Urban Life in the Caribbean: A Study of a Haitian Urban Community

Michel Laguerre analyzes the low-income Belair neighborhood of Port-au-Prince based on field research in the mid-1970s. Looking at Haitian urban communities in the midst of the Duvalier dictatorship in a Caribbean primate city that can also be generalized through dependency theory for other 'Third World' primate cities, Laguerre's work is relevant to broader Caribbean Urban Studies or History. Moreover, Belair is the oldest neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, stronghold of the urban proletariat since the 19th century, but divided into two separate communities: 1. Lower Belair full of middle-class homes, full of shops, streetlights, and institutions and 2. Upper Belair, consisting of poor, shack housing, mostly treeless, fritay social events on Friday nights, open Vodou practice, lakou family formations, borlette lottery numbers.

Laguerre's work brings to life the lively albeit marginalized population of Upper Belair. They can be seen as part of a localized dependency theory within the context of the primate city of Port-au-Prince. Or, to paraphrase Laguerre, Upper Belair suffers from an internal structural dependency on the Haitian elite and the Haitian state. Removed to the periphery of socio-economic status or social mobility, the retailers and laborers of Upper Belair depend on wealthier wholesalers in Lower Belair or other middle-class and elite neighborhoods of the city. Even the numbers game played by residents of Upper Belair is placed in a dependent relationship upon wealthier owners, often of Arab descent. Fortunately, the community pooled resources together through the sangue, a system of rotating credit that facilitated access to outside capital or loans.

In terms of political power, Belair is also lacking. Instead, the dreaded tonton makout represent the state and dominate the neighborhood politically and socially (many a makout were also Vodou priests with sway and other sources of power in the area). The author also explains how Vodou was central to Duvalierism in Belair because it was through Vodou that many lakous and families were oriented, which meant using the houngan as a makout and neighborhood spy reinforced the authority of the state. Laguerre also suggests that those representing Duvalier in Belair had an incentive to not start new projects or innovative programs because a rise of their popularity in the neighborhood could be interpreted as a threat or attempt to make Duvalier look bad.

In terms of job prospects, most men were unemployed, a few toiled as skilled workers or artisans, and some found factory jobs outside the neighborhood, but this only perpetuates their dependency since the forms of employment available to residents were often low income to begin with. The rural lakou also survived rural to urban migration in Belair, becoming a dispersed urban family structure. But infiltration of the lakou through Vodou priests, local officials, and the broader dependency of the community on the rest of the city weakened any attempts to overthrow the existing order. The genius of Duvalierism was its ability to infiltrate nearly every aspect of Haitian society, and in slums like Upper Belair, that included Vodou, which stood at the center for many families and community functions.

Through the lens of dependency theory, one can clearly see how Upper Belair is symptomatic of broader patterns of Haitian, Caribbean, and 'Third World' dependency and underdevelopment. As in the previous review I wrote for The Military and Society in Haiti, a fascinating project to continue Laguerre's research in Belair would be of interest for post-1986. Without Duvalier, how has that 'liberated' political discourse and action in the neighborhood? Are there any new ways in which areas like Belair of Port-au-Prince are, presumably, still on the periphery? From personal experience in Port-au-Prince, it seems importers and wholesalers still pull the strings while the neighborhood retailers and consumers pay more with less means.