NFG 1999 Conference Highlights
Strong Families
Strong Neighborhoods

Little Haiti in Transition
By Janet Shenk

It’s site visit morning, and the undecided are still debating whether to board the bus to Little Havana or Little Haiti. Revolutions, or the lack thereof, have made Miami a mosaic of exile/immigrant communities. Only Little Managua is missing from the list.

The distinction between exile and immigrant is an important one, and the site visit titled “Little Haiti in Transition” underscores the progression. For decades, Haitian activists in Miami focused on fighting the Duvalier dictatorship. Then came the election of President Aristide, the military coup, U.S. Marines, and a tenuous return to democratic rule. Many exiles returned to Haiti; others decided it was time to build a brighter future in Miami.

Our visit to Little Haiti could be described as a series of encounters with remarkable women. Marleine Bastien is President of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami [Haitian Women of Miami], an 8-year-old nonprofit devoted to “the social, political and economic empowerment” of Haitian women and girls. She rides the bus with us, dressed in prim grey suit and African headwrap, offering a mini-course on Haitian history and the challenges of adapting to life in the United States. The morning newspaper carries a story about a rally she led in front of Miami’s Krome Detention Center, protesting unfair immigration laws that favor refugees from Communism (Cubans, Nicaraguans) over refugees from tyranny alone. A social worker by profession, Bastien clearly knows how to inspire a crowd. Soon she has 40 caffeine-deprived funders chanting Creole slogans on the bus.

At the new headquarters of Fanm Ayisyen – two rooms with no air-conditioning – we meet Bastien’s sisters in struggle: Cheryl Little, Executive Director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center; Sister Carline Paul, a regular on Creole radio who runs Haitian Youth of Tomorrow; and Leonie Hermataine, of the Haitian-American Foundation. They describe their work: immigrant rights education, seminars on domestic violence and child abuse, breast cancer awareness campaigns, a micro-loan program to promote Ti Komes, “little commerce.” At Fanm Ayisyen, the labor is all volunteer. And when a member of the audience asks the organization’s budget, a collective gasp greets the answer: $16,000 a year.

There is another aspect to the reality of Haitian women in Miami. So we board the bus again, passing neon pink porches displaying crafts for sale, to Notre Dame, the largest Haitian church outside of Haiti. A group of Haitian women tell us about their lives as workers in Florida’s booming nursing home industry, heavily reliant on cheap Haitian labor to care for patients, run the kitchens and laundries, change the sheets and bed pans. They tell us about dramatically reduced staffing levels that affect patient care; about holding two jobs at a time to make ends meet; about not having healthcare coverage for their own families; about being demoted or fired after years of service for trying to organize a union.

Monica Russo, the last “remarkable woman” we encounter on this trip, is the director of “Unite for Dignity,” a joint project of two unions to organize nursing home workers in South Florida. In fluent Creole or Spanish, she carries the labor movement’s new message about its commitment to organizing low-wage workers, and to building strong ties to community organizations in the process. Russo describes how hard the going has been. People are scared of losing their jobs, she says, but they’re also fed up with the lack of respect and demoralized by the conditions that have caused the decline in patient care. The fact that labor has joined the struggle for immigration reform, lending political clout and resources to the effort, has helped erase the line between union and community, between the lives of Haitian women at home and at the workplace. It’s all one battle — for respect, they say.

After an hour’s give and take, on issues ranging from Medicaid appropriations to the morality of Catholic nursing homes hiring union-busting firms, the site visit ends as it began — in Creole chants and a woman dressed in canary yellow leading us in song.
 

Janet Shenk is a trustee of the Arca Foundation and Special Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. She organized this site visit with NFG’s Working Group on Organized Labor and Community. For more information on its activities, please contact NFG, 703-448-1777.

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