In the 1960s and 1970s the typical gran neg or gran dam (Patron) in provincial Haiti was an individual belonging to a large family that, a) had more and better land than most people in the region, b) a better education, c) urban connections, but, d) was heavily invested in land, agricultural production, livestock rearing and, very importantly, the aggregation and processing of local produce destined for export, typically coffee, cacao, rum, sisal, aloe, goat skins, and castor oil. And perhaps more importantly than anything else, e) heavily invested in social capital. All had extensive networks of kliyan, people who were dependent on them for credit, as purchasers of their produce, and for sharecropping arrangements that brokered access to land and animals. All had many godchildren, and while some were pious Catholics, it was not uncommon for the wealthier men among them to have 20 or more recognized offspring. These economic patwon/kliyan relations, and fictive kinship relations, were expanded exponentially through the similar relations of their own siblings. It would have been rare during the 1960s to find an individual in rural Haiti who could not trace some kinship relationship to a local leader. Today these leaders are typically remembered as honest notables who would judge local disputes, whose decisions were respected, who were above reproach and who not only dominated the Community Councils, but whose presence and consent was indispensable in the acceptance of any community decision.
The extent of the romanticism of the notab of yesteryear is in stark contrast with those of today. Today the wealthiest people in any given rural area are typically described as volé (thief), showy (gen byen/pran poz), not invested in the local economy and not interested in community well-being or development. Although some of this discrepancy in notab of the past vs those of the present may indeed be written off to romanticism, the consistency of the accounts from elders in rural area cannot be dismissed. Moreover, the shift from an elite invested in the local economy to one depending on siphoning off aid and money meant for community services and investment in infrastructure is consistent with the shift in community opinion. The criticisms also coincide with changing national political and demographic trends. Indeed, if we look at these changes in the political, economic and demographic factors we should expect a disconnection between the wealthiest members of the community and the vulnerable masses: if for no other reason than, beginning in the 1970s, almost all of the members of the traditional rural elite have left.
With the political turmoil of this era and the collapse of the formal economy and exports (see this post), economic and social rural leaders increasingly invested, not in the local economy, but in getting themselves and their children out of the region. The extent of the exodus and the shift in the economic leadership base from local economy to charity cannot be gainsaid. Far-West Haiti during the 1990s, is an example. The eight most important community leaders living in the region where I conducted my doctoral research in 1990 had 44 children over the age of 18 years: not a single one had remained in the area. 19 were living in Port-au-Prince; 25 were in the US and Canada (see Schwartz 1991).
Similar evidence comes from the movement of people out of the village of Jean Rabel. I took a list of Jean Rabel village residents from a 1960 open letter to then President Francois Duvalier that I found in a Port-au-Prince newspaper (Nouvelliste 1960). The letter was a plea for aid after a storm had washed out the local cemetery, uncovering graves and sending coffins and cadavers floating through the streets. There were 178 signatures on the letter. Using local informants, we were able to identify eighty-two of the individuals listed in the letter, all the rest presumably having long ago left with their entire families. For sixty-nine of the individuals, information was obtained on the number of children they had and the current whereabouts of these children. Of the individuals, thirty-one had left Jean Rabel; twenty-one of these had immigrated to Miami. Of the 287 offspring identified, 76 percent had left Jean Rabel and 57 percent had immigrated to the United States.[i]
And I found the same patterns in more rural areas. In a 1992 random sample of two rural areas near Jean Rabel (specifically, La Voltiere in the commune of Mole St. Nicolas), I compared tin-roofed households (a sign of higher income) to thatch-roofed houses (a sign of lower income).[ii] None of the sixty-nine heads of thatch-roofed households had any children in the United States and only three had a sibling in the United States. In contrast, seven of twenty-seven tin-roofed household heads had siblings and four had children living in the United States (Schwartz 1992).
It is not that migrant families have more money because they have migrants. It is the inverse. As one moves from the poorest rural areas into those zones where there is a relative concentration of wealth, migration becomes the dominant theme. In one of the only irrigated zones in the region I found that 74 percent of all children of the largest landowners had left the region. Thirty-one percent (31%) were reported as being in the United States, and this percentage did not take into consideration the age of the children and the fact that some were still very young and hence had not yet emigrated (see Tables 1 and 2).
The shift also had an economic dimension. Investment in out-migration created an economic vacuum. As elsewhere in Haiti, enterprises that thrived in the Far-West up through the 1980s collapsed in the 1990s. By 1996 rum, sisal, coffee, goat skins, aloe, and castor oil were no longer aggregated in significant quantities to justify exportation. Into the void came missionaries, orphanages, schools, churches and NGOs, all of which had–and still have–their economic base in donations from overseas. During the 1990s–and largely true today–all clinics, hospitals, road construction, irrigation, soil conservation, and schools—even the public Liceys (high schools)—were heavily dependent on missionaries, UN agencies, and overseas based NGOs. This is true whether or not they were in name owned, constructed or maintained by the Haitian State. Consequently, for the majority of the rural population far and away the single most lucrative entrepreneurial opportunity became gaining access to those entities responsible for vectoring overseas aid. Whether for selfish or altruistic motivations, be it preacher, priest, orphanage owner, clinic owner, association director or those few non-charity endeavors such as merchant, ship owner, land owner, or politician, the major stakeholders earning money in rural Haiti and who were determined to keep a stake there moved his or her family to Port-au-Prince, Florida, New York, Boston, Montreal or Toronto while keeping an economic base in rural Haitian industry of charity. What they did with the money they earned or embezzled is just as important. Although they may have derived profits from their participation in regional overseas-funded charity and development enterprise, they overwhelmingly made their own personal investments in the safer, more stable, insurable and profitable external economies. They opened bank accounts in the US and Canada, bought homes and businesses there, and sent their children to school there. Moreover, while most observers prefer to ignore the topic, the situation was aggravated by the concurrent and very real emergence of illicit drug trafficking as the industry of choice for what has become provincial and arguably even metropolitan Haiti’s most powerful elite, even more powerful than the new custodians of charity. What all this has meant for the social system, the local bureaucracy and social capital is that a sense of community responsibility and community censure has been sapped, leaving little reason to expect anything different than the fraud, corruption, and nepotism for those with access to aid or the state bureaucracy. But perhaps more importantly than anything else, among the poor who are left behind, what remained of particular survival strategies they depended on for the past 200 years allegiance to household and family and values, loyalties that are anathema to the impartial participation in targeting and aid distribution that the State, NGOs and International organizations purport as idealize.
NOTES
[i]. The identification of “prestigious” is simply those individuals who were most easily recognized, about which informants had no questions, and were double-checked without complication.
[ii]. These samples were chosen from lists made in two neighborhoods. Beginning at a random starting point, every fifth household was chosen from the lists.
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