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

By Vincent Joos

Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It describes the failures of international aid in Haiti while it analyzes examples of Haitian-based reconstruction and economic practices. By interrogating the relationship between indigenous uses of the cityscape and the urbanization of the countryside within a framework that centers on the violence of urban planning, the book shows that the forms of economic development promoted by international agencies institutionalize impermanence and instability. Conversely, it shows how everyday Haitians use and transform the city to create spaces of belonging and forms of citizenship anchored in a long history of resistance to extractive economies. Taking readers into the remnants of failed industrial projects in Haitian provinces and into the streets, rubble, and homes of Port-au-Prince, this book reflects on the possibilities and meanings of dwelling in post-disaster urban landscapes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978820609

Vincent Joos

Vincent Joos is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Global French Studies at Florida State University. He recently published Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti (Rutgers, 2021).

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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 unless 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.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To the memory of my grandmother, Angèle Joos

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1Developing Disasters: Dispossession and Industrialization in Northern Haiti

2Industrial Futures: Abstract and Disciplinarian Landscapes in Post-Earthquake Haiti

3State Interventions: Infrastructure and Citizenship

4Inhabiting Port-au-Prince after 2010: Indigenous Urbanization, History, and Belonging

5Daily Life in the Shotgun Neighborhoods of Downtown Port-au-Prince

6Demolishing Shotgun Neighborhoods

Conclusion: Peyi a Lok

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

1. Map of Haiti

2. Map of Port-au-Prince

3. Coconut grove in Aquin, Haiti

4. The edge of a field in Caracol

5. The landfill used by the Caracol Industrial Park

6. Monsieur Saint-Thoma’s only remaining cow

7. Gérard Defils’s collapsed apartment

8. View of Village Lumane Casimir

9. Rehabilitated ravine in Parc Martissant

10. A view of ravine Saint-Léger

11. A Gingerbread house in the Pacot neighborhood

12. Inside the Borno house.

13. The Etzer house

14. A shotgun house in Rue Saint Nicolas

15. Clomène Firmin

16. Selling mangoes in front courtyard of Clomène’s house

17. Clomène and family packing on the morning of the demolitions

18. Searching for salvageable materials from Clomène’s house

19. Clomène’s new warehouse

20. Unfinished bridge southwest of Port-au-Prince

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 were 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 children 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 people in Haiti live in poverty. But so did many people 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 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, limited, 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 after 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.

FIG. 3 Coconut grove in Aquin, Haiti.

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 children 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.

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. There’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 after 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. These 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 responses.² This book concerns these 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 great 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 people 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 labor 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. There, 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 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 houses 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 there 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 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 people 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 people 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 handle 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 after 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. People 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. After 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 are located outside the disaster zone. In rural areas, the Haitian state and its partners, such as USAID and the Inter-American 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 were supposed to grow the economy and foster the rebuilding of the country were only running at half capacity in 2018.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after 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 people retreated before the late afternoon rains could trap them in traffic. Even in the so-called slums, I found well-built houses 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 there, 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 were well adapted to the climatic conditions of the country, and were 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 people 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 these 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 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 were available only in Port-au-Prince, people were pulled back into the capital. Given that more than 300,000 houses had collapsed or were permanently damaged by the earthquake, people 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 were 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 century. 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 were 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 western part of Hispaniola. Located in the middle 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 century, 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 toward 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 people 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 toward colonial centralization in Port-au-Prince was halted abruptly during the nineteenth century. When Haiti gained independence from France in 1804, a majority of Haitians retreated to the island’s mountains to 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 labor. 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 services and goods structured this new society. Even though people grew coffee and marginally participated in the global economy, autarkic models built