Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith

Front matter

CROSSING the WATER and

Haitian Religion in Miami TERRY REY and ALEX STEPICK

WITH A FOREWORD BY

Contents

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Foreword Archbishop Thomas Wenski

Foreword

I welcome this book on the religious faith of Miami’s Haitian community, which features Little Haitis Notre Dame d’Haiti Mission, where I served for eighteen years as a parish priest. The authors are not theologians but social scientists, but their research and their insights derived from that research helps illustrate how religious institutions, which are usually regarded as “conservative,” can creatively and imaginatively respond to new challenges and create new opportunities for marginalized people.

In the 1960s, Operation Pedro Pan, during which the Roman Catholic Church helped some 14,000 unaccompanied minors from Cuba to resettle in the United States, the establishment of La Ermita de la Caridad (the shrine dedicated to Cuba’ patron saint), and the integration of thousands of young Cuban children into its parochial school system were just some of the ways that the local Catholic Church rose to the challenges and opportunities posed by the influx of Cuban refugees to Miami. In the late 1970s, the arrival of Haitian “boat people’—most of whom identified themselves as Catholics—posed new challenges to the archdiocese, challenges met in large part successfully by the establishment of Notre Dame d'Haïti in 1981 on what was previously the campus of a Catholic high school for girls.

The Roman Catholic Church in America, which began as an immigrant institution, moved up into the middle class and out to the suburbs after World War II. As a result, it became invisible to many poor newly arriving immigrants. The challenge in Haitian Miami was thus to make the Church visible to the new immigrants and vice versa. A subtext to the whole issue of immigration is, of course, class. America has always pretended to be unconscious of class; Americas ambiguity toward race is more openly acknowledged. Yet, the key to understanding race

X << FOREWORD relations in America lies in the acknowledgment of the underlying class conflict that so often influences the interactions between racial and ethnic groups.

A pastoral approach that works well in middle-class America will not necessarily correspond to the needs of immigrants who have not yet “transferred” into the middle class. One size does not fit all. To give a hypothetical example, in, say, a suburban Michigan parish, the two or three Peruvian cardiologists who may live there might have no problem feeling at home with their American-born neighbors. Indeed, if asked, they might not even feel any pressing need for Spanish language liturgy. Yet, within the territorial limits of this same suburban parish there may be a migrant labor camp of Mexican farm workers. They would probably not feel at home in the parish, for many reasons. For one thing, perhaps they are not as bilingual as our hypothetical cardiologists. And, perhaps more importantly, class differences between middle-class denizens of suburbia and these possibly undocumented farm workers would mitigate against their successful integration into the life of that parish even if the parishioners bent over backwards to welcome them. Given factors beyond the control of people’s best intentions, to count on that parish’s being a vital force in the lives of those Mexican farm workers would be very Pollyannaish. In reality, they would most likely remain invisible to the wider Church and the Church itself would be invisible to those farm workers. They simply would not see the institution as “theirs.” Without providing for ecclesial structures, like a “national” or ethnic parish, which would allow those farm workers a sense of ownership and would make them stakeholders in the Church, all our talk about the “preferential option for the poor” remains just that—talk.

My many years of experience as a pastor in South Floridas Haitian community taught me that. Notre Dame d'Haïti in Miami is a mission church designed on the national parish model, a model used by the Roman Catholic Church in the United States to integrate millions of immigrants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notre Dame has no English masses but five Sunday masses in Haitian Creole. The parish is entirely made up of Haitians, many of whom fled to South Florida in rickety boats. The newly arrived Haitians struggled to achieve legal status, and to learn English and marketable skills in the American workforce. In the 1980s anti-immigrant sentiment was more

FOREWORD >> xi focused on these poor, black migrants from the hemisphere’s second republic. Their petitions for political asylum were routinely dismissed and, unlike Cuban “refugees,” the Haitians were regarded as merely “economic migrants.”

There are many Haitian professionals who live in Miami—doctors, nurses, accountants, and the like—but they don't usually go to Notre Dame. If they go to church, they go to the parishes in the suburbs where they live. They integrate very well there because they are already the social and economic equals of the Americans who sit side by side with them in the pews. They perhaps don't need a Notre Dame, at least not to the extent that the three thousand or four thousand people that attend Notre Dame every week need it.

Notre Dame d’Haiti gives these Haitians a sense of belonging in a society that has often proved hostile to them: remember that in the 1980s “Haitian” was one of the four H’s identifying “risk” for HIV- AIDS. Notre Dame d’Haiti gives Haitians a place that allows them to do for themselves. They are the ushers, choir members, youth group leaders, catechists, readers, and sodality leaders. For six days a week, they might be reminded that they are foreigners, and unwelcome ones at that. At least on Sunday (and of course, not only on Sunday) at Notre Dame, they feel at home.

Notre Dame has provided for these Haitians the “position of strength” that assures successful integration both into the Church and into the broader society. This could not be easily duplicated in the territorial parish. In territorial parishes, because of mass schedules and other activities for the “real” parishioners, the newcomers are assigned to a midafternoon and generally inconvenient time slot. And, of course, they are admonished, “be sure to be finished by four and pick up after yourself!” But, as a Cuban proverb puts it: “If you want a man to walk with you, make sure he has comfortable shoes.” Evangelization, to be successful, must really take root within the culture to which the gospel is brought. So when evangelization is successful, it is enculturation. Enculturation allows the gospel message to be expressed in its integrity but within pastoral structures that are culturally sensitive and culturally appropriate—in other words, ones that are “comfortable shoes.”

Culture is like the skin that envelops our bodies. The task of enculturation then is to have the good news of Christ penetrate and become xii << FOREWORD one with a peoples skin. To strip away a peoples culture by forcing assimilation is to expose their society to shock, then to disease and death. Research among children of immigrants bears this out. Those most comfortable with their ethnic identity, those more at ease with their parents’ language and culture, do better academically and socially in American society than those who, because of shame or pressure to conform, Americanize themselves too rapidly. The mean streets of too many American cities underscore the fact that rootless people tend to become also ruthless people.

The trauma that brought these people to the United States in the first place—civil unrest, oppression, grinding poverty—and the difficulties of adapting to American life, such as learning a language, immigration status, family separation, can conspire to weaken or injure the “skin” that is one’s culture. These wounds present real dangers, and they require the opportunity to be healed. Without Notre Dame, these wounds would have gone undiagnosed and untreated by the Church's pastoral ministry because the wounded would have remained invisible.

The experience of Notre Dame dHaiti Mission and Miami’s Haitian community offers the social scientist a rich and interesting field to study. Notre Dame d’Haiti has served this community (even those who are non-Catholic) so well because it is both truly Catholic and truly Haitian. This volume showcases how the faiths of Miami’s Haitians, Catholic or other, offer mechanisms of social cohesion to otherwise marginalized immigrants and help them negotiate a strange and often unwelcoming new home

Archbishop Thomas Wenski Miami, July 2012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was a long time in the making and its realization relied heavily on the generous support and insights of many people in many places. Our gratitude is thus as far reaching as it is sincere, though most of it is grounded in, and springs from, Miami and Haiti. Above all, we thank the many Haitian and Haitian American believers, family members, and friends who have so kindly shared with us the depths and contours of their fascinating religious lives, and the priests, priestesses, bishops, pastors, prophets, prophetesses, preachers, and herbalists who have guided them and us along the way. We could not have even conceived of this project without the open arms that received us into a wide array of Haitian religious congregations, Catholic, Protestant, and Vodouists, which are far too many to name here.

For their assistance with our research in Miami, we are especially grateful to Oungan Michelet Tibosse Alisma, Manbo Margaret Armand, Rev. Fritz Bazin, Fr. Patrick Charles, Rev. Jacques Clotaire, Rev. F. F. Duclair, Rev. François Duclair, Rev. Emmanuel Eugène, Rev. Jonas Georges, the late Monsignor Gérard Darbouze, Fr. Lesley Jean, Fr. Reginald Jean- Mary, Jose Antonio Lammoglia, Rev. Wilner Maxi, Manbo Danièle Mangones, Fr. Jean Pierre, Rev. Fandor Saint-Felix, Fr. Juan Sosa, Rev. Harold Vieux, Emile Villard, and Archbishop Thomas Wenski. In Haiti we were very fortunate to have been spoken to and been welcomed and guided by Br. Ameleon, Fr. Whistler Angrand, Fr. Emmanuel Charles, Fr. Gabriel Charles, Joel Jean-Baptiste, the late Fr. Gérard Jean-Juste, Ira Lowenthal, Yolette Mengual, the late Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, Francesca Pascal, Archbishop Guire Poulard, Mira Toussaint, and by a number of leaders in the National Haitian Protestant Pastors Association.

Much of our research was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts as part of their Gateway Cities Initiative, and we gratefully acknowledge

>> xiii xiv << ACKNOWLEDGMENTS this support and particularly that of our program officer at Pew, Kimon Sargeant. The Pew project also resulted in the book Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City, which we co-edited with the project’s other principal investigator, Sarah Mahler. Also affiliated with that project were postdoctoral fellows Katrin Hansing, Christine Ho, and Yves Labissiere. Graduate research assistants were Terry Tsuji, Aidil Oscariz, Isabel del Pino Allen, Su Fink, Eileen Smith-Cavros, Noemi Baez, and Ann Reeder Goraczko.

We began this study of Haitian religion in Miami more than ten years ago while both of us were on the faculty at Florida International University. We enjoyed fruitful collaborations related to this book with a host of talented scholars there, especially Marvin Dunne, Deborah O’Neil, and Carol Dutton Stepick. Meanwhile, FIU’s Immigration and Ethnicity Institute and the university’s Center for Labor Research and Studies, where the institute is housed, provided the space for our Pew-funded research and many other resources that were essential to its success. We also owe a special word of thanks to several professional colleagues from other universities and institutes who are experts on Haitian religion, especially Dimitri Béchacq, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, Leslie Desmangles, Benjamin Hebblethwaite, Laénnec Hurbon, Bertin Louis, Elizabeth McAlister, Karen McCarthy Brown, Margarita Mooney, and Karen Richman, who have so graciously shared their work and ideas with us over the years; Leslie and Margarita, in fact, along with two other anonymous reviewers, read the entirety of an earlier draft of our manuscript and provided invaluable feedback that made this a much better book.

Many thanks also to Jason Martin for creating two of the book’s maps, to Jerry Berndt for contributing his magnificent photographs to this project, to Gayle Schooley for patient and priceless technical and logistical assistance, and to Serge Rey for helping us think spatially about our work. More recently, we have benefited in many ways from our wonderful collaborators at New York University Press, especially Mary Sutherland, Despina Papazoglou Gimbel, Constance Grady, and Jennifer Hammer, our most able editor, and we gratefully acknowledge their support, along with that of the editors of the series in which this book resides, Tracy Fessenden, Laura Levitt, and David Harrington Watt. Antouka mèsi anpil pou tout bèl soutyen ki te pèmèt liv sa realize!