf u­ ntil they left the country during the Duvalier dictatorship or during periods of vio­lence ­a fter 1986. Th ­ ese h ­ ouses now shelter many who lost their homes in the earthquake. Shotguns not only resist disasters but mitigate them—­ the ­houses enable p­ eople to remain within their social networks by allowing them to add rooms when space permits. For instance, my friend Clomène Firmin ­housed f­ amily members in her shotgun on Rue du Champ de Mars ­after the earthquake. Her s­ ister and nieces used a spare bedroom, and she opened other areas so ­people could enjoy the ­house. For example, she had a small extension built onto the back of her ­house to create an area where her friends and relatives could enter, dine, watch tele­vi­sion, and rest without permission. The structural improvisation shotguns allow makes them a prime architectural form in a city where disasters often reshuffle demographic compositions. For instance, when Boss Arold took in his two grand­daughters a­ fter the 2010 earthquake, he moved his tailor workshop from the second room in his h ­ ouse to the side gallery, which he enclosed with doors he found a­ fter the earthquake.3 He cleaned the room that had ­housed his workshop and installed a bed and a TV for his grand­daughters. As the h ­ ouses of Boss Arold, Clomène, and ­others illustrate, shotguns are heritage buildings that are routinely transformed to meet the social and aesthetic

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needs of the ­people who inhabit them. Indeed, they offer a blueprint for a kind of culturally anchored ­house that the state could have replicated ­after the 2010 disaster. Instead, international and state actors opted for costly semipermanent structures and housing proj­ects that ­were often deeply disconnected from Haitian cultural and social anchors.

The Urban Lakou ­ ecause of the city’s population density, the courtyards of many urban dwellB ings have dwindled, especially a­ fter the quake. However, dwindling courtyards have not prevented p­ eople from socializing in covered outdoor spaces. For rural mi­grants who long for the many interactions that courtyards in their rural homes offered, front porches of urban shotgun structures provide places where they can establish networks. For instance, Aland Joseph and his friends regularly socialized on the front porch of Latéral’s shotgun ­house. Latéral, a ­house painter and soccer coach, welcomed p­ eople to his front porch during after­noons and sold cold beers and sodas. ­A fter Aland Joseph introduced me to Latéral, I hung out on his porch almost daily in 2013. ­There, I met Brunel Excellent, a thirty-­two-­year-­old man who had recently migrated from Gros Morne, a mountainous region in the northwest corner of l’Artibonite. Brunel was unemployed, despite his diploma in plumbing from a prestigious Cap Haitian institution. He had moved to Port-­ au-­Prince ­because of the mirage of jobs linked to the city’s reconstruction, and he lived with his ­sister Kettly. Brunel and Kettly’s stories ­were threaded with traces of the ubiquitous rural values that shape modes of urban dwelling. Kettly migrated from Gros Morne long ago. In 1992, she lived in Figaro, a small rural enclave shaded by the avocado and mango trees that dapple the surrounding mountains. She lived with her ­mother, f­ ather, b­ rothers, aunt, and ­uncle in a large courtyard surrounded by candelabra cacti and circled by juniper and palm trees. The courtyard, located between a dirt road fifteen feet wide and the fertile Gros Morne valley, was the center of ­family life. For both Kettly and Brunel, it remains the place they miss most. In the courtyard, the ­house that formerly belonged to her grandparents serves t­oday as a kay spirituel, a ­house inhabited by zanj—­Vodou deities her parents serve and are protected by. The structure is a wooden shotgun h ­ ouse painted white, and it represents one of the many types of shotgun h ­ ouses in Haiti. The kay spirituel is an impor­tant structure in the Excellent courtyard ­because it protects the ­family and, since 1982, has provided siro miel (honey) through a big beehive that spans both sides of a door. The honey generates supplemental income for the ­family and is considered a sign of good ­will from the zanj who inhabit the ­house. When I stayed in Gros Morne in July 2015, Brunel’s f­ ather explained that the honey can only be collected by the ­family houngan (Vodou priest), who is the only person who possesses keys to this par­tic­u­lar h ­ ouse. He visits weekly to open it and travay (work) with the zanj. In order to live in harmony with the zanj, certain ­family members perform

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spiritual practices and leave offerings around the trees that surround the courtyard. Brunel, who converted to Adventism, does not take part in spiritual activities, but he nonetheless re­spects his parents’ beliefs. Brunel and Kettly’s ­mother lives in a two-­room ­house that is twelve by thirty feet long, made of timber and lime, and near an outdoor kitchen in the courtyard. Making lime is time-­consuming and expensive, and having a lime ­house indicates high social standing. Monsieur Excellent, who was seventy-­four years old at the time but passed away in 2019, explained: “You need to find the right rocks at the bottom of the river. They can be very big. You need several p­ eople to drag them ­here in the courtyard. Then you heat them up on a big fire for hours. It demands a lot of wood. Fi­nally, you finely crush the stones. It might take you up to two days to make a good pile of lime.” Rocks from the nearby river ­were prime material for elders’ ­houses, but they also had many other functions. Monsieur Excellent lived in a small two-­room lime-­and-­stone ­house near his parents’ and ancestors’ grave in the center of the courtyard. The burial ground is marked by a circle of small stones covered by a larger rock. According to Monsieur Excellent, you can feel the souffle—­a puff of wind—if you place your hand next to the stones. He said that the spirits of his ancestors still live and preside over the lakou he inherited in 1976 when his f­ ather died. He also said that living in peace with zanj is a way to honor ancestors who live in spiritual form in the lakou and in the fields he still cultivated at age seventy-­four. The neatly built dwellings in the lakou reflect Monsieur Excellent’s fine craftsmanship. More importantly, they reveal how he and his ­family shape and live in a built environment that fosters their relations with the natu­ral, ancestral, and spiritual ele­ments that form their lakou. The lakou is often ruled by a patriarch who h ­ andles internal conflicts and relationships with other lakou in the area. ­These relationships are impor­tant ­because many agricultural tasks demand a large workforce. Working in kumbit—­ groups of ­people who lend their ­labor in a well-­organized gift economy—is vital to generate income from extra crops. Given the exorbitant price of a clinic visit in case of health prob­lems, having a ­little cash on hand is necessary. Through their ­labor, the Excellent ­children generate and use income to buy the goods and clothing their parents need. Their small yearly income often goes t­ oward medi­cations and doctor visits. At one point, Brunel’s aunt and ­uncle lived in one of the two oldest ­houses in the courtyard, a modest, wooden shotgun h ­ ouse with a steep roof, a shaded front porch, and a light-­green-­and-­pink coat of paint. By 2014, however, Monsieur Excellent thought the lakou felt empty. Kettly had left in 1992 to find job opportunities and a better life in Port-­au-­Prince. She married a man who owned a ­house in an alley in Monatuf and started a ti komès (small business) next to her dwelling. To this day, Kettly and her ­daughters sell cigarettes, cold drinks, small ­bottles of rum, individually packed cookies imported from the Dominican Republic, and vari­ous dry goods she buys weekly at Machè Ti Tony, a

Inhabiting Port-­au-­Prince ­after 2010 • 135

gigantic ware­house on the northern side of the city. Kettly noted that building relations of trust and reciprocity in her neighborhood, as she learned to do in her lakou, helps maintain her urban business. B ­ ecause of her actions, she is able to send her ­children to school, send some money back home, and maintain in­de­pen­dence from a husband with whom she shares a roof but seldom engages in conversation. If she could, Kettly would divorce her husband, but the h ­ ouse belongs to him. She works hard and dreams of returning to her native mountains, but she has no choice other than to work hard in the city in order to meet her ­family’s educational and financial needs. As often as she can, she visits Gros Morne and takes produce from the ­family’s land back to the city. Like many rural mi­grants, Brunel and Kettly maintained close relationships with their rural roots. Brunel also longed for home and repeatedly said he disliked Port-­au-­Prince. He finished high school in Cap Haitian, speaks French fluently, and speaks conversational En­glish. In 2008, he graduated from a reputed Cap Haitian technical school and worked t­ here as a plumber for a year before he moved. His wife and son live in the inner city of Gros Morne, where he worked as a security guard in a gas station ­until 2012. Brunel said: I moved back to Gros Morne quickly ­because the salary ­didn’t allow me to live in Cap Haitian. I could barely make ends meet with what I made . . . ​when my employer both­ered to give me my salary. Your parents make a big sacrifice, send you to school. You work hard, and the w ­ hole ­family thinks you’ll be able to help. And you work long hours, day or night, on Sundays, but you d­ on’t make a living. . . . ​Just a l­ ittle money for you, and only you, to survive. I moved back to Gros Morne in 2010, got married, and found a l­ ittle job. Security guard. Unrelated to what I studied. Even with diplomas, p­ eople like me c­ an’t make a living in this country!

In Port-­au-­Prince, Brunel could help his ­sister and generate a bit of income to take home when he was able to catch a ­ride north. Brunel longed for his ­family, his church, his friends, and his hometown with its gentle mountains, mild weather, and clear rivers. When I asked him if he would move abroad if he could, he firmly said that he would never leave Haiti ­unless he was forced. Then, in 2017, he moved to the Bahamas where he works in the h ­ otel industry. He has returned to a life of hard, poorly paid work and now f­ aces new forms of discrimination in a country that has long been hostile to Haitians. While he lived in Port-­au-­Prince, Brunel tried to cope with the boredom and frustration of not being able to use the skills for which he had trained. For many hours each morning, he exercised and then coached a few kids and friends at a tiny, makeshift gym where men pump iron day and night. He watched e­ very broadcast soccer game at Reynald’s ­house, where a dozen or so men pay ten gourdes each to view impor­tant games on a flat-­screen tele­vi­sion. In the eve­nings,

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Brunel sat on the front porch of Latéral’s shotgun ­house and enjoyed a cold Guinness or a Fruit Champagne soda when he could afford it. He would say, “Potoprens raz, man!” (Port-­au-­Prince is boring, man!) Indeed, with his many skills and sharp mind, Brunel could have performed many in­ter­est­ing jobs. However, he was stuck in a tiny neighborhood and hung out with friends who shared the same fate. The Excellent ­family’s fate is far from uncommon in Haiti. Although Kettly and Brunel want to live in their home province, they must live in a dense city in order to find income-­generating employment. For many ­people in Haiti, leaving their home provinces is not a choice but a necessity: most schools, hospitals, and development proj­ects are concentrated in the capital. ­People are willing to work in the newly built subcontracting factories in the northern part of the country (e.g., Caracol Industrial Park), but the demands of ­these jobs are far greater than their benefits. Therefore, many Haitians choose to work in the informal sector where financial gains are minimal but social rewards and solidarity are substantial. As I detail in chapter 5, ti komès (small business) is an essential social activity that brings p­ eople together. Often, the front porches of shotgun h ­ ouses serve as small boutiques where p­ eople exchange goods and information, and exterior spaces around urban h ­ ouses serve as lakou. As I sat in front of Latéral’s home on a windy night in March 2014 with a few friends, we talked about his lakou in Figaro. I showed him a few pictures I had drawn of the courtyard. Brunel knew of my interest in ­houses and spaces of socialization. A ­ fter a pause, he said, “­People in the cities make fun of moun lakou [­people of the countryside]. To me, however, being a moun lakou is a very positive ­thing. I know the lakou is the place where we gather, but it’s not just that. Being a moun lakou means that ­you’re someone who re­spects other ­people [moun ki respekte moun].” Aland Joseph, who seldom talks about the time he spent at his grandparents’ ­house in Ti Rivyé de l’Artibonite, added emotionally: “Vincent, being a moun lakou means that you have values. You re­spect your elders. It means that I’m ­here for my friends and my f­ amily, whenever. I would do impossible ­things for my p­ eople [ je ferais l’ impossible pour les miens]. That means to know how to share and how to be together—­you know, mete tet nou ansanm [put our heads together]. . . . ​Brunel is right, the lakou is not just a courtyard or a space. It’s mainly about who you are, it’s about re­spect.” Aland Joseph and I often visited some of the last urban lakou of Port-­au-­ Prince, such as Lakou Kenep in Bel Air. His and Brunel’s words made me realize that the lakou is not tied to space; rather, it is a set of values and attitudes ­toward life that travels across cramped city spaces. Although Port-­au-­Prince has few public parks, shotgun porches serve as a type of lakou, a communal place where p­ eople exchange information and help each other. They are semiprivate spaces that are essential for creating the friendships—­provisional and enduring—­and solidarity networks that proved crucial ­after the earthquake. On their Port-­au-­Prince street corner, Kettly and Brunel cultivated lakou values

Inhabiting Port-­au-­Prince ­after 2010 • 137

such as trust and reciprocity. However, their urban lakou was both inclusive and exclusive; lakous are not strictly egalitarian spaces. Hierarchies exist within families, and p­ eople also use the lakou to exclude anyone f­ amily members wish to avoid. In summary, when ­people enter shotgun ­houses, they also enter a certain type of sociability where the public life of streets and the privacy of homes mingle to create unique spaces in which many kinds of interactions and transactions occur.

Urban Marronage Rural rhythms infuse urban life in Haiti. Brunel and Kettly’s familiar trajectory illustrates how forms of indigenous urbanization sustained by cultural and social values upheld by the peasantry shape the city. ­These vernacular ­houses, with the lakous they offer, allow p­ eople to enact social, economic, and cultural norms ­shaped by the peasantry ­after the revolution. As Laura Wagner argues, “The lakou continues to be an autochthonous and effective form of social organ­ization and cooperation to this day, in the absence of a functional state or official authorities. This aspect of the lakou is particularly relevant to keep in mind as we consider forms of spontaneous post-­disaster social organ­ization. In the city, and particularly in the post-­disaster city, the traditional kinship-­based lakou has transformed into a more inclusive, non-­strictly familial settlement pattern—in other words, lakous have come to represent and embody new forms of community and fictive kinship” (2014, 81). Following Wagner’s ideas, I previously argued that the international response to the housing crisis was inadequate ­because it failed to account for ­these fundamental aspects of Haitian social life. Understanding the values and practices of the lakou means understanding that Haitians are used to helping one another and that the social bonds created and maintained in neighborhoods are key to post-­earthquake recovery. Instead, as Bernadine Georges has mentioned, international organ­izations and the Haitian state deliberately displaced ­people and ignored long-­established neighborhoods. As Mark Schuller has written, before the earthquake, “extended ­house­holds ­were the basis of solidarity and collective survival. The post-­quake aid ruptured this institution” (2016, 99). The buildings I have described in this chapter clearly indicate that collectives, e­ ither in the bourgeois lakou or in the spaces of inclusivity of the shotgun ­house, are ingrained in Port-­au-­Prince’s architectural arrangements. ­These vernacular ­houses, strong reminders of enduring peasant values, are designed to foster freedom and autonomy. The historian Johnhenry Gonzalez reminds us that “rather than the urbanization of Haiti, with ensuing pro­cesses of modernization and capital accumulation, Haitian intellectual Jean René has aptly characterized internal migration in twentieth ­century Haiti as the ‘ruralization of Port-­au-­Prince’ ” (2019, 253). However, this does not imply a s­ imple unilateral demographic transfer of rural

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populations to urban worlds; René and Gonzalez instead suggest that the peasantry’s everyday re­sis­tance to capitalism and to state-­led export economies shape a city where most ­people are actively disconnected from the national grid of infrastructure and ser­vices. Living in shotgun-­like structures and operating small businesses where profits are low, socialization is maximized, and tax evasion is efficient indicate a form of urban marronage—­the creation of autarkic communities that live away from state authorities. ­These practices are a con­temporary continuation of colonial re­sis­tance. Shotgun ­houses ­were widespread in maroon communities during the colonial period (Edwards 2009), and marronage became widespread ­after Haiti’s in­de­pen­dence when many ­people escaped authoritarian regimes that tried to force them into exploitive forms of wage ­labor (Gonzalez 2019). This form of re­sis­tance first occurred in territories that ­were hard to access. However, as the country’s population grew, and as rural exodus increased, ­people who lived in ­these autarkic socie­ties went to urban areas and “reproduced rural economic institutions and social habits, including informal markets, squatting and contesting land claims, widespread domestic servitude, traditional religious ser­vices, an infinity of open-­air marketplaces, unbanked systems of economic exchange (including barter and informal credit arrangements), urban reiterations of the lakou system of f­ amily compounds, and constant circulation of p­ eople and goods to and from the rural provinces” (Gonzalez 2019, 253). Shotgun ­houses, in all their urban iterations, may be found throughout the mazelike neighborhoods they engender in Port-­au-­Prince. Transformed gingerbread h ­ ouses also enable forms of indigenous urbanization anchored in marronage. Importantly, t­hese two types of vernacular buildings are far more than shelters: they foster a tangible form of urban citizenship that exceeds l­egal definitions. It is a form that enables p­ eople to escape their pariah status. This alternative citizenship takes shape through social, cultural, economic, and religious practices as they unfold in a built environment that echoes rural values and ways of life. If citizenship is created through material and ­legal connections—­and unmade through disconnects—­people who live in Port-­au-­Prince have created their own form rooted in dwellings and spheres of belonging that perpetuate the ideals and practices of freedom they inherited from the Haitian peasantry.

5

Daily Life in the Shotgun Neighborhoods of Downtown Port-­au-­Prince On a hot after­noon in March 2014, ­after a full day observing and talking with state workers who w ­ ere rebuilding the Place Saint-­Anne park in downtown Port-­ au-­Prince, I walked to the ­house of my friend Clomène Firmin. Her home was a place where I could sit in the shade, enjoy a cold drink, and write my daily notes. Clomène ran a small cold drink business and allowed select clientele to sit in her front courtyard where her s­ ister, Monique, usually sold produce. I met the Firmin ­family in September 2013 when my research partner, Aland Joseph, introduced me to Clomène and her husband, Alain. At the time, I was documenting vernacular ­houses in downtown Port-­au-­Prince that ­were slated for eventual de­mo­li­tion, and Aland thought Clomène, who had lived downtown in a four-­ bedroom shotgun h ­ ouse since 1994, might have something to say on the topic.1 Her husband runs a small lottery kiosk nearby and works intermittently as a mechanic. Clomène usually starts her business day at 6:00 a.m. As she noted, “Since I moved in[to] this h ­ ouse, I’ve been completely in­de­pen­dent. I’ve never asked the government or NGOs [nongovernmental organ­izations] for anything, even when business is slow.” With both pride and humor, Clomène often repeated, “M pa janm chita—­I never sit.” Indeed, I have seldom seen Clomène idle. Even when she takes a lunch break, she walks around with her plate, watches her favorite TV show for a c­ ouple of minutes in the living room, and then heads back to the courtyard to manage the ­family operations.

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FIG. 15  ​Clomène Firmin. Photo by Aland Joseph.

In this chapter, I detail and analyze the life history of Clomène Firmin, a ti komèsan who, ­until May 2014, ran several commercial activities from her shotgun ­house in the Monatuf neighborhood—­the heart of Port-­au-­Prince. Monatuf is an area where the ethos and material culture of the Black ­middle classes have durably marked this part of the capital. At the time, Clomène lived in the h ­ ouse where she formerly worked as a maid for a ­woman who held a job in the Presses Nationales, a state-­owned printing com­pany. Although the owner of the ­house, Madame Lucille, left to ­settle in Canada in 1997, her presence still partially ­orders life in this space. In their ornamentation and room functions, many of ­these ­houses represent the values of members of the Haitian m ­ iddle class who once lived in the capital, which grew substantially from the early 1940s to the mid1960s, but who l­ ater left to live abroad or in other parts of the country. I focus on Clomène Firmin’s business to explore the intersection between architecture that reflects the values of this bygone social class and the commercial practices of ­women who now work from their homes. At first glance, the middle-­class ele­ments of her h ­ ouse and the lingering presence of its owner seem to impose restrictions on the business opportunities Clomène can explore. However, I argue that the h ­ ouse itself, the multiple meanings and functions it embodies, and Clomène’s relation to its owner allow her to navigate a set of flexible social values and identities. Ultimately, the ­house and this relationship allow Clomène to tap into the social and spatial practice of the rural world in which she was raised in order to live an in­de­pen­dent life and create ­viable spheres of social and economic exchange in the city. In Haiti, the shotgun ­house is first and foremost the

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­ ouse of a fiercely in­de­pen­dent peasantry that created autonomous economies h around the possession of small plots of land in the de­cades following the 1804 in­de­pen­dence. In this chapter, I suggest that by using urban shotgun structures in par­tic­u­lar ways, w ­ omen who migrated from the countryside infuse the egalitarian values and economic practices of rural life into the heart of Port-­au-­Prince. Moreover, I argue that in their relation with vernacular architecture, ­people reinvent themselves, create economic and social venues, and implement a potentially fruitful form of indigenous urbanization in Haiti. This refashioning of dwellings into commercial hubs points to an impor­tant mode of urban life that is often erased within housing proj­ects sponsored by NGOs and the state. In a way, Clomène Firmin’s life history shows that paths to autonomy and self-­sufficiency exist outside the aid economy and beyond imported housing solutions. If the front room of Clomène’s ­house used to be a richly ornamented salon where the previous owner held formal parties, this well-­ventilated space has now been transformed into a storage room for expensive items such as mattresses. Clomène also uses it to host selling events where a small group of her acquaintances gather to examine new clothes and shoes that she and her s­ ister buy twice a year. The h ­ ouse’s original functions and symbolic meanings have changed, but the ethos of the Haitian urban m ­ iddle classes and the presence of the h ­ ouse’s former owner remain palpable. In many ways, downtown shotgun h ­ ouses such as Clomène’s, with their salons, fine latticework, and sophisticated cornices and pilasters, represented middle-­class architectural aesthetics in the past and continue to do so. Historically, this aesthetic incorporated ornamental ele­ments that w ­ ere commonly found on the large Victorian h ­ ouses of the bourgeoisie and on small, modest buildings; paying attention to room decoration meant that a person intended to receive guests other than f­ amily members. Th ­ ese h ­ ouses, and their rooms’ vari­ous functions, have been repurposed t­ oday to fit the needs of p­ eople who use them as both residential and commercial space. The shotgun h ­ ouses are symbolic of a certain way of life that was suddenly interrupted in Haiti during the transition from the Duvalier dictatorship, which relied on p­ eople living in the city’s historic districts, to a string of regimes that rendered this ­middle class negligible.2 Now the ­houses are liminal areas where middle-­class ethos and lower-­ class rural values combine to create spaces of belonging and exchange. Th ­ ese ­houses have been repurposed in creative ways in direct response and challenge to neoliberal forms of development planning, and they reflect the con­temporary middle-­class aspirations of Haitian rural mi­grants. ­These aspirations and their architectural materializations, which I detail below, could be seen as foreclosures for the p­ eople of lower socioeconomic status who live in t­ hese h ­ ouses t­ oday. However, as I argue in this chapter, t­ hese h ­ ouses and their symbolic ele­ments also open economic and social possibilities—­particularly for w ­ omen. In their businesses and economic inventiveness, w ­ omen use t­ hese h ­ ouses in a distinct mode of work and entrepreneurship. Meanings associated with

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architectural forms change dynamically and cannot be viewed in a fixed perspective that implies buildings naturally echo embedded symbolic and cultural structures. In this chapter, I discuss a par­tic­u­lar type of built environment in which a class of w ­ omen who have been regularly marginalized now conduct commercial transactions. This environment does not determine how their social and economic activities unfold, but it nonetheless partly conditions the pragmatic and resourceful uses of shotgun h ­ ouses by t­ hese small-­business entrepreneurs. ­Because of neighborhood location, access to resources, and common symbolic references, it also widens the pool of clients to which small-­business entrepreneurs have access. Working in h ­ ouses that formerly belonged to members of the Haitian Black ­middle class, the ­women I discuss in this chapter practice a form of social entrepreneurialism that takes place in a domestic sphere and is traversed by multiple social positions and flexible modes of organ­ization and values. In drawing on the life history of Clomène Firmin, a ti komèsan (small merchant) who lived and worked in Rue du Champ de Mars from 1994 to 2014, this chapter explores how gender, commerce, and space intertwine. I describe flexible economic practices and their relationships to urban built environments and argue that a legacy of h ­ ouse rules, morals, and class values associated with the appearance and function of shotgun h ­ ouses partially shapes the spatial and economic expansion of female-­led businesses in Port-­au-­Prince.

Small Domestic Entrepreneurship Since the 2010 earthquake, Clomène’s ­sister Monique and three of her ­children have lived in Clomène’s ­house; their apartment in Delmas 32 had collapsed a few days ­after the disaster. “It’s a miracle,” Monique told me, “none of my ­children ­were hurt. My oldest one got badly injured on the head, but he’s now ­doing okay. He lives with his f­ ather in Poste Marchand.” Clomène’s and Monique’s families coexisted peacefully in a thirteen by forty-­eight-­foot, four-­room shotgun ­house. The h ­ ouse was prob­ably built in the 1910s given the stucco Greek columns that sustain its gable and the ornamented front porch that was fash­ion­able in the Ca­rib­bean during that era (Crain 1994). The ­house has a steep, corrugated iron roof and high ceilings as well as elevated floors covered with pink and green earthenware tiles. It is a ­house that can withstand heavy rains and many kinds of disasters. Indeed, its well-­built timber, brick, and cement structure enabled it to resist the earthquake. As Clomène remembered, “I was cooking in the courtyard, and the ­house began to shake hard. It was like every­thing bent to the right and to the left like a palm tree shaken by high winds! Two l­ ittle rooms I had built in the back courtyard collapsed completely [krazè net]. I sort of rebuilt one, but we d­ on’t inhabit it, it’s a ti kay for the lwa [a small h ­ ouse for Vodou deities].” The back courtyard comprises a small outdoor bathroom with a deep well and an area covered by a tin roof that protects the kitchen and the three large chest freezers

Daily Life in Downtown Port-­au-­Prince • 143

that enable Clomène to lead a sustainable cold drink business. ­There is a four-­ foot-­wide corridor on the left side of the ­house and a sixteen by sixteen-­foot front courtyard enclosed by an iron gate that opens onto Rue du Champ de Mars. In this part of the city, the scars of the earthquake, in the form of cracked or collapsed buildings, render this environment fragile and confer to it an almost ephemeral nature. Many p­ eople have no choice but to live in t­ hese ruined buildings and to use newly freed spaces for commercial activities. In this precise case of repurposing the recent ruins of the earthquake in the former colonial grid, it seems that urban life is mostly improvised and fleeting and that f­ utures are foreclosed. Often, p­ eople who live and work in t­ hese ruined spaces negotiate their presence in such structures on an ad hoc basis and experience the constant threat of being evicted, displaced, or robbed. However, Clomène’s ­house was no ruin. It was indeed abandoned by its owner, who left for Canada in 1997, and the earthquake left its imprint in the form of two big cracks in the rear bedroom and the living room. Even though the ­house could have benefited from repairs, it did not create a sense of ­future lost. To the contrary, it opened new possibilities for ­women who, as Black females from the countryside, had been relegated to the margins of the capital’s society and economy. Many of the small shotgun h ­ ouses or buildings that resisted the seism testify to the resilience of this type of architecture. Modest in size, built with light materials by skilled carpenters, and often adorned with handcrafted ele­ments, the shotgun buildings of Port-­au-­Prince have ­housed p­ eople who work for the state, university, tribunals, or reputed schools that dot this part of the city. Starting in the mid-1980s, however, the urban ­middle classes started to leave this area. Key ­factors motivating migrations included state worker layoffs, growing density in downtown areas, and major economic instability. Many members of the ­middle classes left the country for Canada, France, or the United States. ­Others moved into the hills that surround Port-­au-­Prince, and many of them still live t­ here ­today. Often, ­those who currently live in ­these ­houses had worked for the ­owners, who allowed them to remain a­ fter they had departed. Unlike the o­ wners of the ­houses in which they live, the ­people with whom I talked almost never found employment in the formal sector. However, they nonetheless used available resources in creative ways and ­were able to sustain themselves without the help of aid organ­izations. The fact that they informally inherited ­houses in which they had forged relations with middle-­class o­ wners had two effects: it caused a sense of instability ­because they ­were in ­legal limbo and could face eviction at any time; and it prompted a sense of belonging within a neighborhood where they could generate business opportunities. In February 2014, my field associate Aland Joseph and I conducted a small survey to determine who rented and who owned the places in which they lived. On a random sample of fifty housing units comprising single ­houses and apartments in Rue du Champ de Mars and Rue de l’Enterrement, we found out that 8 ­percent of t­ hese units ­were occupied by proprietors, 44 ­percent ­were rented,

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and 40 ­percent w ­ ere inhabited by p­ eople who had ties to proprietors or had worked in ­these h ­ ouses. This short survey pointed to a peculiar mode of inheritance where bonds with h ­ ouse o­ wners allowed ­people to stay in­def­initely in the ­houses they occupied. All apartment units in the sample had been rented (affermé, or rented for a full year with prices that ranged from $1,600 per year for a roughly four hundred-­square-­foot, one-­bedroom apartment to $3,000 per year for an apartment the same size with modern amenities), but many single concrete and wooden h ­ ouses w ­ ere instead inherited in a singular fashion. In other words, t­ hese middle-­class h ­ ouses w ­ ere passed to ­people who worked in the informal economy or for former o­ wners but did not necessarily share the privileges or aspirations of the m ­ iddle class. Most of t­ hose who live in t­ hese buildings t­ oday ­were born in the countryside where they had lived in similar h ­ ouses. In urban shotgun ­houses, they mobilize economic practices that are extremely common in the country’s rural provinces. In par­tic­u­lar, ­women who sell goods and surplus produce from their homes or markets create social relations based on trust and reciprocity that allow them to rely on one another in times of crisis.

The Race, Class, and Gender Nexus Before I fully describe Clomène’s business activities and the dif­fer­ent kinds of capital engendered by what she does ­every day, I ­will first discuss the structural and symbolic constraints that w ­ omen face in ti komès. While Clomène’s story and trajectory are unique, the physical vio­lence, tense and often humiliating hierarchical relations, and lack of economic possibilities she had to overcome are common among ­women from the provinces who seek employment in Port-­au-­ Prince. Formal work possibilities for Haitian ­women are scarce. Even working in gruesome conditions in factories for salaries that barely sustain an individual is seldom a possibility (Schuller 2009b). Many ­women often have no choice but to toil as domestic servants in vari­ous social milieus. W ­ hether they work for members of the economic elite in the heights of the capital or for lower-­class families living along the city’s periphery, most work long hours and assume a subservient role that has traditionally been recognized as “natu­ral” to Black Haitian ­women. As Laura Wagner noted when recalling the story of her friend Mélise, who worked as an underpaid domestic servant, w ­ omen often consider ti komès a route to in­de­pen­dence and self-­employment. Domestic work is often exploitive and time-­consuming, and it tends to crush ­people’s feelings and confidence while offering few financial benefits. Ti komès appeals to many ­women who seek freedom ­because it offers a way to exercise the business skills most acquired in the provinces, and it involves complex commercial negotiations in markets (any small transaction requires a quasi-­ritual amount of bargaining). Moreover, Haitian ­women have engaged in the island’s economic life as entrepreneurs since colonial times. Being a businesswoman, big or small, is a highly prestigious activity and poses a desirable way of life. ­Because ­women from the provinces often

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support their families back home through work in the capital (Wagner 2014), many consider ti komès a worthwhile risk; it offers a w ­ oman opportunities to be her own boss and to try to build monetary savings that domestic or factory work do not allow. Clomène is a Black w ­ oman who moved to Port-­au-­Prince from the southwestern provinces in 1982. In the capital, she f­ aces the stigmas of being “a moun andeyò,” a person from the provinces, and of being Black and female. Like many rural mi­grants, she was sent to a relative’s ­house in the capital in order to generate extra revenue for her ­family in the Jérémie region. ­Here, I describe the layers of structural stigma faced in ­today’s Haiti by a Black ­woman who lacks substantial financial means. Gender, class, and race intersect as ele­ments constitutive of certain ­people’s noncitizenship. First, in a country where 95 ­percent of citizens are Black, colorism is nonetheless a barrier. The daily racism Black p­ eople encounter in Port-­au-­Prince is stunning. For instance, p­ eople with darker skin pigmentation are systematically screened when they enter supermarkets and are required to leave their belongings in storage while they shop. As the Haitian journalist Nicole Siméon wrote in 2012, Black ­people are “humiliated, reduced to social outcasts without rational reasons” in their daily errands and are refused the privileges that whites and “mulâtres” are offered. This clear inheritance from the country’s racially or­ga­ nized colonial society did not dis­appear when Black po­liti­cal power was strengthened during the presidencies of Dumarsais Estimé and François Duvalier but rather was reinforced by the latter, whose policies solidified the economic powers of Levantine families and “élites mulatres” (Nicholls 1996). Second, Black Haitian w ­ omen have been represented popularly in what Michel Rolph Trouillot named “Christian hierarchies of civility,” which have isolated Black w ­ omen as agents of corruption and sexual perversion (1995, 77). The anthropologist Gina Ulysse has astutely noted that Black ­women have repeatedly been depicted as “ ‘mannish’ beings, ‘accustomed to hard l­abour’ and lacking morals and having an unrestrained sexuality that debased them as the archetypal female animal” (2007, 25). In addition, foreign writers have tended to portray Haitian w ­ omen as sexually unrestrained “tropical temptresses” (Daut 2015, 198). ­Until recently, Black w ­ omen have been depicted in Haitian lit­er­a­ture as intimately linked to nature, maternity, and hard menial work, which has ontologically fixed them in categories that deny them rationality or abstract intelligence. Liberal writers such as Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, who have powerfully described the lives of ­people who come from popu­lar classes, have portrayed Black ­women as strong and valiant, with hands toughened by manual work, and have used telluric meta­phors to describe them (Latortue 1984). During my own fieldwork, I heard such repre­ sen­ta­tions voiced in many social circles, by ­people who wanted ­either to demonstrate their re­spect for Black w ­ omen or to characterize them as manipulable commodities.

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Given the brutal structural constraints Black w ­ omen face in Haiti, it was not surprising to hear Clomène say that she had suffered a ­great deal in her life—­ “pase anpil, anpil soufrans.” In the interview excerpt below, we see how the aforementioned forms of stigma permeated Clomène’s life from the moment she arrived in Port-­au-­Prince. As she often mentions, she ­will never return to the life of a domestic servant. For her, ti komès is a way to build autonomy and to ensure a ­future for her c­ hildren. Most of Clomène’s revenue goes t­ oward her c­ hildren’s school fees and supplies since she wants her d­ aughters to succeed in the medical or educational field. Clomène’s poignant life history is unfortunately very common: I left Jérémie a long time ago [a major city in southwest Haiti]. I left Jérémie when I was 10 or 11. In 1982, I remember. I lived in Chambellan, in the commune of ­Grand Fond. You have to cross a big river to reach my ­house. It’s a beautiful place with plenty of good food: sweet potatoes, plantains, malanga, lam, mazonbel. Not rice with pea sauce [diri ak sòs pwa—­the most common food in Port-­au-­Prince]! You have so much more produce. H ­ ere, it’s rice! I was a child when I left. I was born in November 1972. My m ­ other’s cousin placed me as a domestic servant in a home. It was a tough life, as I told my mom. I washed, cooked for them. The husband overworked me. I cooked for him, made him coffee, [he] showed me how to clean with a wet towel, how to mop. If madame woke up and my morning chores ­were not finished, she would bang my head on the wall. I cried and cried. If the pan w ­ asn’t clean[ed] well, she would hit me in the head with it. I know what misery is. Madame did not have ­children. She was newly married. I went to stay with my aunt. She was like my dad. I actually ended up longing for my previous employer. My aunt almost killed me by hitting me with pans. If I was long fetching w ­ ater, she would hit me with a stick. If I went to the market and was not fast enough to come back, I would take the stick. I came to a point where I was asking God to let me die in a car accident. ­Every day, e­ very day. Before I go to sleep, I would pray: God, let a car crash me so my misery ends. I was just a kid. I remember three times my aunt hit me very hard. One time, her husband came home with a peanut butter jar. When he opened it, he spilled oil on himself. They said that I had eaten from it and replaced it with oil. I had not eaten anything. I w ­ ill never forget it. She beat me. Another time, her husband came home with four chewing gum packs. He put them in his pocket and forgot about them. He accused me of eating his gum and beat me and beat me. Another time, my aunt had gold earrings my ­mother gave her. One day, she misplaced one earring and accused me of stealing it. It was in a jar, and she had forgotten about it. She beat me so hard I still have the scars. I cried, cried, cried. She was a savage person, and I’ve been beat a lot [m manje anpil baton—­literally: I ate a lot of stick]. But she would educate you the right way, teach you how to properly speak in public and how to behave.

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This is the reason why I manage my own affairs in my own way [m jere bagay m pou kont mwen]. You see my goddaughter, she lives with me. I would never beat her like I would never touch my own c­ hildren. I want her to feel at ease, I consider her equal to my own ­children. ­People said we ­wouldn’t get along, but ­we’re d­ oing very well! She’s still h ­ ere, she ­didn’t go back to her mom. I educate her the right way b­ ecause she w ­ ill need to work one day! She ­doesn’t sit and do nothing. She learns and works. I ­don’t want her to know sorrow [chagren]. I manage all of them pretty well. Suffering is suffering [tout doulè se menm doulè], and if she suffers, it would be like my own ­children suffering. I protect her. This ­little girl re­spects me. She re­spects me a lot, she’s like my child [ban m anpil respè, se tankou pitit mwen]. My aunt lived in Rue de L’Enterrement. We lived next to Madanm Batiste [in an alley of four housing units]. That’s where I spent my childhood, in this small corridor [ yon ti koulwa, ti koridò]. Madanm Batiste is a good friend. I was friends with elders. Madanm Batiste has a son, Oudi. I call him Godfather. He is good to me, tolerant. They w ­ ere good to me. I always showed them a lot of re­spect. Madanm Batiste is from Jérémie. From the city. I come from provinces, in Chambellan. I have an aunt, an u­ ncle, my ­sister. I love them, but I ­can’t go t­ here often. ­Going to Jérémie is a prob­lem: it’s a big trip, you need money. Roundtrip is about 1,000 HTG [$20]. When you arrive, you need another 1,500 HTG [$30] to buy groceries for your relatives and for giving them a l­ ittle money. I last went t­ here two years ago, my aunt was sick, and I went to visit and help her. They suffer a lot back ­there.

Madanm Batiste, Clomène’s surrogate m ­ other, told me that Clomène’s teen years ­were rough. She said Clomène only found refuge with her and that she healed Clomène when she was wounded and gave her the attention, love, and re­spect she did not receive from her aunt. As Madanm Batiste told me: “She was a sweet, sweet child. But her aunt whipped her up and beat her up too often. She had a hard life, but now she’s d­ oing good. I’m proud of her. I never thought she would pull herself up. Poor ­thing [Pòdyab]. . . . ​She gave me the mattress I sleep on. She ­doesn’t come to see me enough, but we talk on the phone. She runs all day, I know that, like Fifi [her ­daughter].” Working in the informal sector and d­ oing ti komès may seem less enviable than obtaining a stable, formal job. However, for rural mi­grants and working-­ class w ­ omen like Clomène, ti komès provides a way to enter relations of reciprocity that are often ruptured within the violent sphere of domestic work and poorly paid factory work. Although structural constraints decrease economic possibilities for many w ­ omen, ti komès offers a dignified economic alternative for ­women who are stuck in factories or who work long hours in private homes where they are subjugated to psychological and physical pressures (Wagner 2014). ­In addition, ­women in the country’s more rural areas have long been engaged in business activities, and they have built a strong set of collective skills based

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on the lakou. Within this structure, men mainly worked in the fields, and ­women sold surplus produce in markets, which created a vibrant local economy in which many ­women thrived as bulk vendors. The roots of entrepreneurship run deep within the female worlds of Haiti and allow ­women to enter flexible economies. Ti komès enabled Clomène to sustain the life she desired and to maintain forms of respectability—as I w ­ ill show—­that ­were partially inherited from Madame Lucille and the home she left ­behind. ­Because she was a young Black teenager from the countryside, Clomène endured many hurdles ­until she began working for Madame Lucille in 1994. At the time, Clomène was twenty-­two years old and had a child with a man who left her. Madame Lucille, on the recommendation of Madanm Batiste, hired Clomène and allowed her to stay in the back room of her h ­ ouse. ­Until 1997, Clomène worked for Madame Lucille, who respected her. Clomène maintains positive memories of her three years of ser­vice and is grateful that Madame Lucille allowed her to remain in the h ­ ouse a­ fter she moved to live with her ­daughter in Canada. The location of Madame Lucille’s h ­ ouse is prime for business. The ­house itself produces stability and social possibilities for all members of the Firmin f­ amily. As we ­will see in the next section, ­people’s abilities to create functioning homes enable them to fashion in­de­pen­dent selves.

Informal Business in Downtown Port-­au-­Prince Rue du Champ de Mars, where Clomène lived u­ ntil May 2014, is a narrow street where the usual medley of traffic—­pedestrians, buses, and taxis—­r ushes past vending stands that occupy most of the sidewalk space. The majority of the buildings are one or two stories tall and have rectangular bases, twelve-­to fourteen-­ foot street facades, and several consecutive square rooms that make the buildings resemble train cars. The buildings range from derelict wooden ­houses and quake-­ shattered cinder-­block commercial structures to brand-­new funeral homes, colorful shotgun h ­ ouses, and small apartment buildings. On Rue du Champ de Mars, a passerby can encounter wooden vernacular structures as well as functionalist commercial buildings. The street facades are often painted in bright, warm colors; the architecture is diverse and the traffic constant during the day. Commercial specialties divide this rectilinear street. From the Mausoleum Plaza, which marks the western boundary of a straight street that runs a quarter of a mile, to the Henry Truman boulevard, roughly four sections of two hundred feet each are used as spaces to sell vari­ous items: mattresses and upholstery, new and second­hand electronics, imported alcohol and homemade liquor, and woodcrafts and handmade furniture. Between ­these businesses, many w ­ omen sell dry goods, fried food, cosmetic products, and cold drinks or fruit from their porches. The main arteries of the old city center are full of commercial and professional activities that take place on the semiprivate space of the porch or directly on the sidewalks. B ­ ehind t­ hese commercial and rectilinear streets, narrow corridors

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meander through an eclectic city and provide shortcuts for pedestrians who go about their business in this part of town. Corridors historically offered “sanctuaries” where “informal social life,” the exchange of information, ser­vices, and goods, could unfold away from colonial, imperial, or state authorities (Wade 1964, 73). ­Today, work activities such as casket making or mattress crafting take place ­behind street facades in small, open spaces or in workshops that, like most of the residences that form the bulk of the corridors’ built environment, are roughly twelve by twelve-­foot rooms of cinder block roofed with sheet metal applied over a thin wood structure. Most commercial activities, however, occur on streets or on the front porches or front courts of buildings and h ­ ouses. In this lively section of Port-­au-­Prince, merchants, mechanics, carpenters, and welders exist alongside students, l­ awyers, teachers, and state employees in a zone that was mainly populated by the Black m ­ iddle class from 1940 to 1980. Clomène’s shotgun ­house was located in the “mattress section” of Rue du Champ de Mars. In this district, merchants with low financial capital navigate a commercial arena in which they have historically been “peze souse (squeezed and sucked) by the economic elite through inequitable trade practices and tax burdens, without benefit or po­liti­cal enfranchisement” (McAlister 2002, 11). Victims of state-­sponsored evictions, repression, and inequitable trade policies, the ­women who sell goods on ­these sidewalks or from domestic spaces are also vilified by the press, the upper classes, and state administrators as agents of “uncontrolled, fast and anarchic slumification [bidonvilisation incontrôlée, rapide et anarchique]” in downtown Port-­au-­Prince (Malebranche 2000, 75). However, while they explic­itly acknowledge their powerlessness in the face of institutional vio­lence, t­ hese w ­ omen also craft economic niches that financially sustain their families. They do so by creatively using their skills and h ­ ouses. Most w ­ omen with whom I spoke emphasized their hard work, skills, reputations, place attachments, and large, reliable social networks as ­factors that allow them to create spheres of female autonomy in a region where formal work and trade are essentially male-­ dominated domains. The gains of small commerce are financially thin but socially rewarding; this type of business creates multiple relations based on trust and exchange that prompt communal help when needed. Massive importation of goods and food from the United States began in 1994 ­after the end of the coup years, which ­were marked by economic recession and the unraveling of Haitian agriculture (1991–1994). Th ­ ese imports greatly disrupted the local market economies in which w ­ omen thrived as vendors, intermediaries, and bulk sellers of Haitian-­g rown produce. Tapping into their knowledge of geography and local trade conventions, many w ­ omen have found creative ways to diversify their businesses and adapt to a form of economic globalization that mainly reinforced male-­driven sectors such as customs, w ­ holesale business, or global consumer retail. Moreover, although some w ­ omen express a desire for formal, stable employment, most of the w ­ omen with whom I spoke ­favor the autonomy and social rewards provided by the informal sector. Often

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experienced with domestic work and subaltern positions in industrial and ser­ vice sectors, many ­women in Haiti prefer informal commerce ­because it enables them to have flexible work schedules, engage in relations with p­ eople they trust, and accomplish time-­consuming domestic chores that add work to their already-­ busy days (Schuller 2012b). Clomène and Monique often talked about their home region, Chambellan. Located near Jérémie in the southwestern part of the country, their f­ amily farm is overcrowded t­ oday and does not produce enough food to sustain large families. In addition, both Clomène and Monique want their ­children to go to good schools, which are non­ex­is­tent in their home region. As Monique stated, “I’m not fond of Port-­au-­Prince, but at least I can manage my own business ­here. D ­ oing business is what we do. It’s risky at times, but I ­don’t see myself ­doing something ­else.” As both emphasized, ­doing commerce was a choice, not a constraint. Clomène and Monique loved what they did and often dreamed aloud of new business opportunities. Selling cold w ­ ater and popu­lar drinks such as Seven-­Up, Fruit Champagne, and Malta has allowed Clomène to sustain her autonomous way of life. She started her business in 1997 when she bought her first freezer and sold frozen meat and cold drinks. She quickly saved money and bought two more chest freezers around which, u­ ntil 2014, an impor­tant network of ­people gravitated. In less busy hours, the chest freezers became places where p­ eople could lounge or sit, or they became t­ ables where they played dominos. They w ­ ere not s­ imple inanimate objects; rather, they ­were cherished items that Clomène and her ­daughter Franceska attended with ­great care and deemed more precious than any other furniture in the ­house. Located in the back courtyard, they ­were invisible from the street and outside of the ­house’s living space—­Madame Lucille would not have tolerated them other­wise. As Clomène stated: My freezers make me live! They make me live! I d­ on’t make credit. I sell w ­ ater bags [sache dlo] to four men [Clomène sold to seven clients before the earthquake]. One of them sells in front of a school. You know him, Fred. . . . ​He takes cold w ­ ater ­here twice a day, and if he has time, he pays me in the eve­ning. If not, he pays me in the morning. He’s an old friend. But I c­ an’t make credit. ­There’s a ­water truck that comes by ­every day. I buy from them, then we put the w ­ ater bags in the freezers, making sure each freezer is always full. I sell drinks in bulk, and as you know, by the unit to p­ eople I know. I have lots of clients who come just for a cold drink. All kids and ­people I know. I’ve been living in the neighborhood for about 30 years, so I know p­ eople! I do all kinds of commerce [both Clomène and Monique laugh at my interest in ti komès]. I sell beds, but right now I d­ on’t have any. I sell mattresses. I sell pèpè, I buy pèpè Kennedy [second­hand clothes that are bought in bulk by the “ball” and mainly come from the United States].3 You find them in depots in Carrefour, Tabarre, and ­here, downtown not far from the port. I know how to buy and sell bales of second­hand clothes. You buy it by the bale or by the

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box. They make a ­little hole in the bale [bal] for you to take a quick look, you ­don’t see much, and you have to decide fast. Merchants w ­ ill tell you what you have inside, but, well . . . ​it’s always a surprise. It might be good or bad. You have dif­fer­ent kinds of bales of clothes: some with shirts and underwear, some with pants and shoes . . . ​I ­don’t know for how much they sell now. I h ­ aven’t sold clothes for a while, I mainly do this before the new school year starts. A bale of good quality with shirts, briefs, pan­ties, bras goes for 3,000 HTG [$60]. A big bale goes for 25,000 HTG [$500]. You buy t­ hose in groups with friends. I’m not enough in the business to do that. I buy by the bale. I did that for a long, long time. I used to buy a ball for 700 HTG [$14]! Now, it’s very expensive. But the clothes are usually good and beautiful. Almost new. I know how to pick good bales. Depending on the quality of the bale, you make a profit from 300 to 1,000 Haitian dollars [from $25 to $100] of profit per bale. Sometimes you make nothing. It’s a lot of work to sell clothes. I sell from the front courtyard. Lots of ­people are coming, they try the clothes, they hesitate, and you need to cajole them in[to] buying. . . . ​I sell the good ­things by the unit and by bulk the bad clothes. For awhile, I also sold cosmetics, but it’s a tricky business. If you ­don’t sell fast enough, products go bad. Lipsticks, lotions, you know . . . ​Well, I never sit! That’s why I’m getting old fast. My body is stiffening. I d­ on’t rest enough. . . . ​ Cosmetics . . . ​[Monique helped make the list h ­ ere]: soap, brushes, toothpaste, perfume, shampoo, combs, toothbrushes, makeup, pedicure sets, manicure sets, hand lotion, body lotion. . . . ​House cleaning supplies: Fab, Clorox . . . ​ I sell a lot of dif­fer­ent t­ hings. But I avoid cosmetics now: you invest a lot and you are not sure to get all your money back. It’s hard to sell. It’s expensive. It’s hard to calculate profits ­because it’s long term. With the mattresses: I used to go to Miragoane and buy mattresses. They ­were less expensive than the ones they make around ­here in Port-­au-­Prince. Monique and I used to travel a lot in the South to bring t­ hings to sell, like mangoes and coconuts from Leogane. It became too expensive to make the trips. I only store mattresses my neighbors make and sell them for very ­little profits nowadays.

In March 2014, I sat inside Clomène’s ­house and observed the social life of her freezers. Although dozing on a plastic chair and taking notes about the openings and closings of the freezers was not exactly an exciting ethnographic activity, it did provide insight into Clomène’s everyday life on regular weekdays. For Clomène, business starts around 6:30 a.m. when she prepares Kyra, her youn­ gest ­daughter, for school. Some mornings, she also buys w ­ ater from the truck. On o­ thers, she starts to sell her ­water stock very early. During the day, she may open and reach into her freezers about 80 times. When Clomène walks Kyra to school, Monique or Franceska takes Clomène’s money bag and continues to sell drinks. Fred, who sells cold ­water and gazeuses in Funeral Street, is her most consistent customer. He may buy w ­ ater as many as six times a day or may simply swing by to take a quick shower or to lie down for a moment on one of the

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freezers while he talks about news he just heard on the street. Fred holds a crate full of cold drinks on his head and walks around Monatuf for about twelve hours each day. His peak hours are before and right ­after school. He also stands in Rue du Champ de Mars around 4:00 p.m. when cars are stuck in traffic. When lekol lage (school is over), small groups of teen­agers who are friends with e­ ither Bob, Clomène’s son, or Franceska buy icy Cokes at Clomène’s h ­ ouse and hang out ­behind the freezers. By far, ­water sales are what keep Clomène’s business ­viable. ­A fter a full day of work, I sit with Monique and Franceska, and we calculate the approximate profits each business renders. Clomène estimates that she makes about US$150 of profit per month from ­water sales. However, her expenses during a month are quite high. Her husband Alain pays for the school fees, clothes, and supplies of the two c­ hildren they had together, Bob and Kyra. Clomène takes care of t­ hese expenses for Franceska, who was born before she met Alain. Both Franceska and Bob generate money through their own small businesses: Franceska transforms the living room into a beauty parlor where she cuts hair and gives manicures during the weekend, and Bob repairs electronic devices and charges phone batteries and other items for a small fee. Monique contributes as best as she can and often brings home discounted produce she obtains through her extensive network of friends in the produce markets. Every­one in the ­house­hold also participates in sòl, a popu­lar short-­term money-­saving method ubiquitous in Haiti. For instance, each Saturday, Monique participates in a sòl of seven ­women and contributes US$2 for a total pool of US$14. The lump sum goes to one person in the group each time the money is collected. Clomène explains, “You make sòl with p­ eople you trust and can reach easily. That’s my way of ­doing it. I’d never engage in something risky like sòl with ­people I never met.” Clomène and Monique thus participate in “solidarity entrepreneurialism,” which Mary Kinyanjui defines as self-­organized businesses in which “individuals make investments . . . ​in collaboration with ­others” while sharing “business information, ideas and space” (2014, 96). Drawing from social practices learned in their hometown, they create and participate in an urban lakou where trust and reciprocity are the driving forces of business. As Clomène explained, money is often very tight, and on bad days, she cuts her food bud­get. For many p­ eople in Port-­au-­Prince, meals are made of American rice or local fried plantains, Dominican chicken, and bean-­or onion-­based sauces. Once a week, Monique ­will cook legim, a delicious spicy stew of vari­ous vegetables and salted beef, for the ­whole ­family. The traditional foods Clomène and Monique enjoyed as ­children in the countryside, such as pitimi (millet often cooked with beef and spices) or mayi moulen (corn polenta cooked with smoked fish or fatty cuts of pork and beans), dis­appeared from the plates of working-­ class urban citizens when American imports like rice replaced traditional meals. By the mid-1990s, traditional foods had become luxuries. Fresh fruits and vegetables like avocadoes and kowosol (soursops) are mostly too expensive now for the majority of Haitians who live in urban centers. Hence, when someone

Daily Life in Downtown Port-­au-­Prince • 153

FIG. 16  ​Monique sells mangoes from the front courtyard of Clomène’s ­house. Photo by

Aland Joseph.

makes a trip to the countryside, he or she ­will likely return with watermelons or other valued fruits to give to friends and f­ amily as pre­sents. During the mango season, from late April to late July, friends, acquaintances, and passersby enter the front courtyard, buy mangoes by the piece, and sit in the shade of small trees. Monique, who is in charge of this business, offers them buckets of fresh ­water so they can wash their mangoes before enjoying them. Clomène’s ­house is well-­k nown for its fresh, rare mangoes, which are directly sourced from small producers in the Léogane region thirty miles south of Port-­ au-­Prince. As Monique and Clomène explained to me, and as I experienced, you cannot eat any kind of mangoes at any time of day. The trick is to sell on-­the-­ spot mangoes that ­people can eat at any time and to fulfill client ­orders with rarer va­ri­e­ties of mangoes: We carry mangoes you can eat on the spot at any time of the day: mango plat, mango fil, mango fransik, mango blanche. P ­ eople’s favorite ones are mango batiste and rozali. But ­those are very rare in Port-­au-­Prince. We might get some for two weeks, and then ­they’re gone, like mango kanel. This one, if you see it nowadays, y­ ou’re lucky! ­These are rare mangoes, very rare. Mango rozali is very sweet, bright orange in the inside and purple on the outside. That’s a mango you suck on. Batiste is a mango that fills you up. I also get mangoes “frajil” like mango muska. Th ­ ese are small mangoes that have lots of taste [ki gou anpil anpil!] but that w ­ ill give you a big stomachache if your belly i­ sn’t full before you eat them. That’s what I mean by “frajil” [fragile].

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Monique buys mangoes by the basket. Each basket of regular mangoes (such as blanche) contains about eighty mangoes. ­There is a w ­ hole science to buying in bulk: if the mangoes’ skins are dotted with small brown spots, they are very ripe. Hence, you can bargain with the seller for a lower price. Smells indicate if rotten mangoes are pre­sent. Prices even fluctuate based on the beauty of the fruits. Monique sells about three to four baskets per week. On a good week at the peak of the rare mango season, Monique generates a total profit of 600–700 HTG ($12 to $14). This allows her to contribute to Clomène’s h ­ ouse­hold expenses and to pay the school fees for two of her ­children in Poste Marchand. Although the profits generated are low, ti komès creates social networks and fosters the long-­term exchange of goods and ser­vices between ­people, which often proves beneficial during hard times. As I describe in the next section, d­ oing business in such a h ­ ouse occurs u­ nder certain constraints—­but also enables possibilities—­ linked to both the h ­ ouse and the inheritance of middle-­class space.

Vernacular Inheritance of Private Space In the mattress section of Rue du Champ de Mars, three vendors face wooden shotgun ­houses. Close to the corner, at Rue de l’Enterrement, sellers attract customers by showcasing their finest handmade mattresses on the sidewalks and by cajoling and conversing with passersby. ­Behind them, the gated front courtyards of ­houses serve as workshops that bustle with activity: workers stuff mattresses and painstakingly cut, clean, and sew pieces of recycled fabric together. They work on vari­ous models, which range from inexpensive mattresses stuffed with clothing to carefully crafted mattresses of springs and foam. Clomène has meticulously cared for her shotgun ­house and takes pride in its interior ornamental detail. The ­house includes partition ventilators made of finely crafted wood lattice, which separate the “salle à manger” from the front room “salon.” Originally, the “salon” was prob­ably used to host parties or converse with ­people other than ­family and functioned as the most public part of the ­house. Now this room is where Clomène stores mattresses. She noted, “The real owner of the ­house wants the front sidewalk ­free of any activity. She lives in Canada and almost never comes back ­here, but I re­spect what she wants. We only use the front courtyard for the fruit business, a few hours at the end of the day. In this front room, I just store my neighbors’ overstock and get a ­little bit from what I can sell.” Clomène re­spects the ­house own­er’s wishes and has not transformed the front room into a full-­fledged store. Occasionally, she uses this room to sell fine clothes and shoes when she has new merchandise. However, she makes sure that most of her business activities remain in places the owner considers fit for business. As a result, commercial activities remain more or less unseen. Like Clomène, many ­people who live in the area ­today had or maintain work or kin relationships with proprietors who have passed away, gone to live abroad, or moved to other parts of the city. According to Madanm Batiste, who has a

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very sharp memory, a ­great many long-­term residents began to move away in the late 1980s. As she stated in her soft voice, “Thirty years or so ago, ­people started to leave this neighborhood, moving in[to] newly built neighborhoods located in the hills of Port-­au-­Prince or abroad. I d­ on’t leave my baz [headquarters] anymore, I stay ­here on the porch or inside since I ­don’t know anyone anymore” (field notes, March 2014). Madanm Batiste often insisted that her former daily routines, such as sharing food with neighbors or chatting on the street porch with friends, have been disrupted since the coup period (1991–1994) when random po­liti­cal vio­lence, especially gender-­based vio­lence, plagued the streets of Port-­au-­Prince. As the anthropologist Erica Caple James has noted, this period completely disrupted many ­people’s daily routines and long-­term social relations, which created forms of “ontological insecurity” that influence “the experience of subjectivity and embodiment on both the individual and collective levels” (James 2010, 133). Between 2003 and 2006 and again between 2009 and 2014, this area of town was not the target of state or gang vio­lence. However, the 2010 earthquake and other violent disruptions to daily life in the past have profoundly modified social relations in this neighborhood. Such modifications manifest in senses of mistrust, self-­imposed limitations in the use of public and private space, and anx­i­eties that deeply infuse p­ eople’s daily lives. While Madanm Batiste refuses to leave this neighborhood to live in her spacious ­house in La Plaine in northern Port-­au-­Prince, she complains that semiprivate micro spaces have completely dis­ appeared for her—­especially a­ fter the earthquake when distant relatives of her neighbors occupied the empty spaces in her shared alley. Boss Arold, a sixty-­four-­year-­old man I met at Clomène’s, lived a block away in a shotgun ­house left by his former employer and became one of my key interlocutors during fieldwork. Boss Arold often clarified dif­fer­ent periods of po­liti­ cal crisis for us as well as urban changes and the populations they affected. Boss Arold ran an appliance repair workshop and had occupied a pink shotgun ­house on Rue du Champ de Mars since 1974. In ­those days, parts of the ­house ­were used as a tailoring business. Boss Arold was a young tailor, born in the Saint-­Marc region two hours north of Port-­au-­Prince, when he started to live and work in this h ­ ouse. His neighbor, the elder Monsieur Léliot, first rented his h ­ ouse in 1965 but has not paid his rent since 1974, the year he saw the proprietor of the h ­ ouse for the last time. Monsieur Léliot had no idea what happened to the man who owned his h ­ ouse and several o­ thers on the block. However, Boss Arold, who “­doesn’t like to talk about politics”—­but who only talked about politics—­ hypothesized that the “Duvalier regime got rid of him in one form or another. As a man who owned lots of property in downtown Port-­au-­Prince, he would have been killed by some po­liti­cal group at some point in his life, anyway” (Boss Arold, field notes, March 2014). Boss Arold’s ties to the place where he resided remained unclear, and I could not ascertain w ­ hether the proprietors ­were still around or not. Boss Arold lived with his son, a tailor who lived and worked from

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the back room. Of the three-­room shotgun ­house, the ­middle was inhabited by Boss Arold’s ­adopted d­ aughters, a fourteen-­year-­old girl and her six-­year-­old stepsister whose parents passed away in the earthquake, who ­were, in his words, “the apples of [his] eyes.” Clomène Firmin’s story was similar. A ­ fter years of difficult, low-­paid domestic work for ­family members and ­people who mistreated her, she settled in Rue du Champ de Mars to work for Madame Lucille—­the owner of her house—in 1994. Clomène lived in the back room with her baby Franceska, who was just four months old. Clomène developed a strong relationship with Madame Lucille that still binds her to certain social obligations and orients her moral compass ­today. As Clomène stated: I like Madame Lucille ­because we lived so well together. When she comes back from Canada, I prepare the ­house for her. I tell Alain that we need to prepare the h ­ ouse for her. I know she likes shallots, so I buy shallots. I know she likes smoked herring, so I buy smoked herring, and I make paté [a savory pastry filled with a thick spicy tomato-­herring sauce] for her. She likes meat a lot. So, I buy small cases of frozen turkey legs and wings and store them in my freezer. She’s not rich, and when she comes, she ­doesn’t have money. So I fix the ­house and prepare her meals ­because I d­ on’t want her to suffer [m pa vle li soufri]. That’s why she loves me too. I take care of her. She ­really likes me. Her distant f­ amily gossips [tripotay] about me. Her cousin and distant relatives do. But she says that I am the one who needs to take care of her ­house. Her h ­ ouse looks good, and she appreciate that. When she last came in 2004, she felt the h ­ ouse was beautiful and clean. She’s very old, she cannot work, so I’m taking care of her. W ­ e’re like f­ amily. If the h ­ ouse is demolished, I have plans to store her furniture and belongings. Look, she called me one time and told me that she has a relative who lives in one other of her h ­ ouses in Kafou who called her to tell her bad ­things about me. Madame Lucille told her: “Clomène lives h ­ ere since 1994, and when I left in 1997, I told her to take care of the h ­ ouse. I ­don’t have anything to reproach her.” With age comes wisdom! She called a friend of hers who worked at Presse Nationale, a lady who sometimes comes and have lunch with me. She told Madame Lucille, “I’ve never seen anything fishy at Clomène’s. She’s not living a bad life [li pa mennen vyiè vi]. She takes care of her baby Franceska, walks her to school, keeps the ­house clean and in good shape.” I have nothing to reproach myself with. But some ­people of her ­family who would like to get the ­house spread gossip [ fè twipotay], just t­ hings that a­ ren’t true. Madame Lucille says, “I know Clomène is not a wreck [epav], she’s not a tramp [vagabon]. She’s serious, and that’s why I trust her.” I am very careful not to engage with too many p­ eople in the neighborhood [katyè] ­because p­ eople gossip. I know some ­people h ­ ere and t­ here, but I d­ on’t engage with p­ eople living too close to my h ­ ouse. I go to p­ eople in the

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neighborhood I know very well, but not very often. You have to be very careful. Madame Lucille always told me not to engage too much with ­people in the neighborhood, she ­doesn’t want too many of them coming ­here. And I’m the same, I d­ on’t want too many ­people coming h ­ ere. I live ­here by myself, with my c­ hildren, my friends, and my f­ amily. I ­don’t go and sit at other ­people’s ­houses. I d­ on’t like ­these kinds of t­ hings [M rete nan kay mwen pèsonèl, ak pitit mwen, zanmi m, fanmi m. Men m pa ale chita kay moun, m pa renmen yon bagay konsa].

In this excerpt of an interview I conducted in her courtyard in March 2014, Clomène explains briefly how she came to live in her ­house. She speaks at length about how she maintains her reputation amid accusations of wrongdoings by ­people who covet her h ­ ouse. Although Madame Lucille has not visited the h ­ ouse in ten years, Clomène “keeps a place in her heart” (m gen plas nan kè pou li) for her. Madame Lucille, a ­widow who held a state job and raised her d­ aughter as a single m ­ other, took Clomène into her home when Clomène was a single m ­ other, too. When Madame Lucille’s health declined in the late 1990s, which impaired her mobility, Clomène bought groceries at the market for her, cooked, and took care of the h ­ ouse. Madame Lucille is pre­sent not only through her remembered h ­ ouse rules but also within the materiality of the ­house itself. The furniture and objects she left ­behind, as well as the ornamental ele­ments of the ­house such as wood lattice, create an aura of middle-­class respectability. At the same time, certain h ­ ouse ele­ ments create a melancholy atmosphere of ephemerality: cups that tumbled over during the earthquake sit askew in a glass cabinet with a lost key, and Clomène’s belongings remain packed in crates ­because of her constant fear of sudden eviction. Although Madame Lucille was not financially wealthy, she was educated, spoke French fluently, and lived by strict rules as a ­woman of relatively high social status. As Clomène recalls, she was elegant and reserved and had high expectations for her own d­ aughter as well as for Franceska. Madame Lucille valued her middle-­class standing, which was based on formal work, privacy, ­family, and hierarchy—­ideals that shape the contours of traditional Ca­rib­bean “respectability” for many ­women of her social class (Burton 1997). Even though Clomène technically conducts her business in the cracks of Madame Lucille’s rules, such as when she uses the front room for storage, some of her former employer’s values continue to shape her own life. Clomène inherited a set of values and behavioral codes, specific to the country’s Black m ­ iddle class, that praise integrity and respectability. Attending church, participating in c­ hildren’s school activities, screening her relations and t­ hose of her relatives, avoiding neighborly promiscuity, and appearing as a morally upstanding ­woman are values and practices Clomène integrates into her social self. Mainly, Clomène’s pride about being an in­de­pen­dent, hardworking w ­ oman seems to echo Madame Lucille’s own experience. While Clomène’s husband

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Alain lives at the ­house, he is often absent; seven days a week, he leaves early in the morning and returns from work late at night. Clomène has often emphasized that she is the main source of income in the f­ amily and underscores this by telling p­ eople that she “never sits.” Not being idle is a key princi­ple for the devoutly Catholic Haitian m ­ iddle class. In the Bible, for instance, Ecclesiastes 10:18 condemns idleness: “Through laziness, the raf­ters sag; b­ ecause of idle hands, the ­house leaks.” Idleness is also linked to gossip and godless talk. According to 1 Timothy 5:13, p­ eople should not “learn to be idlers, g­ oing about from h ­ ouse to ­house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not.” I do not seek to overinterpret Clomène’s words within the context of biblical quotations, but in the field, I often thought about how Catholic princi­ ples have ­shaped the Haitian middle-­class understanding of ascetic life, hard work, lack of gossip, and privacy as key ele­ments of social distinction. By keeping busy, selecting her clientele judiciously, and engaging only with p­ eople she has known for a long time, Clomène is able to live in a way that Madame Lucille would consider respectable and acceptable. Even though she lives at a distance, Madame Lucille clearly still holds power over Clomène and could evict her if certain princi­ples and obligations ­were not met. Historically, working-­class and middle-­class values have been described as oppositional categories in the Ca­rib­bean. Anthropologists of the Ca­rib­bean have repeatedly discussed the notions of “reputation” and “respectability” through a binary of values and be­hav­iors built against colonial racial and social expectations (Wilson 1973). Briefly, reputation has been described, especially in Peter Wilson’s (1973) famous ethnography of Providencia, a small Colombian island off the Nicaraguan coast, as a form of flexible adaptability where verbal skills, economic guile, and personal authority orient social recognition and economic opportunity. In the same communities, middle-­class respectability has been characterized as a “counter-­value that emphasizes the achievement of rank in the community through acquiring property, forming a stable f­ amily, and participating in education and religion” (Wilk 2001, 45). In Clomène’s case, and the cases of many ­others who reside in ­houses where they previously worked or lived, t­here is no clear-­cut behavioral pattern to demarcate respectability and reputation. However, many ­people talked about respectability as something that encompasses a set of values shared by both working-­class rural mi­grants and middle-­class urban ­people. Current residents often expressed the sense of responsibility they feel as p­ eople who live downtown in h ­ ouses that formerly belonged to a relatively power­ful group of middle-­class Black p­ eople who clearly demonstrated penchants for “respectable” values. Moreover, members of Haiti’s peasantry generally value owning property and use the home compound as a foundation on which to build thriving f­ amily lives. Landowners, small and large, rural and urban, also share a certain business-­oriented perspective and use their estates to grow in-­demand cash crops; they often gain respectability from their abilities to succeed in tough negotiations. Since the

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majority of working-­class Haitians hail from rural provinces, their desires for stability and their abilities to conduct business through trusted networks integrate seamlessly in this area of the capital. As shown in the interview excerpt above, Clomène fears gossip and fights to maintain her respectability. She’s not “living an old life,” nor is she a “wreck,” expressions that connote sexual depravity and a lack of f­ amily values. For instance, she attends Eglise Saint-­A nne, one of Port-­au-­Prince’s major Catholic churches, ­every Sunday and practices her own Vodou beliefs in private. She serves her Lwa (deity), all of them from the Rada nanchons (benevolent ­family of Vodou deities, such as Freda, Legba, and La Sirène) in a small, hidden space in the far left corner of her back courtyard. Public display of her spiritual practices, such as attending Vodou ceremonies or talking about her beliefs, would cast her as a moun andeyò—­a peasant, but literally a person who is geo­graph­i­cally, socially, po­liti­cally, and eco­nom­ically “outside”—­and potentially make her the target of witchcraft accusations. She said, At home in Jérémie, I would go to fèt patwonal [saints’ cele­brations where Catholics and Vodouyzan participate], and I would never have a prob­lem if I went to a mambo or houngan [Vodou priest] to ask for something or to get better if I’m sick. P ­ eople are knowledgeable of natu­ral medicine where I’m from, and we know with whom we can work and with whom we ­can’t. Each ­family has its own mambo or houngan. H ­ ere, in Port-­au-­Prince, you ­don’t know who is a good houngan or a charlatan. ­People do their t­ hings individually or go back in the countryside when something urgent is needed [ fè bagay pèsonèl]. You’ll find p­ eople who openly serve in the neighborhood, mostly men. I know a few good p­ eople, but even with them, I ­don’t engage in conversations about my beliefs. ­People see you ­going to church, and if you serve or not d­ oesn’t make you a better or worse Catholic. I’m a good Catholic, I love my church.

Clomène and her husband share the same beliefs, but both keep them private. Moreover, Franceska belongs to a power­ful Adventist church in the neighborhood and could be expelled for participating in witchcraft if her ­mother’s practices ­were known. As Franceska told me half-­jokingly, “the preacher says Vodou is dealing with the devil [sèvi Lwa se sèvi dyab]. I d­ on’t think it’s the devil, but I ­don’t want to be associated with it. It’s an old tradition for my mom [ yon bagay lontan]. I re­spect it as her culture, but I ­don’t want to have anything to do with it. It’s real, it’s power­ful and dangerous. My religion condemns it.” Although practicing Vodou in certain parts of rural Haiti may be beneficial for a person’s reputation and authority, sèvi Lwa (practicing Vodou) in certain districts of Port-­au-­Prince may be considered nonmodern and may damage members of families who increasingly attend radical Christian Protestant churches that actively fight Vodou prac­ti­tion­ers. In the private sphere, as Franceska’s example illustrates, ­people easily combine several forms of religion and spiritual practice and attend

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dif­f er­ent churches to serve vari­ous faith-­based and telluric needs. Franceska, like my friend Brunel whose story opened the introduction of this book, belongs to churches that vehemently oppose Vodou in discourse as well as on the ground. However, both Franceska and Brunel accept their parents’ spiritual beliefs. Clomène wants to be perceived as a “good Catholic,” and that perception does not interfere with her other spiritual beliefs; Vodou practioners can also be Catholic. Attending Saint-­A nne also extends Clomène’s social networks and allows her to engage with p­ eople outside her own social class. While Clomène goes to church for personal religious reasons, she also maintains her respectability in the pro­cess. Madame Lucille was relatively self-­sufficient and worried ­little about what ­people thought of her; she maintained a stable income and enjoyed the social recognition that came with holding a formal job. The quest for respectability that emerged in the Ca­rib­bean ­under colonial rule tended to follow Western indicators of social status such as education, work, religion, and ­family life but to work against ­these European-­based hierarchies by offering social uplift to ­people of color (Wilson 1973). For Clomène, whose commerce thrives on trust and durable friendships and whose domestic spatial practices are partially ­shaped by Madame Lucille’s expectations, reputation is also an impor­tant asset. Ideas about reputation are often based on personal rather than perceived social worth and entail complex individual ethics (Besson 1993). For Clomène, a “good” reputation meant being able to buy and sell the finest, rarest products. Her skill at commercial negotiations, her vast business network, and her connections with ­people across social strata enable her to buy brand-­name clothing at cheap prices. For instance, a week before school starts in September, select clientele swing by her ­house to buy fine shoes, pants, or shirts for their ­children. “­People know I sell clean and nice clothes and that I sell at a fair price. I ­don’t need to advertise on the radio! The same ­people have been coming ­here for years!” ­People consider Clomène to be a moun de byen (good person) who does not take advantage of ­people. Again, she avoids breaking Madame Lucille’s ­house rules by selling her wares only to handpicked clientele of friends and acquaintances. ­People also praise Clomène for her displays of solidarity with f­ amily and friends. For instance, a­ fter the 2010 earthquake, Clomène readily welcomed her ­sister and her f­ amily. For a one-­year period she also welcomed two longtime friends, who now stop by her place at least once a day to bring groceries or share a meal with her. Every­one worked in and around the ­house and shared sleeping spots and food. I could not keep track of who ­stopped by and what relation they had to Clomène and Monique, and I was surprised to see that Clomène opened her ­house to so many ­people and shared food without verbal invitation. Her ­house­hold was a fluid, welcoming place where space and goods w ­ ere shared. As the anthropologist Laura Wagner has noted, not sharing food, especially for ­people from the ­Grand’Anse region, is considered a serious breach of social norms and a display of contempt (Wagner 2014). If Clomène w ­ ere perceived as a

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person who only allowed her nuclear f­amily to live in her private space, that image would damage her reputation and her affairs and trap her in tripotay (gossip). In a sense, she diverges from patterns of respectability by living with so many ­people in such a small space, but she balances her actions by allowing only ­people she regards as ­family to stay. As she told me, Madame Lucille has no prob­lems with this and understands that the post-­earthquake situation called for wider sharing of private space. For many ­women involved in small commerce, tripotay poses a ­great danger. If a person is identified as a gossiper (or “sits at p­ eople’s h ­ ouses,” as Clomène says) or becomes the target of gossip, he or she may lose street spots, clientele, and other business opportunities. Preserving one’s perceived respectability—­and following princi­ples that build it—is key to good business practice and fruitful social life. For many w ­ omen, respectability is a desired and attainable attribute. During my field research, I noted that state employees, teachers and professors, and Haitian NGO workers s­ topped by Clomène’s h ­ ouse to examine her merchandise, which included new shoes, shirts, and cosmetic products. Her ability to tap into broader social networks appeared to be more robust than one might expect given her social background. She would invite ­these p­ eople into her home, and they would sit, chat, and drink ice-­cold gazeuze as if they w ­ ere on a courtesy visit. During such visits, her living room operates as a shop with all sorts of commodities carefully arranged on ­tables that are covered with white cloth. In ­these moments, the ornamental and material details of her h ­ ouse allow for Madame Lucille’s praesentia, a term used by Kevin Hetherington (2003, 1940) to account for “the involvement of the absent Other within the material presence of social life.” As Clomène’s h ­ ouse demonstrates, multiple social worlds can coexist in a space where relations are affected by the tangible presence of differential class markers that discharge senses of stability and vulnerability. Clomène’s business practices oscillate between certain middle-­class values, such as self-­interest and autonomy, linked to the so-­called formal sector and the dominant values of small-­ scale economies in which “the outcomes of residents’ reciprocal efforts are radically open, flexible and provisional” (Simone 2004, 408; see also Kinyanjui 2014). She was raised on a small farm where she lived with her extended ­family, shared food and chores, and practiced spirituality in the familial lakou—­the compound in which f­ amily, social, and work life is or­ga­nized (Wagner 2014, 80). Rural mi­grants in Port-­au-­Prince have retained the lakou ­house­hold pattern, even if its most salient spatial dimensions cannot be reproduced in cramped urban environments. Notably, the horseshoe-­shaped organ­ization of ti kay (vernacular ­houses, mainly shotgun structures) has almost dis­appeared in the capital. Nonetheless, the lakou remains an effective form of cooperation and social organ­ization in Haiti t­ oday (Bulamah 2013). Small commercial operations in Port-­au-­Prince are highly systematic and rely on codified social relations and, like most “community economies,” on “trust,

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care, sharing, reciprocity, cooperation, divestiture, ­future orientation, collective agreement,” which are distinctive traits of the lakou economy (Gibson-­Graham 2014, S151). As she builds commercial respectability by using the inside of her home as a shop and reception parlor for her wealthiest clientele, Clomène si­mul­ ta­neously uses the semiprivate space around her ­house to sell cold drinks, ­water, and fruit to ­people she knows and trusts—­people who may pay her at a ­later date or exchange other goods and ser­vices for what they receive. In this case, respectability and reputation are not oppositional gendered categories; they “overlap, interlink, and mutually reinforce each other” and enable the expression of flexible identities within varied social spheres (Browne 2004, 188). Clomène strategically uses domestic settings and spatial, social, and commercial practices to preserve her perceived integrity and honesty and to follow princi­ples that help build both her reputation and her respectability. This multivalence in spatial relations enables her to succeed and to reinvent herself within an open and community-­based female business sphere.

The Shotgun Economy The practices of ­women who work in small-­business commercial spheres in Port-­ au-­Prince must be understood in dialectic relation to the histories of the environments in which they live. In this context, that history includes natu­ral disasters, state brutality, colonialism, and imperial and international military occupation. For instance, even though Clomène inherited a h ­ ouse meant to foster the values of the dominant Catholic m ­ iddle class, I have shown how she transformed her shotgun h ­ ouse into a place where members of the rural mi­grant minority can thrive. I suggest that the transformation of such vernacular and heritage structures into commercial or collective residences potentially disrupts chains of legitimacy that are based on notions of heritage. It also allows marginalized ­people to structure their lives in a culturally anchored manner that produces new social possibilities. The ­people who currently live in ­these shotgun ­houses transform them from middle-­class bastions into dwellings and commercial venues, and they implement forms of “minor architecture” defined by the “making of spaces within the already built” (Stoner 2012, 16). The h ­ ouses become spaces in which ­people’s lives are reinvented. Jill Stoner’s insights on built environments are useful h ­ ere: minor architectures transform existing space and invent new spatial codes that defy aesthetic canons or preconceived architectural meanings and functions. By transforming this shotgun h ­ ouse into a hub of commercial and private activities, Clomène and her ­family enact small practices that form places rather than accepting places dictated by the physical determinism of architecture. Their use of the shotgun ­house also allowed them to enact flexible identities and to transform social hierarchies. As described above, Clomène respected Madame Lucille’s wishes and ­limited business activities in interior rooms except for when she

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transformed the front salon into a boutique. A ­ fter all, the shotgun h ­ ouse is first and foremost a vernacular building from the rural countryside, a structure similar to the ones in which Clomène and her ­sister lived as c­ hildren. Clomène’s commercial activities bridged middle-­class and lakou values; they revived the original functions of the shotgun ­house by diffusing lakou practices into and around the space. This type of practice makes a culturally anchored way of life pos­si­ble for rural mi­grants who live in a city that has repeatedly rejected them. Therefore, ­these micro practices are indeed power­ful in their effects; they show that autonomous lives outside the international aid system are pos­si­ble. In the countryside, ­houses are mostly used at night. At Clomène’s ­house, commercial activities, and life in general, took place outside. If most social interactions occurred in the salon or salle à manger when Madame Lucille ruled the ­house­hold, this pattern has been inverted u­ nder Clomène’s reign. She uses the features of the ­house in a very dif­fer­ent fashion. ­Because she lives in a formerly middle-­class neighborhood, Clomène is able to access a wider clientele than would other­wise be pos­si­ble. She also has consistent electricity; this is one of the few neighborhoods in Port-­au-­Prince that have near-­constant power. Her location makes it pos­si­ble for her to reinvent a lakou system of solidarity in the heart of the city. The space around the h ­ ouse that Madame Lucille deemed fit for commercial activities invites—­instead of impedes—­the formation of reciprocal social and economic relations. The constraints imposed by Madame Lucille are actually subverted since they enable Clomène and Monique to engage in social entrepreneurship. At the same time, the ­house itself, its architectural distinctiveness and location, opens Clomène’s possibilities for inhabiting flexible and changing social identities. Rather than analyzing middle-­class values and the values of the lakou in opposition, I have shown how Clomène’s commercial activities revive the original functions of shotgun h ­ ouses from rural areas in the urban environment of Port-­au-­Prince. In this part of town, informal commerce is commonplace, even if merchants have transited through ­these streets only recently. Commercial trades are thus not only ­shaped by a built environment that stands as a messy archive of past po­liti­cal, familial, and residential regimes but are also formed by flexible traditional skills ­people learned in the provinces or in the city over a long period of time. As Stoner has noted, the minor architecture that small businesswomen implement in this formerly bourgeois neighborhood “is space displaced, a deterritorialization. It challenges authority and its management of time; it is po­liti­cal. It overrides heroic aspirations with an inclusive, collective voice” (Stoner 2012, 14). While minor architecture deterritorializes certain values, practices, and forms, it also reterritorializes the collective lakou princi­ples in a place where hailing from the countryside has long been a marker for exclusion. In a country where the aid economy and state-­sponsored housing tend to suffocate ­people’s social and economic possibilities, ­women’s use of shotgun ­houses may offer a blueprint for thinking of architecture not as a static reservoir of past meanings and

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functions but as an ensemble of malleable forms that are transformed through practices that generate culturally anchored economic horizons. The tapestry of meanings embedded in shotgun ­houses fosters the creation of dwellings in and around them. To dwell means for ­humans to be in a pro­cessual, dialectic relation with their surrounding environments in a way that multiple values and flexible identities can emerge. Architectural forms and the ghostly presence of a former dominant social class do not determine how ­people who live in inherited spaces conduct their lives. In this case, Clomène reinvests her urban shotgun h ­ ouse with the values and practices of the lakou. I suggest that this type of vernacular transformation is a form of indigenous urbanization where hierarchies and social positions are contested and where a collective economy regrows.

6

Demolishing Shotgun Neighborhoods

When Boss Arold heard that his ­house might be demolished soon, he could not believe the news. He turned to me and said, “They can give me $10,000 [or] $50,000. I d­ on’t want it. It’s my home. Where would I go? It’s an old h ­ ouse, it may not be worth anything to them, but I have my neighbors ­here, my memories. I have my workshop. It’s a good h ­ ouse. All made of wood. Th ­ ere are rotten parts, but during the earthquake, nothing moved! No damage at all! Even if it collapses, it d­ oesn’t kill you, it’s wood!” Rumors had started circulating about official letters that noted the ­whole neighborhood would be flattened on April 30, 2014. The government had recently designated the area around Boss Arold’s shotgun h ­ ouse as a zone of public utility. However, like many of his neighbors, Boss Arold questioned w ­ hether the state would demolish good h ­ ouses while many ­people still lived in tent camps. That same day, Clomène called to tell me that her neighbor had shown her a letter stating that their neighborhood would be demolished soon. But nobody knew when this would happen. When I mentioned the letter to Boss Arold, he said that burglars could have sent ­these letters to lure ­people out of their homes. The idea that the government might bulldoze this part of the city seemed absurd and illogical to many of my friends. Yet they ­were all very familiar with the state’s long history of destroying neighborhoods without consulting residents. ­Later that day, Aland and I walked along Rue de la Ré­union, just a block away from Boss Arold’s and Clomène’s h ­ ouses. We saw barricades of burning tires. Protesters threw beer ­bottles at us from a rooftop. We ran ­under the gallery of a 165

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printing shop and talked with the p­ eople inside. They said that demonstrators thought I might be one of the urban planners supporting the de­mo­li­tions. Aland and I told them that we w ­ ere collecting information for an article we planned to publish in Haiti’s main newspaper, Le Nouvelliste. The shop owner replied, “In 2010, they demolished a w ­ hole square of h ­ ouses right t­ here to build a new ministry. They started to build, indeed, but the construction has been halted for more than a year! Now, they ­don’t have money to finish their construction proj­ ects, but they have enough to come and raze our residences. . . . ​Mechanstè! [It’s evil!]” Then, Aland and I tried to locate one of the letters Clomène mentioned, but we had no luck. I went to see Clomène the next day. Aland and my friend Rodrigo Bulamah, an anthropologist who was in Port-­au-­Prince, joined me. When we arrived at Clomène’s ­house at 3:00 p.m., she was sitting in her living room. I was surprised; she usually works at that time, but she said she was depressed and did not feel like working. We sat down and talked about the potential de­mo­li­tions. Aland recorded the conversation, and Clomène said: I ­don’t know when they ­will start the de­mo­li­tion. I d­ on’t know when I w ­ ill start to move. . . . ​They ­don’t say when they start. In 2009, they demolished a part of the neighborhood adjacent to the prison. They gave a month for ­people to move out. A long time before they demolished, though, they gave compensations to some proprietors. Proprietors ­didn’t say anything to anyone and rented their places knowing that they soon would be demolished. . . . ​The state bulldozers come and destroy every­thing, including p­ eople’s belongings [krazè tout bagay moun yo]. I need to pack my belongings; I’ll pull out parts of the ­house to build myself a ­little place in Onaville [about 30 minutes north of Port-­au-­ Prince]. I ­don’t have money. ­There’s nothing ­else I can do. All the p­ eople from this area w ­ ill do that. The state w ­ ill take this place [leta ap prann zon nan]. ISPAN [Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National] declared my h ­ ouse a patrimonial structure ­after January 12, 2010. P ­ eople are angry, but you cannot beat up the state. You cannot beat up the state [ou pa ka goumen leta . . . ​ou pa ka goumen leta]. [Clomène paused] I need to save Madame Lucille’s stuff. I need to go to her other h ­ ouse in Carrefour to save her belongings. That w ­ ill cost money! Her furniture is so heavy, it’s solid wood! Beautiful furniture. . . . ​ They already told us in October they would demolish our place. It ­didn’t happen. . . . ​I’ll go to Onaville, to live on state-­owned land, like every­one does. . . . ​Proprietors receive compensations, not us. Onaville is hot, dry. I’ll build a big room to put my belongings in, my freezers. . . . ​We might have to live in a tent. I’ll take the interior wooden lattice of the ­house. It’s too beautiful to be destroyed.

Clomène’s power­ful words mirrored many ­people’s thoughts; they felt unable to fight back against the state. Instead of communicating clearly and transparently

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about its urban planning proj­ects, the Haitian state used rumors and piecemeal information—­which effectively suppressed mass-­protest organ­izing. ­After we talked, Clomène and I de­cided to collaboratively write and publicize her story in order to raise funds for her ­family. She felt it was impor­tant to tell her story and to show that her neighborhood was not a nest of thugs as the government proclaimed. We then created an illustrated webpage about her story and collected $850. I gave the money to Clomène on May 20, 2014, so that she could or­ga­nize her move and find a place to rent. Although the money was insufficient to secure a place in downtown Port-­au-­Prince, it allowed Clomène to move to Madame Lucille’s second home in Carrefour. Clomène moved to Carrefour on May 29. A ­ fter we spoke a month l­ ater, Clomène called to say that the de­mo­li­tions had halted. She thought the current de­mo­li­tion plan might mirror the one from October 2013, and nothing more would happen. But every­one in the neighborhood lived in deep anxiety; they had no idea when or where to move. In addition, Henry Céant, the ­lawyer in charge of the pro­cess, declared in a radio interview on June 24, 2014, that only fourteen proprietors had been compensated. The state had clearly ­violated Article 36–1 of the 1987 Constitution, which stipulates that “expropriation for a public purpose may be effected only by payment or deposit ordered by a court in ­favor of the person entitled thereto, of fair compensation established in advance by an expert evaluation.” However, Haitian executive powers rarely comply with the laws they are elected to implement. In this case, domicide was again used against p­ eople who lived in­de­pen­dently. This time, state officials destroyed the homes of ­people in the very center of the country’s po­liti­cal center, and, in the meantime, took away their autonomy and their social worlds. Domicide is more than an expression of state vio­lence through de­mo­li­tion. De­mo­li­tion itself is a temporal experience by which buildings, ­people, and objects undergo the pro­cess of becoming past. As shown previously, the attacks against Vodouyzan and peasants who supposedly live in worlds located outside of modernity are reiterated in destructive urban planning. The destructions I detail below participate in the state’s commitment to modernity and to its cap­i­tal­ist vision of pro­gress. Destroying female-­led businesses means getting rid of moral economies deemed nonmodern and erasing the many relations and forms of belonging that informal businesses fostered in this neighborhood. Around 5:30 a.m. on May 28, 2014, Clomène heard trucks and bulldozers rumbling up Rue de l’Enterrement. She immediately called Aland and a few other friends to seek help moving most of her belongings. Anticipating the de­mo­ li­tion, she had already moved Madame Lucille’s furniture to the small h ­ ouse in Carrefour. Aland helped Clomène and her f­ amily load a pickup truck with her mattresses and suitcases, and then he began documenting the de­mo­li­tions in audio recordings, notes, and photo­graphs. Although he and I had been documenting this part of the city for six months, I was not ­there when the de­mo­li­ tion occurred. I had returned to North Carolina two days ­earlier to visit my ­family for a week before I finished my remaining two months of fieldwork in

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FIG. 17  ​The morning of the de­mo­li­tions, Clomène, her ­family members, and her friends start

packing her belongings to move to Carrefour. Photo by Aland Joseph.

Port-­au-­Prince. However, I was bedridden with chikungunya—­what Haitians call fyèv kraze lezo (the fever that breaks your bones)—­one day a­ fter I arrived home. For three months, I had watched the pace of life in Port-­au-­Prince slow as the disease spread through the population, and I fi­nally succumbed to it. I was unable to walk for more than two weeks, and I relied on Aland to conduct impor­ tant follow-up fieldwork ­after the de­mo­li­tions.

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When I returned to Haiti a month ­later on June 27, 2014, Aland and I talked about the heartbreaking material he had gathered. We recorded our conversations as we edited photo­graphs, and we began writing an article for Haiti’s most impor­tant newspaper, Le Nouvelliste. As Aland showed me the images, he shared his stories about the de­mo­li­tions: Very early in the morning, p­ eople started to try to block the streets so state bulldozers c­ ouldn’t pass. They did that so they would gain time to move their belongings. Lots of residents’ friends w ­ ere h ­ ere and helped as they could—­with cars, trucks, or wheelbarrows. You had so much activity. You could see thieves with saws cutting off iron doors and fences, even when residents of the ­houses they looted ­were still inside. You d­ idn’t have bandits with guns but lots of ­people who came to take bricks, win­dows, doors. . . . ​Some p­ eople burned the planks of their ­houses. You had ­people crying. It was exactly like January 12. You d­ idn’t have the dead ­people, of course, but you had ­people r­ unning and crying like mad dogs. You had lots of young ­people with sledge hammers in their hands, saws, looking out for construction material. Ruins of Port-­au-­ Prince are feeding the reconstruction of Port-­au-­Prince. It’s not a new fact. They even told me “President Martelly gave us a job!” [laughing] That’s the way the state creates jobs! They saved cinder blocks, doors, anything made of iron. In the meantime, bulldozers destroyed h ­ ouses. It was dangerous, with all ­those young lads ­under the demolishing crane. Demonstrations from businesspeople and residents w ­ ere immediately repressed. The ­whole of Port-­au-­Prince was filled with activity. Guys from Cité Soleil came to make a l­ ittle money. Guys from Kafou Fèy came with their trucks to make a bit of money, too. ­Little money was to be made from recuperating the iron. Six HTG a pound. [Looking at a photo] You see that guy with a weighing scale. He’s the one who buys. You see, ­here, this is Clomène’s h ­ ouse. ­People are taking the bricks of her ­house away. Every­thing. Like January 12, ­people covered with dust. I felt the anguish I had during January 12. P ­ eople ­didn’t die. But it was the same atmosphere. Policemen w ­ ere t­ here, but p­ eople ­were f­ ree to pick up anything they wanted. It’s an enormous loss for the ­people and the patrimony. You remember our photos of t­ hese neighborhoods before? Houses just dis­appeared in a heartbeat! P ­ eople r­ unning with fridges, cabinets . . . ​What w ­ ill be the next step? W ­ ill they demolish Bel Air?

Aland was tense as he relived the de­mo­li­tions. He frequently mentioned the 2010 earthquake when he talked about the recent bulldozings. He was with his ­mother when the earthquake happened. Their ­house in the Bas-­Peu-­de-­Chose neighborhood, half a mile away from Monatuf, collapsed as they escaped. They slept in Rue Nicolas for two days before they walked to Pétion-­Ville to live with Aland’s ­sister, whose h ­ ouse was intact. Aland lost many relatives and friends in the earthquake and usually slept for no more than five hours each night; he had

FIG. 18  ​­People search for salvageable materials from Clomène’s ­house right a­ fter it was

demolished. Photo by Aland Joseph.

Demolishing Shotgun Neighborhoods • 171

become claustrophobic. Writing an article in Le Nouvelliste was impor­tant to him ­because he wanted p­ eople to understand how urban de­mo­li­tions worsen lives in communities that had already suffered greatly during the quake. Our article was printed on September 3, 2014. It garnered many negative online comments, which ­were ­later removed from the Nouvelliste website. I summarize the article below ­because it reflected two months of our work as we documented state-­sponsored urban de­mo­li­tions. First, Aland and I mentioned that the de­mo­li­tions surprised many p­ eople. Most of the inhabitants had not heard that their neighborhood would be demolished. The government first announced the de­mo­li­tions at 10:00 p.m. on a radio program one day before they occurred. Hence, many ­people awoke to excavators demolishing their ­houses. Second, we noted that the razing was rushed and careless: when they leveled a large square with multicentury structures, demolishers reopened individual wounds left by the 2010 earthquake and the homelessness it caused. We also talked about how looting accompanied the de­mo­li­tions. ­People rushed to move their belongings and often walked in the dust with furniture stacked on wheelbarrows. Although some radio hosts depicted the neighborhood as a chaotic place where bandits live, Monatuf mostly h ­ ouses workers, craftspeople, government employees, students, writers, retirees, schoolchildren, domestic workers, cooks, bosses, traders, and disillusioned unemployed ­people who dream of jobs. Many inhabitants have lived ­there for de­cades and like the neighborhood. We also noted that many other ­people, including former residents and the general public, have clearly expressed their attachment to ­these historically impor­tant streets. Aland and I contested not the necessity but the form of reconstruction. We talked about examples of successful urban proj­ects in Port-­au-­Prince that could have served as models. For instance, the Martissant Park proj­ect is an excellent case study. ­Owners and inhabitants in Martissant ­were compensated for their property. The proj­ect was transparent and well or­ga­nized. Residents helped define the proj­ect scope, and outsiders exhibited re­spect for historical aspects based on elaborate so­cio­log­i­cal studies. The proj­ect resulted in greatly improved sanitary conditions and more efficient coordination among the involved institutions (formal and informal). Martissant is certainly not perfect, but life for many ­people in the neighborhood is much better than it was in 2008. So, why did the state not replicate the Martissant model—­a functional, participatory urban effort—­downtown? Martissant is more dangerous than Monatuf. However, that narrative seems like an excuse to justify the state’s lack of dialogue with ­people in Monatuf. Participatory planning may have also worked well ­there. ISPAN inventoried heritage buildings in the area before the earthquake. Most of the shotgun h ­ ouses in Monatuf still stand, despite their age: they are paraseismic buildings conceived for typical local weather h ­ azards. This type of ­house, ubiquitous in Haiti, could be an impor­tant model in ­f uture urban renovation.

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Other ­people confirmed our report. During conversations, ­people in Monatuf said they ­were surprised by the de­mo­li­tions and that, even though Monatuf was riddled with prob­lems such as blackouts and occasional insecurity, the neighborhood was a good place to live. ­People lost much more than their dwellings when local buildings w ­ ere destroyed. For instance, both Gilberte and Clomène spoke about their experiences. We interviewed Gilberte on July 19, 2014, but Clomène was unable to talk about her traumatic experience ­until June 2015. When we spoke with Clomène, her ­sister Monique was visiting and told us about her own experiences. Below, they describe in their own words the brutal awakening of a state that previously taxed them without offering any benefits. Gilberte has worked in a restaurant in the gingerbread neighborhoods of Port-­ au-­Prince since 2008. She is the thirty-­one-­year-­old ­mother of Wilenson, a cheerful ­little boy who was five years old when my friend Widnel introduced me to them in September 2013. Gilberte’s partner died in the earthquake as he was walking home from his garage at the bottom of Rue Charéron when a five-­story building collapsed on pedestrians. Gilberte spoke about the lack of building norms: “Some ­idiots build up as many stories as they can on the top of old ­houses. The upper stories ­were bigger than the base of the building. Even without an earthquake, it would have collapsed. . . . ​His fate was to walk t­ here at that exact moment.” Gilberte works long hours six days each week. She leaves her apartment at 7:00 a.m. ­after her ­mother collects Wilenson and climbs with him up to Kafou Fèy where he attends school. Gilberte returns home at a time when the commute is reasonable—­a round 5:30 p.m. She was home on May 28 when the de­mo­li­tions suddenly began. She said: They started on Saturday. The night before, I came home at 7:00 ­after r­ unning errands. ­Later, around 11:00 p.m., I went down for a ­little while. My neighbors told me: “What are you ­going to do when they start demolishing tomorrow?” “Demolishing!” I replied. “My landlady d­ idn’t tell me anything about de­mo­li­ tions. Nothing!” I went to bed but c­ ouldn’t ­really sleep. My neighbor called me on the phone around 5:45: “Neighbor, what are you ­doing? They started to crush ­houses down the street, how are you g­ oing to save your belongings?” I ­couldn’t believe it, so I went down to see for myself. They started to demolish at the end of the street. I ran back to my apartment in order to save some of my belongings. When I came back, ­houses around my apartment building w ­ ere demolished to the ground. My neighbor was already gone. I just had time to go up, to pack a suitcase quickly. While I was inside, they started to tear down the building. I ­didn’t want the building to fall on my head, I just had time to escape [ y ap krazè pandan m anndan. Pandan m te anndan yo ap fourè kom si yon krok]! I was trying to save a box of t­ hings, but a big chunk of the wall fell. I was forced to run away. Why do they do that? They d­ on’t have any proj­ects. . . . ​ It’s a concrete building. I lost so many t­ hings. My dresser, my bed . . . ​my son’s school books, uniforms, his drawings, his report cards. Our f­ amily photo

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a­ lbums, all of our memories. All gone [tout bagay sa yo pidi net]. It hurts [sa fè m mal]. I paid a year of rent two months before they demolished. I pay my electricity, every­thing. And the landlady d­ idn’t tell me anything. Anything! I called her, and she told [me] she ­didn’t know what would happen. . . . ​Perhaps she’s a victim like me. She’s now in a hospital abroad, she travels, she ­doesn’t answer my calls. I’m trying to get the months of rent I paid back. For now, I ­don’t know if I w ­ ill get my money back. She owes me 10 months of rent. [As of June 2015, Gilberte had not received any compensation from her landlady.] It was a small apartment in a big blue ­house, next to a tree. A beautiful h ­ ouse that ­really resisted the earthquake well. The biggest one in front of the prison. Only ­family members of the landlady lived t­ here. Her s­ ister, b­ rother, and so on. She’s always abroad. I lost so much. ­Things, money. Like other p­ eople. . . . ​You make a first trip to save your belongings, and you come back, every­thing is u­ nder rubble. [clapping her hands] I had just been t­ here a year and two months. I loved the neighborhood. I was in­de­pen­dent. I love my in­de­pen­dence a lot. I would go back home, I ­didn’t know too many p­ eople. I had ­water and electricity 24/7. I had my room. I ­didn’t go out at night, b­ ecause I have my son with me. We would go to bed early. But it’s r­ eally a good neighborhood, you could go out at any hour of the day or night without any prob­lems. Perhaps ­because the prison stands t­ here. But ­there are a lot of good p­ eople living t­ here. My son now lives with my mom in Kafou Fèy, in the Fouchard zone. It’s a small ­house. My grand­mother lives t­ here, too. My s­ ister lives next door, I live with her for now. [laughing] He’s the only boy in a f­ amily of ­women! I’m not at ease, I miss my in­de­pen­dence. It’s hard to find a h ­ ouse. I looked a lot in this neighborhood to find something decent for me and my son. Every­thing is so expensive. If I rent far away from my work, I w ­ ill have to pay much more for transportation. If I live in Delmas, it would make me pay about 90 HTG of transportation a day. I make 200 HTG [about $4] a day at the restaurant. . . . ​At first, I was making 2,000 HTG a month. My boss saw I was a good worker. She gave me a better position. ­Today, I make 4,000 HTG [about $90] a month. I pay 1,500 HTG a month for sol [a popu­lar credit system]. I pay for transportation ­every day. I pay for my son’s school e­ very month. I’m left with 500 HTG [$12 in 2014, $10 in 2015] a month for food and expenses. I live and survive on God’s account [sè si kont bondyiè map viv]! I need my job, but I cannot make savings. You need to show up to work in time, to have all your clothes impeccable. It sucks your money out. If I’m late, I need to take a moto, which is far more expensive than a taxi. I know how to live on very l­ ittle money! But now that I live in Kafou Fèy, ­things are much more difficult.

Gilberte still lives in Kafou Fèy and walks a long way to work. She has a formal job, but it does not guarantee her a decent life. She works long hours and lives on very l­ ittle money. However, she still prefers to keep her job rather than to enter

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the ti komès economy like her s­ ister. She fears the instability of ti komès income and knows that her area would not be a good place for business. Gilberte is shy and likes to keep to herself. As she told me in June 2015, she dearly misses the in­de­pen­dent life she lived with her son on Rue de l’Enterrement. Like that of many o­ thers, her stability was again undermined when this man-­made disaster occurred. The Port-­au-­Prince in which she lives seems to be perpetually demolished: disasters, brutal urban planning, and ruthless evictions prevent working-­class p­ eople from enjoying the stable lives they deserve.

Compounding Crises ­ fter losing their h A ­ ouse on Rue du Champ de Mars, Clomène and her f­ amily relocated to a much smaller dwelling that was unsuitable for small business. The move split her f­ amily. Her ­sister Monique moved to northern Port-­au-­Prince with one of her ­daughters. Monique and Clomène often talk on the phone but miss being together daily. The Firmin ­family experienced yet another disaster soon ­after Clomène’s h ­ ouse was destroyed. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew devastated southern Haiti and destroyed the Firmin farm in Chambellan, a small commune near the city of Jérémie. Clomène’s seven-­year-­old niece moved to Port-­au-­Prince ­a fter this disaster to live with her. Soon a­ fter this life-­shattering event, Haiti entered a long lockdown prompted by popu­lar strikes and po­liti­cal instability—­ and, since April  2020, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Clomène and Monique have recounted many stories about their experiences during ­these overlapping crises. Overall, Clomène and Monique have not fared well since the de­mo­li­tions in 2014. The destruction of their neighborhood was traumatic, and stress-­induced physical pain has forced Clomène to stay home more than she would like. Monique now lives in Poste-­Marchand, a dense neighborhood near downtown Port-­au-­Prince. Clomène still lives in southern Port-­au-­Prince in two bedrooms on the roof of Madame Lucille’s small h ­ ouse in Carrefour. ­Because the walls of the ground-­floor rooms ­were damaged in the earthquake, her ­family uses this space only as storage. Clomène lives in a very small space with her husband, her three c­ hildren, and, since 2016, her niece. However, they enjoy its open rooftop, which is shaded by a mango tree and a breadfruit tree. They often sleep outside in the breeze at night. But Clomène has lost most of her business opportunities. She receives only three to four hours of electricity each day, so her freezers stand empty u­ nder tar paper on the roof. Far away, Monique now sells sandals on a street next to the Champ de Mars. When I visited Clomène in Kafou on May 31, 2015, Monique was also t­ here. It was M ­ other’s Day, which the ­family usually celebrates. But, once again, the Haitian state had harmed Clomène and Monique’s f­ amily. On Thursday, May 28, 2015, exactly one year ­a fter the de­mo­li­tions, Monique’s son Andy was watching TV at Clomène’s new h ­ ouse when police forces burst into her home. They ­were

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raiding the neighborhood to identify p­ eople who w ­ ere, in their words, “stealing electricity.” Employees of the state electricity com­pany (EDH), as well as other ­people who have the skills and knowledge to divert power, often offer ti priz (illegal connections). Ti priz is not ­free—­far from it. Money and social connections are necessary in order to gain any form of access to the state-­run grid for a dwelling. Since gaining a power meter from EDH may take years, electricity distribution is managed by a complex, informally privatized sector. As Widnel once explained, his ­daughter paid a onetime fee in Kafou Fèy to connect her ­house to the grid and was billed by the number of lightbulbs and appliances she used. Likewise, Clomène pays an electricity bill ­every month. When she saw Haiti’s national police burst into her h ­ ouse, she felt a profound sense of injustice. Clomène managed to quickly hide ­under a pile of mattresses she stored in a large cabinet in her bedroom, but Andy was arrested and taken to the Omega Prison of Carrefour. Clomène heard she would have to pay a $500 penalty to have her nephew released. She and Monique ­were distressed. They thought they might be able to raise the money with help from f­ amily and friends. Clomène said, “If I could pay that fine and get him out of ­here, I would do it right away, but so far, no one told us how to proceed. I’m not even sure that paying a penalty fee ­will work.” Monique’s visit was sparked by this incident, and she was staying with her ­sister in order to take food to her son. I was revolted by the knowledge that Andy—­a cheerful, hardworking, and kind seventeen-­year-­old—­had been jailed. He was released one week l­ ater a­ fter Monique and Clomène paid a hefty fine. At the time, we had not seen each other in ten months. ­A fter we talked extensively about what had happened to Andy, we went out to buy cold drinks and then sat on the roof u­ nder the shade of the mango tree. Aland, Monique, Clomène, and I spoke for a long time, and I recorded the conversation. Clomène and Monique’s words powerfully capture pro­cesses that contributed to their ­family crises. Clomène began: Before the de­mo­li­tions downtown, the owner, Madame Lucille, sent me to a meeting where I presented copies of the property title. We had to go to see the ­lawyer in charge of the compensations, but I d­ idn’t want to give him the original. I think Mrs. Lucille d­ idn’t get anything at the time they demolished the neighborhood. If y­ ou’re a proprietor, you needed the money to move somewhere ­else before they demolish your ­house, right? So, for a while, we heard rumors of de­mo­li­tions. And the night before they demolished, on TV and radio, they said that bulldozers would come the next morning at 5:00 a.m. ­People d­ on’t have money in their hands! Mrs. Lucille d­ idn’t have the money to move her furniture away! Since you, Aland, and I did a fundraiser online, I received money that helped me to move away some of our t­ hings. We did it in a rush. Before I received money, I only had a neighbor and Monique to help me move t­ hings

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away. But we c­ ouldn’t move by ourselves the freezers, the oven. . . . ​What could I do if armed bandits came to steal my t­ hings during the de­mo­li­tions? ­There ­were a lot of them, with crowbars and so on, who stole ­things from p­ eople. Mrs. Lucille ­didn’t realize what was ­going on. The morning of the de­mo­li­tions, very early, I took away with me what I could take away. Aland was t­ here helping. He helped us renting a truck, and Mrs. Lucille called some of her tenants who lived in a ­little ­house she owns in Carrefour, so they would wait for me and help to store our belongings. Without our friends’ solidarity, we would have slept on the streets. You have p­ eople who got hurt during the de­mo­li­tions, some of them died being crushed in their h ­ ouses. Some of them died of utter surprise [sezisman]. You still have p­ eople living in tents in Rue du Champ de Mars. Mrs. Lucille lost a ­house she loved dearly. Canada’s freezing temperatures always took a toll on her. She would come ­here, and you would think she was physically disabled. But a­ fter a month in her h ­ ouse, she would be well and walking. She always said her ­house makes her feel better, that she always thinks of her ­house. Now it’s demolished. She ­didn’t receive any compensation when she was so righ­teous, paying her property taxes dutifully, ­every year! Mrs. Lucille allowed us to stay in the tiny two rooms she owns on the top of her ­house ­here in Carrefour. I saved all her belongings. So . . . ​­we’re not homeless, but it’s very hard on me. My ­children go to downtown schools, and I have to pay for transportation for all of them. I go with my littlest one e­ very morning and pick her up e­ very night. That makes me spend two hours crisscrossing the city e­ very day. It’s hard for me to pay for their schools. Schools ­here in Carrefour are much more expensive than the ones in downtown. So, they still go where they used to go. ­We’re in this ­house, but t­ here’s no life ­here [pa gen lavi]. ­There’s no pedestrian traffic, our street is a cul-­de-­sac. I try to do business, but it d­ oesn’t work. I tried to buy ­water, but since electricity comes and goes, my w ­ ater rots. What I sold in one day in Monatuf, ­here, I sell in 15 days. . . . ​I used to sell soda pops, and it was a nice distraction. Friends would come and go and ask me: “Clomène, give me a l­ ittle soda!” I felt alive. I felt alive! I was well or­ga­nized. ­Here, you ­don’t have anything. Every­one ­here in Carrefour live reclusive lives [ yo viv pèsonèl]. Sometimes, a neighbor w ­ ill come to buy 5 HTG of ­water, a ­bottle of coke.

Monique then spoke about her own life: Clomène supported me a­ fter I lost my home in the 2010 earthquake. I’m her littlest s­ ister. Clomène has her c­ hildren, but she took me with her b­ ecause I ­didn’t have a job. Houses are too expensive for me. I ­don’t want to go to Cité Soleil. I have two young ­daughters, and we cannot live just anywhere. They lived with me at Clomène’s. When I lived with Clomène, I lived well. I was

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d­ oing business, helping sell beds, I was selling produce. Now, I ­don’t have much. I sell sandals where I live in Poste-­Marchand, but it d­ oesn’t work too well. Just enough to buy food for my ­children. When Clomène’s h ­ ouse was destroyed, it broke my heart. I always thought about Clomène and her ­children. . . . ​Where would they go? . . . ​Now, where I am I cannot pay for school for my c­ hildren. It’s a crime to perform de­mo­li­tions like this, to throw away p­ eople like that on the streets. Old ­people, ­mothers, f­ athers, young girls and boys rendered homeless like that. . . . Now, my boy is in jail. I cannot sleep. I have headaches. It hurts me so bad. He’s a child in the hands of the police. . . . ​I d­ on’t know if he w ­ ill get out ­today, tomorrow. . . . ​Myself, as a m ­ other, I cannot intervene. . . . ​Our fate is only in God’s hands in this country.

Hundreds of families lost their homes in the de­mo­li­tions1 (Amnesty International 2015). Clomène lost the h ­ ouse she had lived in for more than thirty years. As Clomène and Monique stated, the destruction was sudden, chaotic, and traumatic. Many of my other friends fared no better. Latéral lost his small ­house and business and now co-­rents a room with two friends downtown. When I visited in June  2015, I found, instead of the ­houses of my friends and acquaintances, piles of rubble, where a few young men w ­ ere trying to extract what­ever resalable materials they could find. A few ti komèsan I knew ­were still vending from stands they placed in front of their former homes. Of the seventeen ti komès located in shotgun structures that I frequented from 2012 to 2014, only six had survived. The Haitian writer Charles Frédo Grand-­Pierre poignantly detailed the destruction of Monatuf: “The space that inhabits us and that we inhabit was rebuilt on our own terms. It was cradled by our dreams and is imbued with unsuspected thoughts which conserve a past that should be inherited by f­ uture generations” (2014, 47). Bodies cannot be “spirited away” from the spaces they inhabit. The creative social body “as produced and as the production of space” is a producer of difference that calls for a break “out of the temporal and spatial shell developed in response to l­ abour” (Lefebvre 1991, 384). But in Monatuf ’s maze of corridors linking buildings and ­people, key ele­ments have vanished—­ the ­houses where in­de­pen­dent female-­run businesses could thrive and the social relationships that created a fragmented yet functioning urban lakou. T ­ oward the end of our conversation, Clomène said: Since the de­mo­li­tions, life became so difficult. I wake up at 4:00 a.m. to prepare lunch for my girls and to prepare my ­little one, and we leave the h ­ ouse at 5:00 a.m. Th ­ ere are so many traffic jams that we need to leave at 5:00 a.m. It costs a lot of money, all t­ hose trips to the city. Only my son goes to school h ­ ere in Carrefour. I lost so much by losing my home in Rue du Champ de Mars. . . . ​ ­Here in Carrefour, I can spend a w ­ hole day without seeing anybody. I had so many friends downtown. I raised my ­children downtown. In a zone like

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Carrefour, where you d­ on’t know anyone, if ­you’re hungry, you w ­ ill stay hungry [w ap fè grangou net]. When I was in Rue du Champ de Mars, I could go to see friends and eat something. I would never be able to go hungry t­ here [m pa ka grangou]. If tomorrow morning I d­ on’t have money to make lunch for my ­daughters, I’ll go to Madame Batiste and tell her I d­ on’t have food. Fifi [Madame Batiste’s d­ aughter] would help me readily. ­Here, you can remain starving [isit w ap fè grangou net, grangou net]. I’m not someone who can sit on a chair and do nothing. I need to find a way to raise my c­ hildren. I’ll find a way. I did all pos­si­ble businesses you can think of. I’ll find ways to make a living, but now my life is upside down. But Carrefour is a luxurious district [se yon zon lux li ye]. ­People come home and stay in their ­house.

Clomène’s ­house and neighborhood in Monatuf w ­ ere spaces where she dwelled by creating and engaging multiple material and social relations that structured her impor­tant solidarity network. Many other residents in this central neighborhood dwelled in the same way. But the de­mo­li­tions in 2014 destroyed not only physical space but also p­ eople’s social lives, in­de­pen­dence, mutual support systems, livelihoods, invested savings, and broader opportunities.

Reconfiguring F­ amily and Business a­ fter Hurricane Matthew The Firmin ­family’s experiences with destruction ­were compounded when Hurricane Matthew devastated the southeastern tip of the island. As I mentioned in the book’s introduction, Category 4 Hurricane Matthew devastated Grand’Anse, one of the greenest, most productive regions in the country. Gusts of wind reached 145 miles per hour, and heavy rains and coastal flooding caused widespread damage. The hurricane killed more than five hundred ­people and rendered thousands of families homeless. Despite the intense destruction, this disaster quickly faded in the global news cycle. Western media outlets missed opportunities to document local solidarities. Nonetheless, the hurricane devastated the region. According to one report, the disaster affected more than two million ­people and triggered flooding and landslides that destroyed infrastructure, farms, and h ­ ouses. The hurricane also triggered a surge in cholera cases (World Bank 2017). The Firmin farm sits next to a river. A ­ fter the hurricane, Clomène, Monique, and their b­ rother Philénome, who lives in Port-­au-­Prince, could not reach their relatives at the farm and feared the worst. Three days ­later, Clomène was able to speak with her s­ ister, who still lives in Chambellan. The roofs of the ­houses around the f­amily lakou w ­ ere gone. All the farm animals had been swept away, and the landscape had turned nightmarish; uprooted trees dotted the hills. The crops that sustained the Firmin f­ amily w ­ ere, of course, also gone. Through a fundraiser I or­ga­nized with the anthropologist Laura Wagner, we ­were able to send $5,000 to four families we knew well, including Clomène’s

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f­ amily.2 On the fundraiser webpage, Laura and I explained that we wanted to bypass international nongovernmental organ­izations and give the cash directly to heads of h ­ ouse­holds, who w ­ ere able to more accurately assess the needs of their families. ­Because ­people in the area operate in lakou systems, they are able to distribute goods and money effectively. Indeed, our friends quickly mobilized and used the funds to help their relatives in both immediate and long-­ term ways. A few days a­ fter the hurricane, Clomène and her b­ rother bought goods such as ­water purification tablets, rice, beans, salt, oil, and stock cubes in Port-­ au-­Prince. ­Because the roads w ­ ere damaged, their trip back to the farm took two days, and they used all kinds of public transportation. Even though Laura and I did not ask Clomène and her ­brother to document their own relief efforts, they did. Clomène and I kept in touch on WhatsApp, and she sent me photos of the goods she bought and, ­later, of her ­family farm. The landscapes from her photo­graphs looked apocalyptic. She distributed the goods and money according to her own judgment. Her ­sister was able to rapidly replace the roof on the main ­house, and Clomène’s b­ rother also returned l­ater with a few chickens and helped rebuild the animal enclosures. In brief, the Firmin ­family carefully planned their recovery efforts, and their long-­term plan enabled them to resume some of their farm activities. However, the funds we generated ­were insufficient to rebuild a w ­ hole farm that could sustain all of their relatives in Chambellan. ­Children, in par­tic­u ­lar, ­were affected by the hurricane: more than 450,000 ­children ­were unable to attend school in­def­initely (World Bank 2017). Meanwhile, Clomène and her f­ amily have worked hard to make ends meet and have been able to gather building materials and save a l­ ittle money. At the beginning of 2018, Clomène, Monique, and Philénome built a light structure with corrugated steel and wood in the downtown area where Clomène used to live. Since 2017, p­ eople whose h ­ ouses and businesses w ­ ere demolished have returned to their old neighborhood. Even though the zone was initially covered in rubble, p­ eople went back to where they used to work. In March 2019, Clomène asked me to meet her at the site of her former h ­ ouse instead of at her home in Carrefour. A furniture market had opened near the h ­ ouse. Next to the prison, amid the rubble, p­ eople had built makeshift ware­houses where they sold refurbished mattresses, beds, and many other goods. Clomène and her ­family also built a ware­house, but its position away from the street front negatively affects sales. However, a middleman, who also works for several other ­people and makes a small commission, guides clients to their shop. On the day I visited her business, I offered to buy lunch for every­one. I followed one of Clomène’s nephews to a small open-­air restaurant in the m ­ iddle of the market and saw one of Clomène’s former neighbors, who was cooking tonmtonm, a breadfruit mash dipped in a spicy okra sauce. Tonmtonm is a staple dish among ­people from the Jérémie region. The sight reminded me that, even in the ­middle of a market that sits on a pile of rubble, p­ eople rebuild their neighborhoods and the regional networks

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FIG. 19  ​Clomène’s new ware­house, next to the National Penitentiary and to her former ­house.

that structure them. Although Clomène’s new business was not thriving, she was relieved to be re­united with her community. G ­ oing to her ware­house e­ very day meant that she could visit Madame Batiste, for instance, and that she could access a social network that remained crucial to her well-­being, her stability, and her business. When I returned to observe what had happened to the neighborhood, I expected it would remain a pile of rubble, a wasted space. However, this part of

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Monatuf endured as a social node even though it was physically destroyed. ­People who had lived in the area and had known each other for de­cades returned to the site and helped rebuild their neighbors’ lives and businesses. Faced with a sudden rush of construction, the municipal government chose to avoid evictions and instead established a tax-­collection system that many ­people consider a burden. Clomène and her f­ amily pay the equivalent of $80 each month to stay where they are. She said, “It’s expensive, but, in a way, it gives us a ­legal right to stay ­here.” The ware­house Philénome built is a rectangular building roughly six hundred square feet in size. Dozens of mattresses of all qualities stand in its ­middle, and handmade furniture such as chairs and ­tables line the corrugated walls. Clomène took two of her chest freezers to the ware­house and sells cold ­water to the ­people she worked with before the de­mo­li­tions. Other activities also occur ­there. Monique and her nephew buy shoes and clothing in bulk and then clean and repair them at the ware­house entrance. Sales are very low, but Monique is well connected among local clothing merchants and resells repaired clothes in smaller packages. The Firmins generate just enough profit to survive. As Clomène said as we ate lunch, “At least we are together. The ­family is back together, even if all of us live far away from the ware­house. ­A fter school, our ­children can come ­here and do their homework ­until it’s time to go home. I see my friends and neighbors and have far more business opportunities than I would have if I stayed in Carrefour. I tried hard to sell ­things in Carrefour, but it’s not my zone. It d­ idn’t work out.” Philénome added, “If the state demolishes the zone again, we are ready to pack up and go. I can quickly dismantle the ware­house and store it u­ ntil we find a new site. We hope the economic situation ­will get better. With the prices of every­thing ­going up ­every day, I ­don’t see how we ­will be able to keep working.” Clomène and her ­family expressed a sense of relief, and they ­were motivated to continue the new business venture. I went back to visit her in Carrefour one week l­ ater. Her s­ ister, Ticille, was visiting from Chambellan to spend time with her ­daughter. They ­were busy preparing tonmtonm when I arrived. Ticille laughed and said, “I have to come to Port-­au-­Prince to eat tonmtonm, Vincent! Can you imagine, breadfruit is cheaper ­here than in Jérémie!?” She explained that life on the ­family farm was hard, and the recovery was slow. They now have enough chickens to support the f­ amily, but growing vegetables, other than sweet potatoes and bananas, is difficult. Even banana trees do not fare well. The scorching sun and absent shade prevent many crops from returning. The breadfruit trees w ­ ill take years to grow back. Ticille crushed breadfruit in a large pestle and asked, “What if another big hurricane hits us again? With climate change [chanjman klimatik], it is bound to happen often.” Clomène and Ticille talked somberly. Climate change has been a real­ity in Haiti for a long time. Entire months without rain and increasingly frequent hurricanes are power­ful signs that Haiti, an island that produces very ­little in carbon emissions, is bearing the brunt of a slow disaster created by imperial

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and colonial powers. This knowledge does not escape Haitians. New crises loom, and the current economic downturns have stressed every­one. Clomène wondered aloud ­whether she would ever get a break. Once again, familiar topics ­were on her mind: inflation, growing po­liti­cal instability, and embezzlement scandals that have provoked massive strikes since July 2018. She said, “The strikes [peyi lok] back a month ago have been hard on us. We ­couldn’t go downtown. Philénome slept in the ware­house b­ ecause we w ­ ere scared that our goods could be stolen. I ­couldn’t sleep when he was ­there. What happens if ­there’s a fire, and he’s trapped in the ware­house? Now, t­ hings are back to normal, but food is so expensive that ­people ­can’t afford to buy mattresses or furniture.” As we ate tonmtonm on her rooftop, Clomène was pensive. She said that some of the ­family ­children may have to go abroad. No one in their ­family wants to leave the island, but the compounding crises may cause new separations among the Firmins.

A Sense of Place amid the Rubble During the de­mo­li­tions, Aland shot a poignant short video showing a group of young men who refused to leave a half-­demolished apartment building. In it, we see three p­ eople sitting on the floor of the building’s second story. They watch and talk with ­people in the nearby crowd who are urging them to leave. Aland said, “I thought they would die, the bulldozers w ­ ere active around them, and ­there was no sign that they would stop b­ ecause a small group of p­ eople protested.” Eventually, they left the building, which was then quickly flattened. A few days ­later, Aland talked to one of the young men. The man said that he and his friends used to live in the building but now had nowhere to go. When Aland asked what he would do, the man said that he would stay in the neighborhood even though it was now demolished. Like many other young men, he returned to his apartment building to salvage what­ever he could. This group of men cleared debris from the front of the building and then used corrugated iron and a tarp to erect a large tent from which they sold cinder blocks. I thought the social life and networks that traversed this neighborhood would die when it was flattened. To my surprise, the piles of rubble w ­ ere more than a symbol of de­mo­li­tion for the p­ eople who had lived in the h ­ ouses and buildings that once stood ­there. As Clomène explained, ­people returned to the demolished sites where they had lost their homes and simply reopened their businesses on the sidewalk or anywhere e­ lse they managed to clean; most of the p­ eople in the area had experienced displacement before. Their return and their construction of makeshift buildings for business reaffirmed their sense of belonging in this central space in the country. Clomène returned ­because she wanted to deal with ­people she knew and b­ ecause the area was still plugged into the best electrical grid in the country. The anthropologist Gastón Gordillo argues that “the negativity of rubble (its evocations of destruction, tensions, and absences) is never purely negative. This

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is why I propose to look at the negativity of rubble as a generative, affirmative force” (2014, 125). The rubble in Monatuf evinces repeated state-­sponsored destruction and per­sis­tent, antagonistic relations between the state and most Haitian p­ eople. It also inscribes senses of loss and waste in the landscape. And yet, ­people regathered and activated new and old systems to function amid the rubble. For instance, they negotiated with municipal authorities to secure their rights to remain in Monatuf and to access electricity. The type of infrastructural connection they created prompted local institutions to recognize them as a collective. Moreover, in the new market where Clomène works, ­people have formed small surveillance groups and use respected intermediaries to negotiate access to clients and sales opportunities. As Gordillo states, “places are nodes rather than containers: points ­toward which relations and lines of movement converge and from which they move to entangle other nodes” (2014, 21). Places are created through connections—­infrastructural, social, and economic—­and through vari­ous individual and collective attachments. In this very case, informal commerce and the moral economies it sustained acted as a power­ful social infrastructure. Clomène and her ­family deplore the destruction of their neighborhood but see more than debris when they look around. The site of Clomène’s former ­house still conjures intimate memories and remains the center of a social network that somewhat survived the de­mo­li­tions. Impor­tant outcomes of their new investments in the ware­house included reunifying their f­ amily, providing a place for their c­ hildren to gather a­ fter school, and encouraging the eagerness of former neighbors and business partners to work together again. E ­ very day in Monatuf, ­people renegotiate their relationships to the city center in multiple ways and create dwellings and businesses that transform this site of destruction into a place of belonging. In December 2019, Clomène’s health suddenly deteriorated. It took her three months to recover. During that time, she was unable to go to the ware­house. Her husband Alain checked on the building e­ very day as he went to work. Her b­ rother Philénome did his best to keep the store open each after­noon. Normally, Monique and her husband took turns managing the ware­house. However, Monique’s husband passed away in January 2020. She must now stay with her grandchildren in Poste-­Marchand while her ­children work. During a long telephone conversation we had in June, Clomène said, “2020 is a very bad year, Vincent.” She then explained: I lost my brother-­in-­law, and you almost lost me! Since I got sick, Alain is the only one who works in our ­house­hold. It’s stressful b­ ecause he needs to go to work downtown, which means that he has to go through dangerous zones. Sometimes, t­ here are panic movements [kouri]. He has to run and hide b­ ecause ­people are firing guns in t­ hese areas. With the economic crisis, no one is buying mattresses or furniture, so our ware­house remains closed most of the time. We have a new neighbor t­ here who is creating prob­lems. I was e­ ager to go back

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t­ here, but I d­ on’t have the energy to argue with the neighbor who is trying to steal business from us. Anyway, with the COVID-19 pandemic, I d­ on’t go out of my h ­ ouse. I only go to the local market ­here in Carrefour, and I wear a mask when I go ­there. I have recovered, but I c­ an’t get sick again. Every­one in my ­family who lives downtown got a fever recently. We think it’s the virus. Thank God, every­one is well now! Th ­ ings are very bad now with the virus. ­People cannot work, kids cannot go to school. How can I do business? If I had electricity h ­ ere where I live, I could work with my freezers. Now I know ­people in Carrefour. I doubt this w ­ ill happen. I’m h ­ ere with my c­ hildren, making sure they do schoolwork on their own, now that the schools are closed.

The coronavirus pandemic has para­lyzed the country again. As Clomène said, though, many Haitians are disciplined and are taking necessary precautions— at least in the area where she lives. When we chat on WhatsApp, Clomène repeatedly says that she is scared for me and my f­amily since we live in Florida. On the news, she saw p­ eople on spring break partying on beaches and could not believe that the U.S. authorities did not intervene. Although many p­ eople who live in the United States are now experiencing confinement for the first time, lockdowns are fairly common in Haiti. Over the past two years, economic and po­liti­cal instability has rocked the country. On July 6, 2018, mass demonstrations erupted when the Haitian government announced that gas prices would increase 38 ­percent to $4.60 per gallon ­because the International Monetary Fund, a major Haitian creditor, recommended ending petroleum subsidies. Major embezzlement scandals followed the gas-­price crisis and again triggered mass protests, which included a weeklong strike in February 2019. Gas has been a scarce commodity for the past two years, and gangs (often linked to politicians) have terrorized the population (Joos 2019). In general, p­ eople who work in the informal economy cannot make ends meet. As I have shown, the informal economy is highly or­ga­nized, it represents two-­thirds of the country’s gross domestic product, and it employs 80 ­percent of the p­ eople who are currently working (Montas 2018, 125). When the Haitian state destroys a neighborhood where informal business thrives, it directly attacks a key national economic sector. It also destroys a way of life that has enabled most Haitians to live on their own terms since in­de­pen­dence. Demolishing the shotgun neighborhood of Monatuf, as Aland and I stated in our Nouvelliste article, erased the history of hardworking Haitians and the heritage dwellings that testified to the architectural skills of Haitian carpenters. More importantly, the many domicides perpetrated h ­ ere negated p­ eople’s rights to overcome their moun andeyò status. In this case, connecting to the city center and its infrastructural grid offered a path t­ oward a more connected form of citizenship. For ­people like Clomène, Monique, and ­others discussed in this chapter, overcoming a moun andeyò status involves living in dwellings that are uniquely adapted to Haitian urban life but that also echo the aesthetic and

Demolishing Shotgun Neighborhoods • 185

spatial values of the rural world. ­People in this part of Monatuf used their ­houses as residences, commercial hubs, and places of social interaction. However, if we think of places as nodes, we can clearly see that de­mo­li­tions are not complete erasures. Although top-­down urban planning often transforms or destroys physical spaces, it does not necessarily erase the social and emotional connections p­ eople build into their daily lives: social networks and feelings of belonging. ­These two realms resist destruction, and their adaptability indicates how determined Haitians are to craft autonomous lives in neighborhoods and dwellings they shape to meet their needs.

Conclusion Peyi a Lok In March 2019, Widnel called me and asked me if I wanted to come with him to Gressier, a commune located in the southwest of the Port-­au-­Prince region. A few days before, Widnel and I had driven to downtown Port-­au-­Prince to look at the new state buildings built between 2015 and ­today. This time, he wanted to show me a string of unfinished proj­ects that stood along the road to Gressier. As we slowly drove in Martissant, Widnel pointed out Simbi Hospital. “I ­won’t stop the truck, it’s not a safe area h ­ ere ­these days,” he said. On the other side of the road, the omnipresent red sheet-­metal fence surrounded an im­mense half-­ finished building. He continued, “It used to be [a] fancy ­hotel! I’ve seen the band Scorpio playing ­there when I was younger. It was a luxury ­hotel. ­A fter Duvalier, ­people moved in and squatted the place. I ­can’t remember when it was demolished. . . . ​The hospital is a good idea, we need it. But they stole all the money and look . . .” Widnel was referring to the Petrocaribe scandal and the embezzlement of billions of dollars meant for social programs and reconstruction proj­ects by politicians. We drove slowly for a few more minutes and ­stopped at the Fontamara fish market. Again, ­behind a long red sheet-­metal fence stood a large, two-­story unfinished building. The state had promised to open this much-­needed market so ­people could sell their fish in better climatic and sanitary conditions. However, the construction site ended up reducing the market area and forced ­people to sell their fish on ­tables placed along the fence. We drove a ­little farther. Widnel ­stopped the truck and started to laugh. “Look at this!” He pointed to a very large pillar that seemingly sustained an unfinished bridge. It was hard to figure out what the proj­ect would accomplish if it ­were finished. This small part of a road suspended in the air had been ­there for more 186

Conclusion • 187

FIG. 20  ​Unfinished bridge located southwest of Port-­au-­Prince.

than five years. ­People started selling tires and auto parts in its shade. Widnel shook his head, lit a cigarette, and started driving again. “Instead of building a bridge, they should start fixing the roads!” he exclaimed. A few months ­later, in June 2020, I called Widnel for his birthday. He had just turned fifty-­five, and he laughed as he said, “When y­ ou’re my age, y­ ou’re an old man in Haiti!” A ­ fter pausing, he explained that he was worried about getting COVID-19. He then said that the situation in Port-­au-­Prince was bad and that it reminded him of the early 2000s. Widnel had never before expressed a loss of hope when we spoke. He usually refrained from talking about politics, especially since some of his clients work for the government. Moreover, ­until recently, Widnel had been shielded from most economic hardships. He owns property, his f­ amily runs a small restaurant, and, most impor­tant, he is well connected—­which means he has steady work. This time, however, the crisis— or succession of crises—­was so intense that he thought his work opportunities might not return. “Afè’m pa bon . . . ​Peyi a lok pour de bon, Vincent!” he told me: “My business is not ­doing well. The country is on lockdown for good!” ­A fter our conversation, I thought about the diverse states of immobility to which Widnel referred in many of our conversations. The facts that the construction of impor­tant post-­earthquake proj­ects had been halted for years and that COVID-19 had slowed down activities in a city already para­lyzed by vio­ lence created a sense of intense stasis. Aland, who is often stuck in his Pétion-­ Ville ­house for weeks at a time, links the pre­sent crises to what happened in the United States. As he wrote to me recently, “when t­here’s a crisis in the

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United States, it means death in Haiti [Quand les Etats-­Unis vont mal, c’est la mort en Haïti]. But we are adapting. Credit, luck, dialogue . . . ​We do every­ thing we can to resist.” Peyi a lok pour de bon. The country is on lockdown for good. As I thought about Widnel’s statement, I remembered that e­ very forceful foreign intervention in Haiti has been accompanied by long periods of lockdown. “Lok,” a new Kreyòl word borrowed from En­glish, indicates an economic shutdown provoked by a strike, a state of paralysis. In February 2019, p­ eople across the country protested the Petrocaribe embezzlements and voluntarily chose to stay home and temporarily cease all professional activities. For a c­ ouple of weeks, p­ eople remained in their homes, and the usually busy streets of the capital remained empty. Demonstrators called for the president’s resignation, but they also publicly identified many international interventions (such as the International Monetary Fund [IMF] recommendations to end gas subsidies) as key ­factors in the country’s instability (Joos 2019). For many Haitians, such protests ­were common occurrences, but this time, p­ eople from e­ very social strata participated in the demonstrations and strike. Then, as Widnel mentioned, the state and the gang activities it sponsors maintained the country in a state of paralysis. Aland’s words pointed to this fact: ­people resisted ­these pressures the best they could and relied on their social networks to get by. A ­ fter all, the post-­disaster reconstruction of their country never occurred, and ­people could only rely on the strong social infrastructures they had created themselves. ­Under the guise of development, the Haitian state and its allies have used international relief funds to build half-­fi nished proj­ects, free-­trade zones, and industrial parks that have led to evictions and reinforced food insecurity, as is the case in Caracol. Th ­ ese industrialization schemes not only fail to create the necessary revenue to rebuild the country but also pauperize the population. Haiti is now on the “lower end of the production pro­cess with wages that barely assure the biological reproduction of the individual worker, let alone his or her ­house­hold” (Fatton 2014, 26). The state not only disregards its population’s desires and needs as it obstinately tries to build an export economy but also displays its contempt for most Haitians by openly allowing government officials to siphon public funds. Th ­ ese are well-­known facts in Haiti. The Caracol Industrial Park is only a spectacular iteration of such economic pro­cesses. Its construction has been and continues to be criticized by Haitian organ­izations. However, despite widespread opposition to industrial proj­ects that displace peasants, evictions and land g­ rands in northeastern Haiti continue. In November 2020, peasant organ­izations denounced both the ongoing violent dispossessions happening in the northern part of the country and the incarceration of peasant leaders who are fighting against such evictions. As the h ­ uman rights advocate Camille Chal­mers notes, “the goal of ­these anti-­peasant politics is to transfer land to transnational corporations so they can continue to loot our country” (AlterPresse 2020). The rush to the north analyzed in chapter 1 of this

Conclusion • 189

book is, unfortunately, ­going strong. The current po­liti­cal crisis and ongoing economic disaster in the northern part of the country are met with re­sis­tance. According to Robert Fatton, Haiti is trapped in an outer periphery that is “marked by zero-­sum politics and profound social inequalities, which are aggravated by an environment of scarcity and poverty. Not surprisingly, most ­people in the outer peripheral states sorely lack the sense of belonging to a community of equals, of being full citizens” (2014, 14). Indeed, as seen in Bolosse and many other parts of the country, numerous p­ eople are prevented from being full citizens b­ ecause they are disconnected from basic ser­vices and infrastructures and remain excluded from the formal economy. The disciplinary landscape of Village Casimir and the attempts to prevent the growth of small businesses or produce cultivation are striking examples of social and po­liti­cal exclusion. It is true that many ­people would like a formal job; a lot of Casimir residents wished for the opening of a factory next to their settlement. However, ­people working in the informal economy do so by choice. As Samuel Shearer has shown, informal markets, housing, and infrastructures in Kigali, K ­ enya, allow p­ eople to reclaim a city “that no single interest, pro­cess, or population fully controls” (2017, iv). Informal economies and vernacular spatial practices in Port-­au-­Prince enable ­people to create alternative forms of citizenship that are constituted by social and material entanglements that have enabled a majority of Haitians to live autonomously on their island since the country’s in­de­pen­dence. Unfortunately, instead of supporting hardworking and autonomous Haitians, the police harass street vendors while state urban planners simply destroy the neighborhoods in which small-­scale businesses sustain a vast part of the population. In Casimir, they forbade the existence of such businesses between 2011 and 2016. However, the rigid administrative structure of the so-­called village was not strong enough to impede the emergence of ti komès. ­Today, p­ eople in Casimir live on their own terms. Trees are growing in this arid landscape, ­people have managed to grow food, and ti komès dots ­every street of the “village.” They did not wait for the help of the state, NGOs, or corporations to create economic opportunities and ­viable lives. Likewise, the life story of Clomène Firmin shows how p­ eople collectively invent economies based on solidarity and reciprocity that enable them to be disengaged from the international aid system. It also shows how the state relentlessly destroys ­viable modes of existence based on rural practices and values. Lastly, de­mo­li­tions do not erase the social infrastructures that are ­shaped by and shape the built environment. The vendors of Rue de l’Enterrement rebuilt their businesses on the ruins of their ­houses, thereby showing that the state cannot erase them or chase them away from their own city.

Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships Analyzing the construction of disciplinarian landscapes in Village Lumane Casimir illuminates the pro­cesses that create the lack of belonging Fatton mentions.

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It also clearly illustrates how the Haitian citizenry has been undone in a top-­ down fashion: the intentionally crafted landscape isolates p­ eople and prevents them from engaging in the economic and social practices they are familiar with. In other words, one of my central arguments in this book is that citizenship is spatial in nature. Citizenship necessitates the possibility of dwelling—of entering multiple relationships with vari­ous places and p­ eople in order to create familiar, personal spaces where p­ eople feel a deep and abiding sense of belonging. Being a citizen also necessitates the possibility of retreating into familiar worlds where p­ eople experience the same sense of connected belonging. The rural and urban lakous that I have described in this book offer glimpses into the ways that ­people create spheres of belonging where alternative modes of being together, or being citizens, emerge. In turn, t­ hese citizenships from below, to take the words of Mimi Sheller, open po­liti­cal possibilities based on collective well-­being (2012). When this capacity to experience relationships with one’s social, spiritual, and ecological environment is threatened, one’s possibilities for belonging to a community of equals vanish from the horizon. More than one hundred years ­a fter Haiti’s brutal occupation by the U.S. Army, and a­ fter de­cades of “Good Neighbor” policies marked by repeated military interventions, the Haitian state is now an eviction agent that violently protects international business interests. Each major industrial push—­from the rubber fiasco to the garment-­factory invasions in the 1970s and 2011—­has contributed to solidifying the po­liti­cal domination of predatory elites and to eroding state capacity related to social welfare, the national workforce, and public infrastructure. However, when ­people frame Haiti’s fate as conditioned only by neoliberal forces or by a predatory state, they silence the country’s main actors: Haiti’s citizens. Haitians on and off the island are presently rebuilding their country on their own terms and fighting against authoritarian institutions. As Yanick Lahens puts it, “the young p­ eople who are demonstrating are not necessarily against the government; they fight against the system that was able to produce such a government” (Lahens and Kouaou 2020). Describing Haitians as helpless victims of corrupt governments and natu­ral disasters triggers the same type of neo­co­lo­nial interventions meant to “develop” the country. To the contrary, t­ here is an urgent need to listen to the Haitian p­ eople who are involved in the current protests. This is an apt moment to remention Gonaïbo, Jacques Stephen Alexis’s protagonist in Les arbres musiciens. In Marxist-­influenced lit­er­a­ ture, Gonaïbo is a unique character. As he witnesses the devastation caused by rubber cultivation in the Jérémie region and painfully experiences the loss of his land and the destruction of the forests and fields he cherishes, he realizes that social and economic equity are indissociable from environmental justice. Rather than subscribing to the “modernization through industrialization” and antipeasant Marxist doxa of his time, Alexis forges a new kind of socialism. His socialism is based on the anticolonial practices generated during the 1791–1804 revolution and on Vodouyzan peasants’ pantheist reading of nature

Conclusion • 191

where, even if “musician trees may fall from time to time, the voice of the forest keeps being power­ful.” Even though everyday Haitian p­ eople are often accused of driving deforestation, most of them have long opposed export economies and extractive systems. They also know that their well-­being and ability to withstand disasters reside in the ecological healing of their country. The anti-­IMF protests of the 2000s as well as the 2018 protests against the IMF-­recommended rise in gas prices are not spontaneous “mob” movements; they are intentional actions rooted in deep understandings of the economic, social, and po­liti­cal corrosion caused by international financial institutions and their local collaborators. It is impor­tant to note that most of the p­ eople with whom I worked in Haiti recognized that the relational and spatial nature of citizenship—­and hence the possibility of dwelling—­was being corroded.

Citizenship and the Meaning of Compagnonnage In 1983, Georges Anglade published a brilliant essay titled “Ochan pou Malere” (1983b). In this short text, Anglade analyzed how a “civilization of poverty” has optimized ­human, environmental, and material conditions to create ­viable lives and economic systems. Instead of treating poverty as a prob­lem and assimilating it into the “miserable misère” (miserable misery)—­defined as a complete absence of survival means—­A nglade proposed to study systems of resource re­distribution and collective modes of work, such as compagnonnage, a risk-­ averse diversified agriculture, that Haitian peasants have forged over the long term. Compagnonnage is a key mode of existence in rural Haiti. In French, a “compagnon” is, etymologically speaking, the person with whom you share bread. When Anglade used this term, he underscored networks of workers who pass on their skills and knowledge and share their time and resources to help their companions in a system that privileges reciprocity. Compagnonnage, noted Anglade, also points to a ­whole set of nonhuman relations. Making a garden in compagnonnage means privileging polycultures. It means knowing which plants pair well together, and it relies on intimate knowledge of the soil and flora built in the course of de­cades of subsistence agriculture. As we saw among Caracol peasants, such relationships with the land and environment are also relationships with the past and ancestors. Compagnonnage is a form of small-­scale agriculture that maximizes production through relational knowledge, but the term also calls attention to the myriad relations—­humans with h ­ umans, h ­ umans with nonhumans, nonhumans with nonhumans, and tangible with intangible and spiritual—­that structure a form of freedom s­ haped in the long term, away from the state, and partially away from the global economy. Compagnonnage means privileging local agriculture over export-­centered monocrops; privileging local food security and land tenure over wage-­labor systems that foster dependence on food imports; and privileging Haitians’ values, desires, and practices over g­ rand proj­ects designed by

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foreign technocrats. The mass strikes in 2019 and the many large and small protests that have rocked Haiti’s po­liti­cal landscape since the 2008 financial crisis represent what Gonaïbo dreamed for the country and what Georges Anglade long argued for before he passed away in the 2010 earthquake: popu­lar re­sis­tance to neo­co­lo­nial empires is not merely a response to oppression but also a holistic practice that ties together ecol­ogy, collective memory, vivre-­ensemble (living together), and economic well-­being. And, as I have tried to capture in our journey across Haiti, this holistic practice is relational and spatial in nature. P ­ eople’s connections to land, to spiritual and historical worlds, and to local economies make dwelling, and hence citizenship, pos­si­ble.

Acknowl­edgments This work is the product of many collaborations. I want to first thank my friends and colleagues in Haiti. I thank my research partner and dear friend Aland Joseph. His guidance and advice have been crucial for this proj­ect. I offer a heartfelt thank you to the friends who welcomed me into their homes and helped me in many ways over the years: Jacques Bartoli, Maryse Jean-­Jacques, Carl Fils-­Aimé and his ­family, Clomène Firmin and her f­ amily, Jean-­Lou Lhérisson, Hélène Mauduit, Mehdi Chal­mers, Carine Shermann, and all the friends anba lavil. I also want to thank my friends in Gros-­Morne, Cap Haitian, and Milot, especially the Excellent f­amily and Maurice and Innocente Etienne for their hospitality. Colleagues and friends provided consistent and invaluable support. Laura Wagner is a compassionate ethnographer and brilliant scholar who introduced me to her friends in Haiti and taught me how to navigate Port-­au-­Prince. Since 2012, her work, our conversations, and her feedback have helped me in countless ways. Rodrigo Bulamah’s contagious passion for northern Haiti, his impor­ tant work ­there, and our conversations ­these past ten years have fueled and continue to fuel my research. Writing a book in a second language is a daunting task. I offer a hearty thank you to Peter Buttross Jr. who patiently taught me how to write in En­glish more than ten years ago. I had the chance to work with ­Jessica Ruthven. Her excellent editorial work on this proj­ect gave me confidence and helped me finish this book. This proj­ect benefited im­mensely from comments on grant applications and chapters by Amelia Fiske Morel, Paolo Bocci, David Font-­Navarette, stef m. shuster, Claire Payton, John Mathias, Beth Kressel Itkin, Michaela Hulstyn, and Samuel Shearer. A special thank you to Orisanmi Burton, whose friendship, insight, and support have been crucial over the years.

193

194 • Acknowl­edgments

Offering consistent support and critical feedback w ­ ere professors and colleagues at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and at Duke University. I am most grateful for Towns Middleton’s friendship and mentorship. Towns’s feedback and encouragement at e­ very step of my c­ areer have been invaluable. Patricia Sawin, Peter Redfield, Rudi Colloredo-­Mansfeld, and Karla Slocum are fantastic professors and brilliant thinkers and ethnographers. ­There are no words to express my gratitude to all of them. They have encouraged my research consistently and offered support when it was most needed. I was lucky to work and study with Marcie and Bill Ferris, who have encouraged me and helped my f­ amily in many ways. Thank you to all my professors and colleagues in the Writing Center and the Folklore and Anthropology departments at UNC Chapel Hill. I benefited from the conferences and seminars held by the Duke Haiti Lab. Laurent Dubois, Edouard Duval-­Carrié, Sabine Cadeau, Hank Gonzalez, Jonathan Katz, and the many p­ eople I met at the Haiti Lab helped me shape this proj­ect. At Duke University, I want to thank Laurie McIntosh for her excellent teaching and feedback. I also thank my colleagues at the Duke Thompson Writing Program. Fi­nally, I offer warm thanks to my colleagues across departments at Florida State University (FSU) for their continuous support. Martin Munro is the best mentor I could have asked for. A special thank you to Jeannine Murray-­Román for organ­izing the Ca­rib­bean Studies Group at FSU, a lively interdisciplinary group that continues to fuel my research interests and collaborations. Research was made pos­si­ble by the National Science Foundation (#1322181), the C. V. Starr Fellowship, the Hugh McColl Fellowship (UNC Chapel Hill), the Lecturing Fellows’ Scholarship (Duke), and Florida State University. In Haiti, I want to thank the FOKAL team for helping me with my research. Farah Hyppolite and Lucie Couet have been incredibly helpful. Being part of the editorial team of Trois Cent Soixante, a cultural studies journal located in Port-­ au-­Prince, opened many doors and allowed me to test ideas with fantastic collaborators. Mehdi Chal­mers, Maude Malengrez, and Carine Shermann are brilliant thinkers who animate this excellent journal. I am grateful for their friendship and support. Jane Voltaire taught me a lot about class, gender, and politics in Haiti. Her friendship and our many conversations helped me in many ways. Thank you to Frantz “Fanfan” Voltaire for sharing his knowledge and the archives of the CIDIHCA. I benefited from the conferences and the many solid conversations I had at the Haitian Studies Association annual meetings. Thank you to all my friends and colleagues ­there, in par­tic­u­lar to Mark Schuller, the current president of the Haitian Studies Association, who has been generous with his time and advice. Mark’s engaged work in Haiti remains a model for me. A part of chapter 5 was published in Economic Anthropology. I thank the editorial board for allowing me to reproduce this work ­here. Lastly, I want to thank the editorial teams at Rutgers University Press and Westchester Publishing Ser­vices and the peer reviewers who sent me generous, spot-on feedback.

Acknowl­edgments • 195

Last but not least, I want to thank my f­ amily. I offer my most heartfelt thanks to my wife Mira and my son Simon for their love and patience. Mira helped me in so many ways—­this book is hers too. Thanks to my parents, Alain and Marie­Jo, who consistently supported me during this proj­ect. I also offer warm thanks to Nastasia Talpau and to my ­family in Romania for their constant support. My grand­mother Angèle Joos passed away when I was ­doing fieldwork in 2014. She worked for the Résistance in her native island, Corsica, and was an out­spoken feminist, antifascist, and anticolonialist. She loved speaking Corsican and loved islands in general—­Corsica and Haiti in par­tic­u­lar. I miss her dearly. This work is dedicated to her.

Notes Introduction 1 ​Louisiana Creole developed at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century on southwestern Louisiana plantations. Planters and enslaved persons from Saint-­Domingue who came in Louisiana during and ­a fter the Haitian Revolution influenced this form of French-­based Creole language. 2  For instance, Ja­na­ka Jayawickrama notes that the current humanitarian system is perpetuating global inequalities s­ haped during the colonial period. For example, he notes that Oxfam kept hiring UK workers accused of sexual misconduct, and thus disregarded the well-­being of the population it was supposed to help. In 2011, Haiti’s Oxfam operation leader Van Hauwermeiren was accused in a sexual exploitation scandal—­something he was already accused of in 2006 while working in Chad. See Jayawickrama 2018. 3  For instance, George W. Bush famously appointed Michael Brown, who had no prior experience in disaster relief, to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 2003. FEMA’s h ­ andling of the aftermaths of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 was in itself a disaster. Relief was slow to come and FEMA could not deliver food and medical supplies when they w ­ ere most needed, which led to the deaths of many p­ eople in southern Louisiana (Cooper and Block 2007; Levitt and Whitaker 2007). In Republican-­led North Carolina, disaster relief was also considered secondary. In 2016 “the state legislature designated $500,000 from the state’s disaster relief fund to cover the cost of defending House Bill 2 [a law stipulating that ­people may only use rest­rooms and changing facilities that correspond to the sex identified on their birth certificates] to use them against multiple lawsuits” (Rab 2016). 4 ​The economist Paul Collier, right a­ fter the earthquake, argued that an administration parallel to the Haitian state should control the reconstruction pro­cess, since Haitian institutions ­were too corrupt. He stated: “ ‘Effective and dedicated management is the most difficult. In the past within Haiti the interests of corruption have postured as the protection of sovereignty, while internationally, ­every actor has offered to co-­ordinate, yet none has wanted to be co-­ordinated. What is needed is to pool money into a single ‘Haiti Fund’ that can be used for 197

198 • Notes

development. Both the Haitian government and the international community need temporarily to vest authority, both for spending money and for the swift construction of housing, hospitals, ports and power stations, in a single entity, prob­ably co-­led by a respected Haitian and a world figure.” See https://­oxfamblogs​.­org​/­fp2p​ /­haiti​-­reconstruction​-­t wo​-­cheers​-­and​-­one​-­big​-­boo​-­for​-­paul​-­colliers​-­plan​/­. 5 ​Landon Yarrington’s study of transport infrastructure in Haiti and the way it conditions cultural understandings of freedom provides an excellent spatial approach to concepts and practices of libeté in Haiti. See Yarrington 2015. 6 ​For instance, Laura Wagner and I raised $20,000 a­ fter Hurricane Matthew. As we explain on the website, the money went directly to the heads of ­house­holds we knew well and trusted. See https://­w ww​.­gofundme​.­com​/­f​/­jeremie2016.

1. Developing Disasters 1 ​With the exceptions of Aland Joseph and Milostène Castin, I have used pseudonyms for every­one in this chapter in order to ensure anonymity. 2 ​The name “caco” is derived from the name of the national bird of Haiti, the “Tacco” (Hispaniolan trogon). Tacco, Taco, or Caco birds live in wooded areas and are known for their camouflage abilities. Again, wooded landscapes play an impor­tant role in many forms of re­sis­tance in Haiti. See Sheller (2012).

2. Industrial ­Futures 1 ​I have used pseudonyms for every­one in this chapter in order to ensure anonymity. 2 ​In October 2012, the Haitian Parliament voted in ­favor of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which made the government’s obligations binding. This new set of laws reinforced and gave greater precision to Article 22 of the 1987 Haitian Constitution, which stipulates that the state “recognizes the right of e­ very citizen to decent habitat, education, alimentation, and social security” (Saint-­Pierre 2013).

3. State Interventions 1 ​I have used pseudonyms for every­one in this chapter in order to ensure anonymity. 2 ​Other results of MINUSTAH incursions include sexual vio­lence against w ­ omen and ­children and the introduction of cholera to the area. See Joos 2019. 3 ​Gayana, Soraya’s s­ ister, moved to the Dominican Republic in 1995, following a cousin who worked as a carpenter t­ here. She first found a job as a domestic worker in San Juan de la Maguana but quit a­ fter a year. Soraya explained to me that she made very ­little money and that she mainly worked for room and board. While in San Juan, she met other Haitian w ­ omen who crisscrossed the border and brought all kinds of goods to Haiti. Gayana, who can negotiate in Kreyòl and Spanish, started by bringing small amounts of dry goods to Port-­au-­Prince and, by the end of the 1990s, was d­ oing weekly trips to the San Juan region to buy pasta, canned goods, and sugar in bulk. In November 2020, Soraya told me on the phone that Gayana still crossed the border, even though it is supposedly closed ­because of COVID-19. The 234-­mile border that separates the Dominican Republic from Haiti can easily be crossed, especially for p­ eople like Gayana who has moun pa (acquaintances) who work in the customs in both countries. However, since the deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent to Haiti increased suddenly in 2014, the

Notes • 199

Dominican state has reinforced border controls. For instance, a friend of mine told me that he was shot on sight while trying to cross the border illegally in northern Haiti in 2015. The Dominican state has a long and brutal history of anti-­Haitian racism. The 1937 Parsley massacre, when the Dominican army killed more than twenty thousand Haitians, remains a painful memory ­today. The recent deportations and the humanitarian crisis they engendered at the border reinforced the impacts of the 2010 disaster by straining already scarce resources and forcing p­ eople who built their lives in the Dominican Republic to ­settle in Haiti, a country some of them barely know. Nonetheless, ­people like Soraya and Gayana, who have done business on both sides of the border for de­cades manage to travel on the w ­ hole island of Hispaniola to meet their f­ amily needs.

4. Inhabiting Port-­au-­Prince a­ fter 2010 1 ​The U.S. Army left Haiti in 1934, but the occupation did not end. A U.S. fiscal representative worked in the Haitian government u­ ntil 1947. This representative wielded broad power over customs collection, tariffs, taxes, and government spending. He also ensured that the Haitian state repaid the loan it contracted with the United States in 1922 (see Dubois 2012, 295). 2 ​Except for Monsieur Invité, I have used pseudonyms for every­one in this chapter in order to ensure anonymity.

5. Daily Life in the Shotgun Neighborhoods of Downtown Port-­au-­Prince 1 ​In chapter 4, I define what a shotgun h ­ ouse is and detail its ties to f­ ree Black communities in Haiti and the United States Deep South. Briefly, shotgun h ­ ouses are train-­like structures one room wide and from one to four rooms deep. They have a front-­facing gable porch that constitutes a liminal space between the street and the ­house’s private areas. Shotgun ­houses, both in Haiti—­where they w ­ ere first created—­and in the U.S. Mississippi valley, encapsulate the story of long migrations, the Atlantic slave trade, the rise of f­ ree Black communities, and the creolization of indigenous Yoruba and French architecture (Vlach 1976a). In Haiti, urban shotgun h ­ ouses, as in New Orleans, Louisiana, represent the aesthetic and architectural values of a f­ ree, Black ­middle class and, ­later in Port-­au-­Prince, of the Duvalierist m ­ iddle class. 2 ​This shift is described in detail in chapter 4. 3 ​The journalist Rowan Moore Gerety (2019) wrote an excellent account of the shipping of second­hand objects from the United States to Haiti.

6. Demolishing Shotgun Neighborhoods 1 ​Amnesty International’s report, “15 minutes to Leave”, provides a thorough account of the downtown de­mo­li­tions. 2 ​For more information, see https://­w ww​.­gofundme​.­com​/­f​/­jeremie2016.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italic indicate figures, and page numbers followed by “n” indicate endnotes. abstract(tion), 60, 62; in Casimir, 78–79, 83; development practices, 17, 60, 63; housing proj­ects, 82; intelligence, 145; materialization of, 68–70; rationality and, 78, 84; space, 62, 79, 82, 83–86; urban planning, 23, 79; in Village Lumane Casimir, 83–86 ActionAid Haiti, 54 Action Plan for Recovery and Development of Haiti, 32 Action pour la Reforestation et la Défense de l’Environnement, 49 Adams, Harry, 73 agriculture, small-­scale, 57 Agritrans, 50 Aguerre, José Augustin, 37 A l’­angle des rues parallèles (novel by Victor), 33 Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 44, 45, 57, 145, 190 Alphonse, Roberson, 29 Anand, Nikhil, 106 Anglade, Georges, 78, 123, 191–192 Appadurai, Arjun, 70 Aquin (Haiti): coconut grove in, 2; shotgun structures, 129 arbres musiciens, les (Alexis), 44, 57 Arendt, Hannah, 80 Aristide, Jean-­Bertrand, 32, 93, 118 Arold, Boss, 132, 155, 165 Artibonite River, 104 AshBritt, 31

Barthélémy, Gérard, 4, 10, 78 Bas-­Peu-­de-­Chose neighborhood, 169 Batiste, Madame, 147–148, 154–155, 178, 180 Baussan, Georges, 119 Bautista, Felix, 63 baz (base), 91 Baz Tije group, 95 Beckett, Greg, 94, 98 Bel Air, 93, 128, 136 Bellerive, Jean-­Max, 30 belonging, 51, 107, 116, 118, 167; in Bolosse, 107; CIP, 58–60; citizenship and, 25; expression of, 18; national, 14–15; senses of, 124, 143, 182, 189, 190; social networks and feelings of, 185; spaces of, 85, 141 “blakawout” (blackout), 94 blank-­slate mentality, 34 Bodmè Limonade, 36, 39, 41, 50, 53, 55 Bois Verna neighborhood, 117, 121–122, 126–127; Etzer h ­ ouse in, 124; regional enclaves, 122–123; urban enclaves, 124 Bolosse neighborhood, 101; belonging in, 107; globalization impact, 105–106; infrastructural citizenship, 110; MINUSTAH UN peacekeeping mission, 103–104; ­people’s life a­ fter 2010 earthquake in, 101–103, 105, 106; quest for solution, 107–110; ravine in Rue Saint-­L éger, 102, 103, 104; urban citizenship, 106–107 217

218 • Index

Bolosse Troisième Ave­nue, 24 Branson, Richard, 30 Brazil: housing proj­ects in, 85; income in­equality and poverty rates, 5 Brown, Michael, 197n3 “Building Back Better”, 32, 61–62, 77 Bulamah, Rodrigo, 166 Bush, George W., 32, 197n3 Button, William Robert, 52 “caco” bird, 198n2 Caco Wars, 28, 53 Canaan, 62, 101 Cap Français. See Cap Haitian Cap Haitian, 4, 8, 9, 38, 106, 135; American Scientific Mission, 106; displacement of farmers, 45, 47–48 Caracol, 44; edge of field in, 27; eviction of farmers, 74; farmers, 54; industrial development, 29; Northern Economic Corridor in, 34; proj­ect, 28, 34, 74 Caracol Industrial Park (CIP), 23, 28, 136, 188; on belonging, dwelling, and citizenship, 58–60; compensation, 54–56; dispossession, 43–45, 54–56; failure of, 35; fragmentation, 54–56; industrial destructions, 45–53; landfill used by, 37; multiple sides of vulnerability, 56–58; proj­ect impact on ­peoples, 34–35; resisting dispossession, 45–53; touring, 35–39; working conditions at, 39–43. See also Village Lumane Casimir Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood, 110, 150, 166–167, 174, 176, 178, 181, 184 Casimir. See Village Lumane Casimir Casimir, Jean, 56 Castin, Milostène, 49–53, 57, 198n1 Castor, Suzy, 51 Céant, Henry, 167 centralization pro­cess in Port-­au-­Prince, 8–12 CEPR (Center for Policy and Economic Research), 31 Chal­mers, Camille, 188 Champ de Mars, 7, 12–13, 16, 20, 110, 116, 127 Chemonics International, Inc., 31 Chérizier, Jimmy, 111 chimè, 93 Cho, Daniel, 34 Christian hierarchies of civility, 145 Cité Administrative, 13 Cité Jérémie, 123 Cité Royale, 16

Cité Simone housing proj­ect, 76 Cité Soleil, 93; effect, 36; housing proj­ect, 76 cités ouvrières, 76 citizenship, 18–19, 25, 29, 110, 190–192; crafting, 16; Haitian, 58–60, 189–191; infrastructural, 110, 184; in Port-­au-­Prince, 138; transformation, 92. See also urban citizenship city dwellers. See moun lavil or citadins class among Haitian w ­ omen, 144–148 classic colonial enclave, 51 Clinton, Bill, 6, 29, 30–33, 77; neoliberal policies in Haiti, 82 Clinton, Hillary, 29, 31 Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, 32 Clinton–­Martelly economic plan, 67 Collier, Paul, 31, 33, 197n4 Collier’s strategy, 30 colonial disciplinary landscapes, 85 Columbus, Christopher, 44 commerce, informal, 163 commercial trades, 163 Compagnonnage, 191–192 compounding crises, 113 174–178, 182 Corvington, Georges, 117 Couet, Lucie, 98–100 counter-­plantation system, 56 COVID-19, 198n3 Creole, Louisiana, 197n1 Croix-­des-­Bossales market, 128 Croix-­des-­Bouquets, 9, 66–67, 71 Crosswell, Catherine, 123 Dauphin Plantation in Fort-­Liberté, 51 déchoukaj, 44, 53 De Coppet, Andre, 51 Defils, Gérard, 61, 62, 64–65, 67, 73, 74, 79; collapsed apartment in Delmas, 65 Defils, Mériane, 64–65, 70, 72–73, 79, 86 deforestation, 5, 191 demographic pressure in Haiti, 10 Desruisseaux, 114–115 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 9 dilapidated h ­ ouses, 121 DINEPA (State ­Water Supply and Sanitation Agency), 95, 108–109 disaster(s), 1, 3, 56, 132; h ­ uman and physical, 11; Hurricane Katrina, 197n3; Hurricane Matthew (2016), 1, 5, 174; Hurricane Rita, 197n3; natu­ral, 12, 18, 45, 190; recovery, 5, 32; zone, 7, 78. See also 2010 earthquake in Haiti

Index • 219

disciplining residents in Casimir, 70–75 dispossession of CIP, 43–45, 54–56; resisting, 45–53 domestic work, 80–82, 144, 150, 156, 198n3 domicide, 29, 59–60, 167, 184 Dominican Republic, 41, 51, 64, 94, 101, 105, 134, 198n3 Dominican state, 198–199n3 douz janvye, 15 downtown Port-­au-­Prince, 12–15, 139; informal business in, 148–152; race, class, and gender nexus, 144–148; shotgun economy, 162–164; small domestic entrepreneurship, 142–144; vernacular inheritance of private space, 154–162. See also Port-­au-­Prince DRC Group, 31 Dumont, Frank, 83 Dunham, Katherine, 98 Duvalier dictatorship, 9, 11, 115–117, 132, 141 Duvalier, François, 11, 75, 76 Duvalier, Jean Claude, 74, 145 dwellers. See moun andeyò dwelling, 11, 24, 76, 77, 116–117, 126, 164, 174, 183, 190; of CIP, 58–60, 69, 85; heritage, 184; refashioning of, 141; rural, 120; in spaces, 16; urban, 29, 82, 133, 189–191 Easterly, William, 34 economic statecraft, 30 EKAM village, 38, 59 ensekirite (insecurity), 93 entrepreneurship, small domestic, 142–144 Excellent, Brunel, 133–136, 160 Faas, A.J., 56 Far West analogy, 27–28 Fatton, Robert, 189 Favier, Hilère, 43 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 197n3 Fèy, Kafou, 173, 175 Firmin, Clomène, 16–17, 22, 24, 25, 132, 139, 140, 150–151, 167, 172, 174–175, 178–179, 182, 189; business practices, 161; commercial activities, 163; health, 183; life history, 141–142; morning of de­mo­li­tions, 168; new ware­house, 180; ­people search for salvageable materials from Clomène’s ­house, 170; revenue, 146; shotgun ­house, 149; story and trajectory, 144, 156 Fondasyon Je Klere, 111

Food for the Poor (NGO), 59 Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty (FOKAL), 24, 89, 91; administrative capacities in urban planning and management, 92; Hyppolite in, 120–121; preservation proj­ect, 93, 97–100; urban planning, 95 France: export node in Haiti, 8; in global economy, 84; Haitian Revolution in, 3; Haiti’s in­de­pen­dence from, 9; housing proj­ects in, 84 Franceska, 150–152, 156, 157, 159–160 Francis, 39, 43, 55, 58, 60 free-­trade zones, 27, 29, 32, 33, 50, 62, 79, 188 French Development Agency, 37, 96 gender among Haitian w ­ omen, 144–148 Georges, Bernadine, 17, 121–122, 123, 137 Georges, Etzer, 17, 121–122; h ­ ouse in Bois Verna neighborhood, 124 Gerety, Rowan Moore, 199n2 Gilberte, 172–174 Ginen, Tele, 109 gingerbread ­houses. See gingerbread neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince gingerbread neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince, 21, 24, 117, 129, 131; Bois Verna neighborhood, 117, 121–124; Pacot neighborhood, 117–121; transformation, 125–127, 138; Turgeau neighborhood, 117, 125–126. See also shotgun ­houses of Port-­au-­Prince gingerbread trims, 119 Gonaïbo (character), 190, 192 Gonzalez, Johnhenry, 10, 137–138 “Good Neighbor” policies, 190 Gordillo, Gastón, 182–183 Grand-­Pierre, Charles Frédo, 177 Gros, Jean-­Germain, 33 Gros Morne, 133, 135 Groupe IBI DAA, 70 Hadom, Constructora, 63, 64 Haiti, 189; citizenships, 189–191; Haitian citizenry, 190; Haitian Civil Code, 75; Haitian Constitution, 198; Haitian Revolution in France, 3, 28; Haitian Statistical Institute, 75; industrial interventions in, 18; myths about, 6; repre­sen­ta­tions of, 3; research in, 19–23; sensationalist accounts of, 4–7; in 1751 earthquake, 9; after 2010 earthquake, 6

220 • Index

Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act (2006) (HOPE I), 79 Haiti Economic Lift Program Act (HELP), 79 Haiti Fund. See Haiti Reconstruction Fund Haiti Reconstruction Fund, 69, 197n4 Hanneken, Herman Henry, 52 Hauwermeiren, Van, 197n2 Hellinger, Doug, 33 Hetherington, Kevin, 161 Hilaire, Evens, 101, 107, 108, 113 houngan (Vodou priest), 133 House Bill 2, 197n3 Hurricane Katrina, 197n3 Hurricane Matthew (2016), 1, 5, 174; reconfiguring ­family and business a­ fter, 178–182 Hurricane Rita, 197n3 Hyppolite, Farah, 120–121 In­de­pen­dent Consultation and Investigation Mechanism (MICI), 50, 54, 56 individual modular ­houses, 83 individual wealth accumulation, 4 industrial destructions in CIP, 45–53 industrialization, 17–18, 83, 188; cycles, 74; dispossession and displacement in CIP through, 43–45; in Haiti, 28; housing proj­ects during, 78; modernization through, 58, 80; state-­sponsored, 81; uprooting through, 44 in­equality, 5, 22, 113 inflation, 40, 41, 182 informal business in downtown Port-­au-­ Prince, 148–152 infrastructural citizenship in Bolosse, 110 Ingold, Tim, 58, 85 Inter-­American Development Bank (IDB), 6, 7, 28, 33, 34, 37, 69; compensation scheme, 47–48; corrective mea­sures, 58; MICI, 50, 54; report about vulnerability, 56 Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), 29, 30–32 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 198n2 international donors, 30 international financial institutions (IFIs), 30, 32, 33, 69; offering loans for Casimir, 74–75 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 33, 184, 188 International Right to Adequate Housing, 72 Island Accord, 32

James, Erica Caple, 93, 94, 155 Jayawickrama, Ja­na­ka, 197n2 Jean, Fritz, 29 Joseph, Aland, 20–21, 22, 26–28, 65, 87, 88, 132, 133, 136, 143, 165–167, 169, 171, 175, 182, 187–188, 198n1 Kahn, Meredith, 129 Katz, Jonathan, 30, 104 kay spirituel, 133 Kettly, 133–136 Kinyanjui, Mary, 152 Kivland, Chelsey, 93 Kniffen, Fred, 129, 151–152 Kolektif Peyizan, 54 Komite Tè Chabè (Kolektif Peyizan Viktim Tè Chabè), 49 Kreyòl (Haitian language), 20–22, 38, 81, 95, 188 kumbit, 134 lakou; system, 81; urban, 133–137 lakou-­foumi, 11 Lakou Kenep in Bel Air, 136 La Navidad, 44 land scarcity in Port-­au-­Prince, 15 La Saline de­mo­li­tion (1967), 76 “La Ville”, 127–128 Lefebvre, Henri, 17, 62, 84, 82, 109 Lescot, Elie, 44 livelihood restoration, 56 longue durée, 124 Louisiana Creole, 197n1 Lucien, Georges Eddy, 44, 51, 115 Lucille, Madame, 140, 148, 150, 156–157, 160–163, 167, 174–175 lwa, 50 Makandal, Francois, 4 Mangonès, Lorraine, 98 “maroon nation”, 10 Martelly, Michel, 29, 63, 67, 68, 74 Martial, Monsieur, 102–103, 104–105, 107–109, 113 Martissant neighborhood, 24, 87–89; connecting state and citizen, 96–100; initiatives in, 91; institutional goals, 92; Martissant Park, 90, 171; rehabilitation pro­cess, 97; urban renovations in, 110; vio­lence in, 92–96 master-­planned housing proj­ects, 83–84, 85

Index • 221

materialization, 62; of abstraction, 68–70; architectural, 141–142 Mathon, Léon, 119 Mausoleum Plaza, 20, 148 Maximilien, Joseph Eugène, 119 Meille River, 104 Merten, Kenneth, 31 Mexico: housing proj­ects in, 84–85; Plan Puebla Panama in, 84 minor architecture, 127, 162, 163 MINUSTAH, 94; incursions, 198n2; UN peacekeeping mission, 103 Moïse, Jovenel, 111 Monatuf neighborhood, 127–129, 132, 134, 140, 169, 171–172, 177, 181, 183, 184 Monique, 142, 150, 152, 153, 174–176, 178–179, 181, 183–184 Morne-­à-­Tuff, 13 moun andeyò, 60, 110 moun lakou, 136 moun lavil or citadins, 60 moun pa (acquaintances), 198n3 Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 42 Navaro-­Yashin, Yael, 119 Nelson, Louis, 131, 132 neoliberalism, 77; in Haiti, 82 Nicolas, Alice, 123 1937 Parsley massacre, 199n3 no-go zone, 96 nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs), 6, 16, 18, 69, 89, 96, 139, 189; Concern Worldwide, 97; Food for the Poor, 59; influx of, 32; in Port-­au-­Prince, 8, 20; projectorates, 97. See also Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty (FOKAL) North Atlantic universals, 18 Northeastern Haiti, 26; edge of field in Caracol, 27; industrial activity, 27–28; post-­ earthquake relief effort, 28, 29–35; threat of urbanization in, 27 Northern Economic Corridor, 30, 34, 36 Nouvelliste, Le (Haiti’s newspaper), 166, 169, 171, 184 Obin, Michel, 3 Odnell, David, 67, 69 ontological insecurity, 155 open-­air drainage ravines, 105 ostracization, 4

overpopulation in Port-­au-­Prince, 15 Oxfam operation, 197n2 pacific and multinational revolution, 53 Pacot neighborhood, 106, 116, 117–121; gingerbread ­house in, 120 Parc Martissant. See Martissant neighborhood: Martissant Park Parias (documentary by Saint-­Aude), 114–115 Pascalin, Jean-­Luc, 17, 101, 107, 108 Payton, Claire, 63, 115 Penn, Sean, 30 Péralte, Charlemagne, 52, 53 permanent housing crisis in Casimir, 75–78 Petit-Frère, Alain, 48–49, 54, 55, 152, 183 Petrocaribe Report, 55 Pettigrew, Robert, 51 Philénome, 178, 179, 181–183 Philogène, Jerry, 52 Piera, Nuria, 63 Pierre, Armand, 45–46, 47–55 Pierre, Jemima, 103–104 Plan Puebla Panama in Mexico, 84 Port-­au-­Prince, 1–2, 5, 6; architecture, 116; centralization, 8–12, 76; destruction of historical district, 25; downtown, 12–15; ­FOKAL in, 91; gingerbread neighborhoods: see gingerbread neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince; international reconstruction of infrastructure and housing, 6–7; Parias and, 114–115; reconstruction, 27, 62, 105, 121, 169; shotgun ­houses: see shotgun neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince; after 2010 earthquake, 7–8; unfinished bridge located southwest of, 187; urban citizenships, 15–19; urban lakou, 133–137; urban marronage, 137–138; urban planning, 115; vernacular ­houses, 116–117. See also downtown Port-­au-­Prince poverty in Haiti, 1–2, 5–6, 97, 189, 191 Presses Nationales, 140 private–­public partnership, 23 pro-­democracy groups in Martissant, 93 Professionals for Fair Development (GRET), 96, 99 projectorate model, 97 Providencia, ethnography of, 158 Quar­tier Morin, 48, 55

222 • Index

race among Haitian w ­ omen, 144–148 rationality, 145; and abstraction, 78–79, 84; technocratic, 63, 82 reciprocity, 5, 12, 24, 81, 162, 189, 191; social bonds based on, 10; trust and, 135, 137, 144, 152 reconstruction, 78; contracts, 63; failed, 4, 17, 70; of Haiti, 17, 29–30; housing, 18, 32, 68–69; international, 6, 18; national, 6; of Port-­au-­Prince, 27, 62, 105, 121, 169; ventures, 25 recovery aid, 77–78 René, Jean, 137–138 reputation, 158–162 Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, 111 residential/industrial complexes in Casimir, 81 respectability, 148, 157, 158, 160–162 Robeson County, North Carolina, 5–6 Roumain, Jacques, 145 Route des Dalles, 98, 101 rubber experiment in Haiti, 45 Rue de la Ré­union, 14, 165 Rue de l’Enterrement, 143–144, 147, 154, 174, 189 Rue de L’Enterrement neighborhood, 24 Rue du Champ de Mars, 142–143, 148–149, 152, 154–156, 174 Rue Saint-­Léger, 102, 103, 104 rural dwellers, Haitians fight against, 75–78 Sae-­A Trading Co. Ltd., 34, 38, 47 Saint-­A nne, Eglise, 159–160 Saint-­Aude, Magloire, 114–116 Saint-­Domingue, 129, 131; French colony (1749), 8–9 Saint-­Martin housing proj­ect, 76 Saint-­Thoma, Monsieur, 54 San Juan de la Maguana, 198n3 Schuller, Mark, 77, 81, 82, 137 Seitenfus, Ricardo, 32 self-­organized businesses, 152 sensationalist accounts of Haiti, 4–7 sense of place amid rubble, 182–185 1751 earthquake in Haiti, 9 Shearer, Samuel, 189 Sheller, Mimi, 50–51, 190 shotgun economy, 162–164 shotgun ­houses of Port-­au-­Prince, 127, 138, 165, 199n1; architectural origin, 129, 131; compounding crises, 174–178; heritage

buildings, 132–133; Monatuf neighborhood, 127–129, 132; reconfiguring f­ amily and business a­ fter Hurricane Matthew, 178–182; in Rue Saint Nicolas, 130; sense of place amid rubble, 182–185; vernacular buildings, 131. See also gingerbread neighborhoods of Port-­au-­Prince shotgun neighborhoods. See shotgun ­houses of Port-­au-­Prince “­silent coup d’état”, 32 Siméon, Nicole, 145 SMCRS (municipal trash collection), 95, 99, 105, 108 Society for Haitian and American Agricultural Development (SHADA), 44–45 soil erosion, 10, 15 solidarity of Haitian ­people, 12, 15 Soraya, 88, 89, 91, 95, 99, 112, 198n3 spectral housing, 70 state interventions: Bolosse, 101–107; Martissant, 87–100; Thomassin Mountains, 110–113 Stiller, Ben, 30 Stoler, Ann Laura, 106 Stoner, Jill, 127 “straw ­houses” neighbourhood, 76 Tabarre (Haiti), 14 “Tacco” bird, 198n2 Taco bird. See “Tacco” bird Tè Chabè, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 57 Terrier-­Rouge village, 59 Tèt Kale governments, 63–64 Thomas, Gerald C., 106–108 Thomassin Mountains, 110–113 Ticille, 181 ti komès, 66, 73, 79, 80, 84, 134, 136, 144–145, 147–148, 154, 174, 189 tonmtonm, 179, 181 Trou Caïman lake, 72 Trou du Nord (Haiti), 26, 27, 35–37, 42–43, 45, 49–50 Trouillot, Michel-­Rolph, 3, 18, 145 Trump, Donald, 3 Turgeau neighborhood, 117, 125–126 2010 earthquake in Haiti, 11–12, 77, 169, 171; American occupation impact in people, 15; industrial projects after, 28; Port-au-Prince. See downtown Port-au-Prince; postearthquake relief effort, 29–35; relocation of dwellings of people, 23; Village Lumane Casimir. See Village Lumane Casimir

Index • 223

Ulysse, Gina, 145 United Nations (UN), 29, 68, 69 United Nations Stabilization Force. See MINUSTAH United States (US), 10; disrupting relief effort ­a fter earthquake, 3; importation of goods and food to Haiti, 149; international aid system from, 6; local and federal governments, 6; normalcy in, 1; Parias and, 115; po­liti­cal leverage, 29; U.S. army invasion in Haiti, 10; visa issues in, 19 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 7, 31, 33, 74; assemblage, 52 Unit for Construction of Public Buildings (UCLBP), 66–67, 68–69, 72–73 uprooting pro­cess. See déchoukaj urban(ization): dwellings, 189–191; indigenous, 78–83, 137, 138, 141, 164; lakou, 133–137; marronage, 137–138; threat in Northeastern Haiti, 27 urban citizenship: in Bolosse, 106–107; moun andeyò prevented from, 110; in Port-­au-­Prince, 15–19 Valcin, Tony, 39, 42, 53. See Hauwermeiren, Van Vansteenkiste, Jennifer, 50 Venezuela, 54, 55, 68, 69, 85 vernacular architecture, 7, 19, 83, 131 vernacular ­houses: in gingerbread neighborhoods, 126–127; in Port-­au-­Prince, 116–117, 131 vernacular inheritance of private space, 154–162 vernacular transformation, 164 Victor, Gary, 33

Village Lumane Casimir, 23, 61, 62, 189; abstract space and vio­lence, 83–86; disciplining residents, 70–75; ­family’s experience of, 63–67; fight against rural dwellers, 75–78; geography, 62–63; materialization of abstraction, 68–70; permanent housing crisis, 75–78; preventing indigenous urbanization, 78–83; view from Defils’s rooftop, 66. See also Caracol Industrial Park (CIP) Vincent, Sténio, 44, 94 vio­lence, 60, 63, 78, 119; of abstraction, 79; colonial gender-­based, 20; against demonstrators, 53; gender-­based, 155; in Haiti, 3; in Martissant, 92–96; physical, 144; po­liti­cal, 2; sexual, 198n2 Vlach, John Michael, 128–129, 131 Vodouyzan, 59, 111, 159, 167, 190 Voltaire, Jane, 20 voodoo economics, 18 vulnerability: in CIP, 56–58; disaster, 23; resorbing, 83; social, 43 Wagner, Laura, 1, 7–8, 13, 122, 137, 144, 178–179, 198n6 Wharf, Jeremie, 62 Widnel, 87–89, 91, 92, 96, 99, 110–113, 175, 186–187 Wilson, Japhy, 84 World Bank, 6, 33, 37, 69 Yarrington, Landon, 198n5 Yoruba ­houses, 131 zanj. See lwa Zubrzycki, Geneviève, 16

About the Author VINCENT JOOS is an assistant professor of anthropology and global French studies

at Florida State University. He completed a BA and an MA in philosophy at the Charles de Gaulle University, France, and an MA in folklore and a PhD in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Available titles in the Critical Ca­rib­bean Studies series Giselle Anatol, The Th ­ ings That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Lit­er­a­ture of the Circum-­Caribbean and African Diaspora Alaí Reyes-­Santos, Our Ca­rib­bean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola Katherine A. Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-­Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015 Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize Carlos Garrido Castellano, Beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion in Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popu­lar ­Music and the ­Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Novel Lia T. Bascomb, In Plenty and in Time of Need: Popu­lar Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Ca­rib­be­an Rafael Ocasio, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico Ana-­Maurine Lara, Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic Anke Birkenmaier, ed., Ca­rib­bean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism Sherina Feliciano-­Santos, A Contested Ca­rib­bean Indigeneity: Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism H. Adlai Murdoch, ed., The Strug­gle of Non-­Sovereign Ca­rib­bean Territories: Neoliberalism since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009 Robert Fatton Jr., The Guise of Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States Rafael Ocasio, Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico/Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico Yveline Alexis, Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, Writing the Ca­rib­bean in Magazine Time Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Ca­rib­bean Life Writing Alison Donnell, Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-­Caribbean Vincent Joos, Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti