EMERGING VOICES THE WEST INDIAN, DOMINICAN, AND HAITIAN DIASPORAS IN THE

Douglas W. Payne October 22, 1998

Policy Papers on the Americas

EMERGING VOICES The West Indian, Dominican, and Haitian Diasporas in the United States

Douglas W. Payne

Policy Papers on the Americas Volume IX Study 11

October 22, 1998

CSIS Americas Program

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), established in 1962, is a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary.

CSIS is dedicated to policy analysis and impact. It seeks to inform and shape selected policy decisions in government and the private sector to meet the increasingly complex and difficult global challenges that leaders will confront in the next century. It achieves this mission in three ways: by generating strategic analysis that is anticipatory and interdisciplinary, by convening policymakers and other influential parties to assess key issues, and by building structures for policy action.

CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author.

CSIS Americas Program Leadership

Georges Fauriol, Director M. Delal Baer, Deputy Director and Director, Mexico Project Joyce Hoebing, Assistant Director Michael May, Director, MERCOSUR-South America Project Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, Assistant Director, Mexico Project Christopher Sands, Director, Project

Editor

Joyce Hoebing

© 1998 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This report was prepared under the aegis of the CSIS Policy Papers on the Americas series. Comments are welcome and should be directed to:

Joyce Hoebing CSIS Americas Program 1800 K Street, NW , D.C. 20006 Phone: (202) 775-3299 Fax: (202) 466-4739 E-mail: [email protected]

Contents

Preface

The first CSIS initiative on the Caribbean, launched in 1965, provided an assessment of the U.S. intervention in the . This was the cold war era. Over the following two decades, political and security concerns were at the heart of CSIS efforts. These were anchored by topics such as and revolution in the region, the influence of the Soviet Union, and U.S. intervention in Grenada. By the late 1980s into the 1990s, issues had progressed to a new set of concerns. For CSIS, these were dominated by the political transition in , regional trade integration, the effect of a globalizing economy on the small economies of the Caribbean, and the future of U.S.-Caribbean relations have been addressed. Key elections in the Caribbean have been covered in the CSIS Western Hemisphere Election Study series since the early 1980s. In 1996, CSIS launched the Caribbean Leadership Group, a network of emerging young leaders drawn from throughout the region. The members of the Group—drawn from the public and private sectors and nongovernmental and grassroots organizations—conduct research, participate in CSIS visiting fellowships, and attend annual plenaries to explore how best to meet the challenges and opportunities facing the region in the coming decades. As the Leadership Group evolved, another idea took shape: What role does the Caribbean diaspora play in U.S.-Caribbean relations? The concept that has ensued is a parallel leadership group, comprised of members of the U.S.-based Caribbean diaspora, which would work in tandem with the Caribbean Leadership Group to explore the future of the Caribbean and U.S.-Caribbean relations. Emerging Voices is the first step in the process. The interests of the Caribbean, as well as the future of the U.S.-Caribbean relationship, cannot be separated from the dynamic of the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. From remittances to the home country (which in the case of Haiti exceeds total public sector internal revenues) to narcotics trafficking and crime in the region, the U.S.-based diaspora plays a role. Likewise, the diaspora represents a salient consitutencly and is a latent political force in U.S. policymaking and in local politics. This large group of immigrants has in recent years begun to achieve U.S. citizenship. This is partly in response to new U.S. immigration law that threatens the social benefits to which legal immigrants were formerly entitled. In in 1996, four of the five top countries in terms of the number of people seeking citizenship were Caribbean (the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guyana, and Haiti). If this group were to organize around specific issues—domestic or foreign in nature—they could potentially gain a louder voice. Douglas Payne was asked to review the diasporas from the English- speaking Caribbean, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. His task was to assess the organization of these diasporas, their goals, and their roles in U.S. policymaking and in shaping U.S.-Caribbean relations. Emerging Voices is a unique study: much has been written describing the socioeconomic characteristics of various diasporas and the background to emigration to the United States. Much

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less attention has been paid to how diasporas interact with domestic and foreign public policy issues. Two vibrant Caribbean diasporas are not addressed in this study, Cuban and living on the mainland. The latter involves such a uniqaue and more integrated socio-politcal interaction within the U.S. political community that it did not easily fit the terms of reference of this study. As for Cuba, much has already been said and written about this diaspora group’s level of sophistication with regard to organization, funding, lobbying, and outreach. It also has a galvanizing focus—Fidel Castro—that is in effect a single-issue interest not readily found in other Caribbean diasporas. We did not want to divert attention away from the mostly overlooked diasporas from the rest of the Caribbean. More likely, a separate, full-length report will be necessary to adequately address the issues facing the Cuban-American community over the coming decades.

Joyce Hoebing Assistant Director Amercas Program

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Introduction

Based on recent estimates, up to 15 percent of the population of the English- speaking Caribbean lives in the United States, 12 percent of the population of the Dominican Republic, and 14 percent of the population of Haiti. West Indians—as those from the English-speaking Caribbean will be referred to in this report—have arrived in successive waves since the early part of this century, Dominicans and since the 1960s. While Haitians have fled political oppression, and Dominicans political uncertainty and corruption, the people of all three diasporas have come in search of better economic opportunities. The largest concentrations of West Indians and Dominicans are in the metropolitan area, while Haitians have congregated there and in greater . Over the years, secondary concentrations have developed in , the Mid-Atlantic states, and South , while smaller outposts can be found in a number of states in between and further west. Each diaspora group has maintained strong ties with home countries— political, economic and cultural—stemming from the strong desire among many who departed to return some day. Transnational linkages have been facilitated by geographic proximity, advanced communication technology, and low-cost air travel. The widespread expectation among Dominicans and West Indians that their stay would be temporary has been evident in the low rates of naturalization compared to other immigrant groups in the United States. It has been somewhat different in the case of Haitians. In recent decades, no other immigrant group has suffered more prejudice and discrimination, and many have had to struggle to obtain any legal status whatsoever. Over the last 10 years, the transient mentality has begun to shift, in part because these immigrants have seen little improvement in the conditions which prompted them to leave their countries in the first place. In addition, new generations of U.S.-born children are growing up with a sense that the United States is home, despite the great difficulties many encounter. As a result, ever greater numbers of West Indians, Dominicans, and Haitians are coming to the realization that they are here to stay. But just as that idea began to take hold, the very permanence that people were growing to accept became imperiled by the anti-immigrant backlash in the United States and new federal legislation designed to limit legal immigration and bar legal immigrants from many forms of social assistance. The threat was a wake-up call for West Indians and Dominicans, and signaled Haitians that their security in the United States remained in jeopardy despite the legal residency many had finally achieved. Encouraged by community leaders and activists in all three diasporas, people have been applying for U.S. citizenship at an unprecedented rate. That, in turn, has stimulated efforts to gain political power through the ballot box and to build institutions with voices strong enough to be heard in the congested corridors of Washington. These developments have been supported by the Dominican as well as a number of West Indian governments. They are concerned about a

1 2 Emerging Voices reduction in the flow of remittances which have become a critical source of foreign exchange, and the possible closing off of an important safety valve for relieving population pressures. They also view diaspora communities as potential assets for influencing U.S. foreign policy, particularly on trade issues. The current government in Haiti, paralyzed since 1997 and with few resources, remains mostly out of the picture. This report, based on interviews with some of the key players involved and a cross section of media, academic, and government sources, provides an overview of the three diasporas, including their dimensions, who the people are, and when they came. It then examines levels of institutional development and considers the prospects for political empowerment and building influence in Washington. There are a number of parallels between these three immigrant communities, the hurdles they face, and the evident determination among an increasing number of leaders and ordinary people to overcome them. So far, the results have been mixed at best. Some influential figures in each group note the potential for cooperation, particularly on the issue of immigrant rights. Still, differences in terms of language, ethnicity, history, and culture have precluded all but the most minimal interaction, and most West Indians, Dominicans, and Haitians in the United States may know as little about each other as the rest of America knows about them.

The West Indian Diaspora

People from the West Indies generally refer to themselves as Caribbean. For the purpose of clarity, West Indian is used in this report to differentiate them from the people of the Haitian and Dominican diasporas. Specifically, West Indian will refer to people from the nations and dependencies of the English-speaking Caribbean, the majority of which belong to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). The English-speaking members of CARICOM are: the island nations of Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago; the mainland nations of Guyana (South America) and Belize (Central America); and the British dependency of Montserrat. The other English-speaking dependencies in the region are Anguilla (UK), Bermuda (UK), British Virgin Islands (UK), Cayman Islands (UK), and U.S. Virgin Islands (U.S.). It should be noted that in the last few years Dutch-speaking Suriname and French/Creole-speaking Haiti also have become members of CARICOM.

Dimensions

The 1990 U.S. Census provides but a starting point for determining the populations of the three diaspora communities considered in this report. It missed an estimated 8 to 10 million people nationwide, many of them in urban areas, and eight years have now gone by. The 1990 Census counted 688,730 people who

Douglas W. Payne 3 claimed that their primary ancestry was West Indian, up from 469,920 in 1980. The largest group by far was Jamaicans, with 435,024, or nearly 64 percent of all those counted in 1990. The next largest group was people of Guyanese ancestry (81,665), followed by Trinidad and Tobago (76,270), Barbados (35,455), Belize (22,922), and the Bahamas (21,081), with the remaining sixteen or so thousand from other countries. According to the 1990 Census, 386,256 people of West Indian ancestry, or about 56 percent of the West Indian diaspora in the United States, were found in the New York City metropolitan area (including and ), with the overwhelming majority of them residing in New York City. The next largest concentration was in Florida (117,549). Significant concentrations were also found in , , and the Washington D.C.- area. Most estimates by region are substantially higher. The Caribbean Research Center at Medgar Evers College in estimated, based on city-wide surveys, that in New York City in 1991 there were more than 400,000 Jamaicans alone. In Connecticut, where the 1990 Census counted 23,310 people of West Indian ancestry, Dr. Basil K. Bryan, the Jamaican consul general in New York City, estimates that there are now nearly double that number. In Maryland and Washington, D.C., the Census counted 26,003 West Indians, with the overwhelming majority in Maryland. In April 1998, reporter Desson Howe of The Washington Post estimated, based on embassy mailing lists, local cultural associations and community observers, that there were between 40,000 and 60,000 West Indians in the -Washington corridor. Dr. Bryan reckons that there are now about 200,000 West Indians in Florida, three-quarters of a million in the New York City metropolitan area, and possibly a million nationwide. That seems a reasonable estimate. The U.S. Census Current Population Survey (CPS) issued in March 1997 determined, based on data collected in 1996, that in the United States there were 506,000 people alone who had been born in Jamaica. The survey did not consider children born in the United States to Jamaican immigrants. Adding in the other countries of origin and their second generations, the West Indian diaspora in the United States may indeed be approaching the one million mark, which would be more than 15 percent of the combined populations of the West Indian nations themselves.

Who They Are, When They Came

Of the three diaspora groups, West Indians were the first to arrive in the United States in significant numbers. As described by Philip Kasinitz, author of Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race, there were three distinct waves. The first occurred in the early part of this century, when tens of thousands arrived, and ended after the United States imposed severe restrictions on foreign immigration after 1924. Most were Jamaican and settled in New York City, as many as 40,000 to 45,000, while about 10,000 Bahamians went to Florida, lured by the building boom then taking place in the Miami area. Some were middle and upper class but a majority was working class. The second and smallest wave

4 Emerging Voices arrived between the late 1930s and 1965, with an average of only a few thousand arriving each year. Most were people joining family members who had migrated during the first wave, or young professionals who came on student visas and remained after achieving their degrees. During the 1950s West Indians by the tens of thousands went to Great Britain, a magnet at the time because of a post-war labor shortage and lenient immigration laws. In 1962 London imposed tight restrictions on Commonwealth immigration and effectively closed what had become an important population safety valve for West Indian nations. When Washington liberalized its immigration policy in 1965, opening the door to quota-free migration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time since the 1920s, the outflow of West Indians shifted to the United States in what would become the third and largest wave. By the early 1980s, according to official U.S. figures cited by Kasinitz, up to 50,000 West Indians were arriving legally in the United States each year, with at least half settling in New York City. Although the rate has leveled off and has possibly diminished since then, Jamaica and Guyana for more than a decade have remained fourth and fifth among the top five sources of immigrants arriving in New York. The first three are the Dominican Republic, the former Soviet Union, and China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan). The third wave, which has continued to the present, includes people from every sector of West Indian society. Elites have migrated to protect their wealth from fluctuations in volatile economies and political uncertainty. For example, significant numbers of Jamaica’s upper and upper-middle classes left for during the 1970s when the left-wing government of Michael Manley was in power. And Guyana suffered an enormous brain drain during the quasi-socialist, authoritarian regime of Forbes Burnham (1964-1985). Meanwhile, throughout the region, children of the middle classes have left in search of greater economic opportunities, and the poor have fled subsistence conditions and chronically high unemployment.

Initial Stages of Institutional Development

In the early part of this century many West Indian immigrants achieved significant economic success. By the 1930s a disproportionately high number had risen to high social and political positions in New York City’s black community. But as Kasinitz points out, they did so identifying themselves as blacks, not West Indians, for racial identity remained the principal factor in determining social organization and political participation. Most West Indians did maintain strong ties to their nations of origin. When they organized on that basis, however, it was apart from their involvement in U.S. politics, something that would not begin to change until the 1980s. The West Indian voluntary and benevolent associations that emerged in New York in the first decades of this century were organized around countries of origin and were primarily for mutual support. In the 1930s some evolved into action groups and were joined by new organizations that became directly involved

Douglas W. Payne 5 in politics at home, usually as proponents of independence from Great Britain and universal suffrage. The largest of these, the Jamaica Progressive League (JPL), was formed in 1936 and became the registered U.S. representative and fund raiser for one of Jamaica’s two main political organizations, the People’s National Party (PNP). From the 1940s through the 1960s, according to Kasinitz, the JPL’s membership was in the thousands, while a number of Barbadian, Grenadian, and Vincentian organizations had hundreds of members on their rolls. Following Jamaica’s independence in 1962, the JPL became active in lobbying Washington for immigration liberalization, and was able to gather support from the wider West Indian community in the United States. But with the election of the PNP in Jamaica in 1972, the JPL lost ground because its partisan position held less appeal and because much of the JPL’s middle-class following and some of its leadership were uneasy with the PNP’s shift to the left under Prime Minister Michael Manley. Moreover, a number of those West Indians who had arrived in earlier decades and spawned a new generation of U.S.-born children were becoming more concerned with U.S. domestic issues such as education and health. The first serious attempts to form pan-West Indian organizations were made in the 1980s. The most prominent group was the Caribbean Action Lobby (CAL), founded in 1980 by Trinidad-born Los Angeles congressman Mervyn Dymally and a number of younger, New York-based activists of various nationalities and political tendencies. The CAL held together when its focus was advocating in Washington on immigration issues and U.S. policy toward the Caribbean. But it foundered amid internecine battles in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it tried to make inroads in the racial rough-and-tumble of Democratic Party politics in New York, where West Indians and African-Americans were increasingly at odds. The Brooklyn-based Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CACCI), founded in the mid-1980s by Grenada-born Roy A. Hastick, has had better staying power, but is focused primarily on promoting small business and, more recently, trade between West Indian nations and the diaspora. It has drawn on the appeal of self-reliance and entrepreneurship among West Indians and enjoys the support of institutions in New York such as Consolidated Edison as well as banks and companies doing business in the West Indian community. Hastick established ties with the Democratic Party in Brooklyn and, in conjunction with Dr. Marco Mason of the Caribbean Women’s Health Association and other groups, helped secure public funding in 1985 to establish the Caribbean Research Center at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. One of the most influential West Indian umbrella institutions and a primary platform for projecting West Indian identity in the United States is Carib News, a New York-based weekly newspaper. Karl B. Rodney, the founder and publisher, arrived in New York from Jamaica in 1958. He attained a university degree, climbed the corporate ladder at the Equitable Life Insurance Company, and served for a decade as president of the JPL. In 1982 Rodney decided the West Indian community needed, and had become large enough to support, a newspaper that would combine coverage of Caribbean affairs and issues affecting the West Indian

6 Emerging Voices

diaspora in the United States. Today, the circulation of Carib News has climbed to more than 60,000 and its news and editorial pages provide a forum for West Indian voices from throughout the United States and the Caribbean. More than a quarter of its readers are outside the New York metropolitan area. In the mid-1980s most West Indian leaders in the United States backed immigration legislation that provided amnesty for undocumented aliens. They were angered when a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus opposed it, particularly Congressman Major Owens whose Brooklyn district encompasses a large swath of New York’s West Indian community. Much of the protest was amplified through Carib News and when the Simpson-Rodino Act finally came up for a vote in 1986, Owens broke ranks with the caucus to support it. By that time there was talk in New York of a “West Indian vote,” and New York politicians could not help but notice the increasing numbers of people at the West Indian American Day Carnival which culminates every Labor Day with a parade on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Although Trinidadian in origin, the carnival in New York has been embraced by immigrants from every West Indian nation and remains the most visible public expression of West Indian culture in the United States. By the mid-1980s it was attracting up to one million people, including West Indians from around the United States and Canada, and public officials and political candidates of all stripes lined up to march in the parade. In 1998, the 31st annual holding of the parade drew an estimated two million people. One way to gauge the growth of the West Indian diaspora is to track the annual carnivals held in other cities. Recent entries include Atlanta, , Washington D.C., Syracuse, and Jersey City, where carnivals inaugurated during the last decade now attract tens of thousands of people. Nonetheless, many West Indian immigrants remained unable to vote because they had not become U.S. citizens. According to the 1990 Census, only 36.7 percent of the 682,418 West Indians in the United States were naturalized, one of the lowest rates of all immigrant groups. In a survey conducted in the late 1980s under the aegis of the Caribbean Research Center, only 25 percent of West Indians interviewed in New York City said they were U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, African-Americans continued to dominate politics in New York’s black community. West Indians with political aspirations risked marginalization if they did not follow the agenda. Shirley Chisolm, for example, born in Brooklyn of Barbadian parents, reached the U.S. Congress—the only person of West Indian descent thus far to do so—by identifying herself with African-American rather than West Indian interests. Jamaica-born Una Clarke broke the ice when she successfully ran as a West Indian candidate for the New York City Council in 1991. Clarke came up through the ranks of the African-American-controlled Empowerment Group in Brooklyn and acted as a liaison to West Indians for Congressman Owens. When she stepped forward to run in the newly created, predominantly Caribbean 40th District in Flatbush, the group accused her of “tribalism” and ran its own African- American candidate against her. Backed by Carib News, she campaigned on a pro- West Indian platform, focusing on the concerns of the Jamaicans, Guyanese,

Douglas W. Payne 7

Trinidadians, Grenadians, and Haitians who constitute nearly two-thirds of the district. Clarke won by a narrow margin but has proven to be an effective West Indian voice in the ethnic hothouse of New York politics and has won re-election ever since. In the view of Dr. George Irish, director of the Caribbean Research Center at Medgar Evers, “Una Clarke gave expression to a mounting undercurrent and brought it forth. She gave legitimacy to the West Indian banner because she has carried it so effectively and done so without alienating other groups.”

1990s Wake-up Call

Notwithstanding Clarke’s breakthrough in New York and the growing influence of Carib News, the West Indian diaspora in the early 1990s remained a generally diffuse and inward-looking community. Many West Indians had done well economically, but individual pursuits remained a priority for those who had achieved middle-class status and for the more recent arrivals who aspired to it. The CAL had withered—“a feeble attempt,” Karl Rodney says in retrospect—and despite the steady growth of the community in the United States there was no nationally organized West Indian voice in Washington or anywhere else. A number of trends in the first half of the 1990s acted as a wake-up call and many in the West Indian diaspora have endeavored, by fits and starts, to respond. Paramount has been the anti-immigrant backlash in the United States, manifest first in the passage of Proposition 187 in California and proposals for similar referendums in Florida. That was followed by federal legislation that made legal immigration more difficult and barred legal immigrants from many forms of social assistance, and a new U.S. policy of deporting not only illegal immigrants but also legal immigrants convicted of a crime. West Indian immigrants from all economic classes pride themselves on economic self-reliance and generally frown upon public assistance. But the general targeting of legal as well as illegal immigrants was seen as a threat to those with permanent residency, the status of the majority in the community. That threat emerged at the same time that increasing numbers of West Indian immigrants were coming to the realization that they, and especially their children, were in the United States to stay, at least until they reached retirement age. And maybe not even then, for many had seen little improvement in the economic and social conditions which had compelled them to leave the West Indies in the first place, and despite enduring nationalist feelings, the United States was beginning to feel more like home. These developments led to citizenship drives from New York to South Florida. They are generally led by a younger generation of West Indian community leaders, including immigration lawyers and other professionals who use local radio and go to churches and other gathering points to promote the securing of rights that come with citizenship. Along with legal protections, they emphasize that people also gain the right to vote and therefore a say in how their taxes are spent, for example, on education and other public expenditures which directly

8 Emerging Voices affect the lives of their children in the United States. Deborah Edwards, a Jamaica-born lawyer in Dade County, Florida, says, “As we become settled economically, we must think about political involvement where we live—school boards, county politics. West Indians have been strong individually, but there is a growing awareness that we need to organize.” Another recent trend is the heightened interest of CARICOM governments in the well being of West Indian immigrants in the United States. A major reason is that remittances have become a principal source of foreign exchange for small Caribbean nations whipsawed between giant trading blocs in North America and Europe. With the sharp reduction in U.S. economic aid to the region since the end of the cold war, monies sent home from the diaspora have become even more critical. According to Deborah Waller Meyers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jamaica is among the eight countries which account for 97 percent of all Latin American and Caribbean remittances. Many West Indian governments, through embassies and consulates, therefore have joined in encouraging expatriates to become U.S. citizens. They remind that nationality will not be lost, as the constitutions of virtually every West Indian nation allow for dual citizenship. “My message to our nationals in the United States,” says Dennis Antoine, Grenada’s ambassador in Washington, “is to get empowered, become voters.” Finally, there has been renewed interest in establishing institutions to influence Washington on issues affecting West Indians. This has stemmed both from the anti-immigrant climate as well as the shift in U.S. policy since the end of the cold war. U.S. economic relations with CARICOM are now said to be based, as they are elsewhere in the developing world, on trade, not aid. Yet the Clinton administration, despite repeated commitments to CARICOM, has been half- hearted at best in urging Congress to extend trade benefits that would put the Caribbean on equal footing with Mexico, and the prospects for passing so-called NAFTA parity legislation remains poor. Moreover, Washington has been adamant in pressing the World Trade Organization (WTO) to overturn a long-standing agreement which guarantees some Caribbean nations a share of the European Union banana market. A number of the island countries are highly dependent on banana exports. And while Washington continues to prod CARICOM to get tougher on illegal drugs and money-laundering, West Indian governments believe that U.S. trade policy, by hobbling the region’s economies, only makes their nations more vulnerable to penetration by traffickers. They make strong arguments, as well, that Washington’s policy of criminal deportations exacerbates crime and drug problems in their countries. CARICOM leaders lobbied President Clinton on these issues in Barbados in 1997 and West Indian diplomats have worked the halls in Washington, but to little effect. A number of CARICOM governments are therefore looking to the diaspora for support in Washington. In addresses made at the July 1998 CARICOM meeting in St. Lucia, St. Lucia prime minister Kenny Anthony stated that the West Indian diaspora must be turned into a political asset. Anthony was

Douglas W. Payne 9 seconded by Edison James, prime minister of Dominica, who specifically called on West Indians in the United States to lobby Congress on the banana issue.

Prospects for Political Empowerment

Citizenship drives have had significant success. Activists say that in recent years more than 100,000 West Indians have initiated or completed the naturalization process in New York, tens of thousands more in Florida and other states. According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), in 1996 Jamaicans and Guyanese ranked third and fourth in numbers of people seeking citizenship in New York, behind only immigrants from the Dominican Republic and China. That other diasporas also are naturalizing in large numbers has created an enormous backlog in processing applications—up to two million nationwide, with at least 300,000 waiting in New York City alone. That, too, has become an issue for West Indian activists, some of whom allege that anti- immigrant forces in the U.S. Congress are deliberately seeking to hold back the wave of new citizens by withholding resources from the INS. Nonetheless, a number of West Indian candidates have been able to capitalize on the increase in West Indian voters. In New York in the early 1990s, there were only Una Clarke and a few others. Today, there are 13 people of West Indian descent who have won municipal or state office in the New York metropolitan area. Most are members of the Association of Caribbean American Leaders founded by Clarke. Eleven are Democrats. Two who were elected to municipal office in Hartford, Connecticut, where the West Indian community is decidedly middle class, are Republicans. In 1998 the Association of Caribbean American Leaders sponsored a series of forums in which candidates for the U.S. Senate and the governor of New York were invited to address and take questions from the West Indian community. One was held in the northeastern Bronx, which has come to be known as “Little Jamaica,” although many Vincentians, Antiguans, and others are there, too. In her remarks, Clarke said, “These meetings are about a return on our investment. We pay taxes, buy houses, invest. Now, we are seeking a return on that.” Most of the major Democratic candidates for senator and governor in New York came to at least one of these meetings. Not surprisingly, all were critical of recent immigration legislation and vowed to make reform a priority. George Irish adds that in New York, Governor George Pataki and other state-level political figures recently have approached the Caribbean Research Center for demographic data on the West Indian community. “Not long ago,” he says, “only Congressman Owens and a few others in Brooklyn paid any attention.” West Indians are also starting to break out of political isolation in South Florida, at least in Broward County, just north of Miami. Broward has been the destination for many in the most recent wave of West Indian migration, particularly working-class Jamaicans who have congregated in the Lauderdale area. A citizenship drive organized by Hazelle Rogers, a Jamaican-American elected to the Lauderdale Lakes city commission in 1996, helped Jamaica-born

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Samuel S. Brown get elected mayor in March 1998. Brown told the Miami Herald, “The Caribbean community was instrumental in the outcome of this election.” Still, grassroots mobilization within the West Indian diaspora remains at a low level. Rodney and Irish believe that most people continue to be preoccupied with individual pursuits and rarely think in terms of a collective effort on behalf of the community as a whole. Irwine Clare, a Jamaica-born former banker who personifies the new generation of energetic West Indian activists, says, “Those hundreds of thousands of West Indians out on Eastern Parkway every Labor Day—that’s still just potential.” Clare co-founded Caribbean Immigrants Services (CIS) in New York in 1994 with lawyer Winston Tucker. CIS, a non-profit, private organization, has spearheaded a major citizenship drive in New York and other cities, processing, Clare says, up to 100,000 applications in the New York area alone. “With more citizens, we can elect more Una Clarkes,” he says. But real political empowerment, he believes, cannot be achieved until the West Indian community understands the array of political issues that affects it collectively. He views immigration as a catalyst to mobilizing and educating people on other issues, from U.S. trade policy and CARICOM initiatives to education and health, all of which he and Tucker address on a weekly radio program they co-host in New York. Looking further ahead, West Indian candidates seeking higher office must find a balance between building an ethnic base and seeking support within the African-American and other ethnic communities. Una Clarke says, “We must educate and understand ourselves based on a community of interests. For example, to the extent that I weigh in on welfare—and I do—African-Americans should be able to support us on immigration.” More than a few political observers in New York consider Clarke a good bet for the U.S. Congress. Still, tension remains between West Indians and Afro-Americans, and coalitions of mutual interest are never easy to establish or maintain in ethnically complex, urban politics. Most recently, West Indian leaders were outraged when Congressman Owens joined a number of his cohorts in the Congressional Black Caucus to help block passage of NAFTA parity legislation. Moreover, there has been only limited contact between West Indians and Haitians and even less with immigrant groups, even though all share common concerns about immigration and urban social and economic issues. Clare envisions West Indian alliances with other groups somewhere down the road, “But we still have a lot of work to do among ourselves.”

Prospects for a West Indian Lobby

Making an impact in Washington means mobilizing voters and raising substantial sums of money for lobbying efforts and campaign contributions. In New York, West Indians may be nearing the critical mass necessary to send someone to Congress. But while West Indians have done relatively well economically, most individuals willing to devote time and personal resources continue to identify more with concerns specific to their country of origin rather than pan-Caribbean

Douglas W. Payne 11

causes. “Basically,” says Karl Rodney, “the West Indian community here has evolved along country lines. No broad leadership has emerged. There has been no Moses.” Today, the West Indian diaspora in the United States remains mostly an amalgam of a hundred or more country-based organizations, some of which date back to the first half of the century. In 1998 more than 40 groups were represented at the 21st annual convention of the National Association of Jamaican and Supportive Organizations (NAJASO), and more than a dozen at the 6th annual convention of the National Association of Barbadian Organizations. Ambassador Antoine of Grenada says that there are at least seven or eight Grenadian associations in the United States. There are even a number of organizations formed by immigrants from St. Kitts and Nevis, the smallest West Indian nation, with a population of less than 45,000. Prospects for developing a unified voice are hampered, too, by ethnic divisions within two of the largest country groups in the United States, Trinidadians and, especially, the Guyanese. Long-standing tensions between Guyanese of African and East Indian descent have been transferred to New York and Florida. They live separately—the Afro-Guyanese in Brooklyn and Dade County, the Indo-Guyanese in and Broward County—and there has been much verbal jousting across county lines since the disputed December 1997 elections in Guyana. There is considerably less friction between Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians in the United States, but they still tend to live and organize separately. People from Belize, one of the mid-size West Indian groups, are divided geographically, with the largest concentration found in the Los Angeles area. Also, some identify themselves as Garífuna first, and Belizean second. The Garífuna, also known as Black Caribs, are descendants of people forcibly removed by the British from St. Vincent to Central America two centuries ago and who currently inhabit Caribbean coastal areas from Belize to Nicaragua. Regarding the Bahamas, Ivelaw Griffith of Florida International University points out that even though the nation is a member of CARICOM, Bahamians at home and in the United States tend to identify themselves more as North Americans than West Indians. Moreover, the Bahamians in Florida date back to the first decades of this century and have achieved a level of integration which further weighs against activism based on ethnic identification. It is little wonder, then, that developing a base of support for pan-West Indian organizing in the United States has been difficult. For example, the non- profit Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS) in Washington, D.C., has struggled to sustain itself since it was established in 1993. The ICS was founded by Dr. Claire Nelson, a Jamaica-born project officer at the Inter-American Development Bank. Its board and allied research and private sector councils feature technocrats, academics, diplomats, and other luminaries from throughout the West Indies and the diaspora in the United States. The primary goals of the ICS are to promote Caribbean development and to insert the diaspora into the U.S. policymaking process. Yet, as Dr. Nelson recently related, the institute still has no full-time staff

12 Emerging Voices and continues to suffer from a lack of funding and volunteers. She believes that part of the reason is that most West Indians are still more attuned to participating in social organizations and do not yet understand the need to build nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for the purpose of influencing government. She says, too, that West Indian businesses, a number of which she has approached for funds, have yet to appreciate the importance of NGOs, interest groups, and think tanks in the formation of public policy in the United States. The only other Washington-based, pan-West Indian organization is the National Coalition on Caribbean Affairs (NCOCA), which was founded in July 1997 to encourage greater civic involvement within the diaspora and to lobby policymakers on issues affecting the Caribbean. NCOCA is chaired by Dr. Ransford W. Palmer, head of the economics department at Howard University and author of Pilgrims from the Sun, a history of West Indian migration. Its board includes a number of top-flight academics and professionals in the United States and it has five regional coordinators. Palmer says, “We see ourselves as part of a greater Caribbean community which has expanded well beyond the borders of the geographic Caribbean.” Thus far, NCOCA has been able to open some doors at the State Department and the National Security Council, and has issued a statement in support of extending the Caribbean’s banana preferences with the European Union. Only a year old, however, NCOCA still lacks visibility in the logjam of Washington lobbying and has yet to garner attention in the U.S. media. Palmer says that a planned series of forums on trade, immigration, and other issues are aimed at achieving greater recognition. But it remains to be seen whether NCOCA can develop a base of popular and financial support within the diaspora, without which it will be difficult to exert any significant influence on Capitol Hill or the Washington bureaucracy. As noted earlier, a number of West Indian governments now see the diaspora as a potential asset for influencing U.S. policy. But there has been no CARICOM initiative to establish the lines of communication necessary for coordinated action. As Ivelaw Griffith notes, differences among CARICOM nations which have hindered efforts at greater cooperation in the region are, in turn, reflected in differing approaches toward engaging Washington. Jamaica, for example, identifies itself with a regional agenda. Richard Bernal, Jamaica’s ambassador in Washington for much of this decade, has become a principal spokesperson for CARICOM on trade and economic issues. He also is on the advisory board of the ICS, has helped NCOCA gain access in Washington, and has developed a strategic demography of the West Indian diaspora which the Jamaican embassy in Washington employs to map out lobbying strategy. Trinidad and Tobago, on the other hand, evidently feeling more secure because of its oil and natural gas cushion, has tended to go it alone in its relations with Washington. Griffith says that like the Bahamas, which also prefers to deal with the United States bilaterally, Trinidad and Tobago does not view its expatriate community as a potential asset in the context of U.S. politics. Anthony Bryan of the North-South Center at the University of Miami adds that Trinidad

Douglas W. Payne 13 and Tobago does, however, view its diaspora as a commercial asset, and notes the high level of investment in South Florida by Trinidadian companies. Irwine Clare thinks that the diaspora itself must overcome parochial interests and develop an agenda that can unite West Indians everywhere. “We live in a borderless world,” he says. “What we should be doing for the greater Caribbean community, that’s the question. It’s about more than just bananas. We need to prepare a transnational blueprint.” As noted earlier, Clare believes that immigration is the issue that can bring together ordinary West Indians, and CIS is now holding forums in West Indian nations as well as in the United States. He says, too, that effective West Indian lobbying in the United States requires better communication between CARICOM governments and the diaspora. CIS proposed to a number of prime ministers at the July 1998 CARICOM meeting that a formal coordinating mechanism be established. Carib News sponsored a forum in New York in June 1998 on “The Caribbean Diaspora: A Vision for the Future.” Panelists included government officials and prominent thinkers from the region and West Indian community leaders from the New York area. Discussions focused on the need to energize the diaspora around a lobbying effort in the United States, but some participants acknowledged that it would not be easy. George Irish went so far as to question the resolve of many West Indian advocates in the United States and said that “the notion of lobbying is not part of the Caribbean psyche.” He also said that not enough was being done to address pressing concerns within the diaspora itself, particularly education. In New York, he said, “our children are failing, especially in reading and writing English.” Notably absent among the panelists were representatives from NCOCA or the ICS, particularly in light of the proposal made by Barbadian deputy prime minister Billie Miller for the creation of a West Indian think tank in the diaspora. Carib News itself has taken the initiative on a number of tracks. Karl Rodney believes that relations with the Congressional Black Caucus are critical to building support in Washington, even if African-American legislators remain divided on some issues important to West Indians. “We are part of the black community in the United States,” he says. “There are differences, yes, but there is enough common ground to forge a partnership.” Rodney says that New York congressman Charles Rangel is supportive and has agreed to sponsor, in Washington, a gathering of West Indian and African-American leaders to build on the idea. At the same time, Rodney believes that promoting trade and business with the Caribbean is important for strengthening relations between the West Indies and the diaspora, and between West Indians and African-Americans. Five members of the Black Caucus, as well as former New York mayor David Dinkins, participated in the second annual multinational business conference co-sponsored by Carib News and Air Jamaica in Barbados in 1997. Rodney hopes to double that number at the next conference scheduled for November 1998 in St. Lucia. Some West Indian activists talk about the Jewish-American and Cuban- American communities as models for influencing U.S. policy. Ambassador Bernal says, “We have a long way to go, we’re not even close to where they are in

14 Emerging Voices resources, organization, and impact.” He notes that the Jews and Cubans are not only single-nation diasporas, they also have fundamental, galvanizing issues to organize around—the security of Israel and opposition to Fidel Castro—and far greater resources. Still, the idea of developing a West Indian lobby in the United States appears to be taking hold. The challenge will be to overcome the inherent difficulty of establishing a single voice within such a complex, multi-national community.

The Dominican Diaspora

Dimensions

The 1990 Census counted 520,151 people in the United States who claimed Dominican ancestry, with nearly 70 percent of them in New York City. In comparison, the Census counted a little over one million people who claimed Cuban ancestry, nearly two-thirds of them in Florida. Census data show that over the last decade and a half the Dominican Republic has been the top country of origin for immigrants coming to New York. Between 1980 and 1990 the Dominican population of New York City climbed from 125,380 to 357,868, which made Dominicans the fastest-growing major ethnic group in the city. By comparison, the 1990 Census counted 896,763 Puerto Ricans in New York City. According to a report by the New York Department of City Planning, more than 110,000 new immigrants from the Dominican Republic arrived legally in the city between 1990 and 1994, averaging about 22,000 annually. The report projected that if the trend continued, coupled with the baby boom among Dominicans in the 1990s, New York City’s Dominican population would exceed 700,000, or about 10 percent of the total population, in the year 2000. After New York, according to the 1990 Census, the largest concentrations of Dominicans in the United States were in New Jersey (52,807), Florida (34,268), Massachusetts (30,177), and (9,374). Many if not most of the Dominicans who came legally to the United States over the last decade—as well as Haitians, West Indians, and other recent immigrant groups—took advantage of the 1986 amnesty that legalized 2.68 million undocumented immigrants nationwide, many of whom then brought in relatives under family-reunification provisions of U.S. immigration law. Most analysts agree that, as in the case of West Indians and other recent immigrant groups, the 1990 Census significantly undercounted the Dominican population. It is generally believed that the numbers would be substantially higher if undocumented immigrants and those who avoided or were missed by census takers were taken into consideration. The INS estimated that in October 1996 there were about 75,000 undocumented Dominicans in the United States. In 1995 the Dominican consulate in New York estimated that there were substantially more than that in New York City alone.

Douglas W. Payne 15

In July 1998 Mark Fineman of The Los Angeles Times reported that Dominicans in the United States currently number at least one million, based on estimates by INS officials in Washington and officials at the U.S. Embassy in . That seemed to jibe with the U.S. Census Current Population Survey (CPS) issued in March 1997. The survey, based on data collected in 1996, concluded that there were 632,000 people in the United States who had been born in the Dominican Republic. It did not consider children born in the United States to Dominican immigrants. Taking into account second-generation Dominicans, as well as estimates of the number of undocumented Dominicans in the country, the Dominican diaspora in the United States could very well be one million, or a little more than 12 percent of the current population of the Dominican Republic itself.

Who They Are, When They Came

It was not until after the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator that significant numbers of Dominicans began migrating to the United States. Under Trujillo’s 30-year rule the government systematically sought to keep Dominicans from leaving the country. Only diplomats and elites loyal to the regime were granted visas to travel internationally. As noted by Professors Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernández of the City University of New York, authors of the recently published The , Trujillo believed an increasing population would strengthen the economy and wanted, as well, to prevent an outflow of professionals and skilled workers. From 1953 to 1960, according to INS data, an average of 922 Dominicans per year migrated legally to the United States. The number jumped to more than 3,000 in 1961, more than 10,000 in 1963, and was averaging better than 20,000 by the early 1980s. After Congress raised the limits on several forms of legal immigration in 1990, the number of Dominicans arriving legally in the United States rose to about 40,000 annually. According to the most recent INS data, 39,604 came in 1996. Studies of the initial exodus in the 1960s and 1970s offered differing views about the nature of Dominican migrants. Some showed that they were predominantly rural, poor, uneducated, and unemployed, while another concluded that a majority were from the urban middle and working classes and had held jobs. Torres-Saillant and Hernández believe that migrants flowed steadily from all those sectors of Dominican society. In the 1980s the numbers of professional and technical workers leaving for the United States increased because of the declining Dominican economy and the deterioration of infrastructure and public services. Still, according to Torres-Saillant and Hernández, the great majority of migrants since the 1980s have been unskilled workers, poorly educated, and mostly dark-skinned, with females outnumbering males. Roberto Suro, a reporter for The Washington Post and author of Strangers Among Us, cites a number of studies that show that in New York, the principal destination of Dominican migrants, Dominican adults are arriving with the lowest

16 Emerging Voices level of education among all immigrant groups and with little or no proficiency in English.

Initial Stages of Institutional Development

As traced by Torres-Saillant and Hernández, the first Dominican voluntary associations date back to the late 1940s, when less than 10,000 Dominicans resided in the United States. Most were based on family networks and the holding of social events such as weddings and birthdays. By the 1960s some groups had developed a civic outlook and were holding events to observe Dominican independence and other important historical dates. They tended to be divided between a small minority sympathetic to the former Trujillo dictatorship and a majority that had vehemently opposed it. In the 1970s, Dominican social clubs mushroomed in the wake of sharp increases in immigration, with more than three dozen alone by the end of the decade in ’s Washington Heights, home to the largest concentration of Dominicans in the United States. Many of these associations were formed on the basis of common origin in a town or neighborhood in the Dominican Republic. The early 1980s saw the emergence of Dominican social service organizations in Washington Heights. A number of them came and went, but others such as the Alianza Dominicana, or Dominican Alliance, have sustained a range of programs including assistance on education, drug prevention, and job training. Another, the Asociación Comunal de Dominicanos Progresistas, or Community Association of Progressive Dominicans, was one of the first to seek empowerment by participating in New York City politics. Most of its founders were educated in the United States and many were teachers. One of them, , was elected to the district school board in 1983 at the age of 32, following a voter registration drive among Dominican parents by the association and other groups. School boards are a first rung on the political ladder in New York, particularly for immigrant communities. To vote in school board elections, individuals need only be parents of students, not U.S. citizens. By 1989, a number of Dominicans had been elected to the Washington Heights school board, and Linares had become the first Dominican to be elected board president. However, efforts to focus on the concerns and needs of Dominicans in New York have come up against powerful counter tendencies. A majority of Dominicans themselves view the United States as only a temporary stop, a place to earn money before returning home. Modern communications, especially inexpensive direct-dial telephoning, and low-cost air fares allow even the poorest to stay in close touch and to return home at least once a year. Social clubs and other voluntary associations tend to be geared toward maintaining language, culture, and links with the home society, and “do little to promote a healthy adaptation to the receiving society,” according to Torres-Saillant and Hernández. As Roberto Suro has written, Dominicans built Washington Heights and other New York barrios not as places where they could begin the process of integrating into U.S.

Douglas W. Payne 17 society, but as enclaves in which “to become transnationals or simply to remain Dominicans.” In turn, the political establishment in the Dominican Republic has, since the late 1970s, viewed the growing diaspora in the United States as a source of funding and votes, as many Dominicans started successful businesses and a majority remained registered to vote at home. All of the major Dominican political parties established permanent offices in New York and by the late 1980s were raising millions of dollars from immigrants during Dominican presidential campaigns. For example, by the late 1980s the social democratic Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), headed for years by the late José Francisco Peña Gómez, had built an extensive interstate organization with membership in the thousands that stretched from New York to New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Florida. Dominican parties were holding rallies and marches in Washington Heights larger than anything sponsored by the Democratic Party, the traditional power in northern Manhattan and all of New York’s outer boroughs except Staten Island. The penetration of Dominican politics became so deep that Dominican organizations in the United States, from social clubs to professional groups and non-medallion taxi cooperatives, squared off against each other based on allegiance to one Dominican political party or another. Linares and a number of other U.S.-educated Dominicans, bolstered by an emerging U.S.-born second generation, continued to press on the New York political front. Some worked their way into the machinery of the Democratic Party, and in Washington Heights María Luna became the first Dominican in the city to be elected a Democratic Party district leader. In 1989 mayoral candidate David Dinkins sought and received the endorsements of a number of Dominican activists and community groups. In reality, however, the Dominican community in New York lacked real clout because most were not U.S. citizens and were unable to vote. A 1992 study by the New York Department of City Planning indicated that while Dominicans were the largest new immigrant group in the city, during the 1980s they had the lowest rate of naturalization, a little over 20 percent. As late as 1993, less than a third of Dominicans residing in the city were registered to vote, according to a study by the New York-based Institute for Puerto Rican Policy. The 1990 reapportionment of New York City Council districts increased the number of seats from 35 to 51 and, as noted earlier, produced a predominantly West Indian district in Brooklyn. Similarly, intense lobbying by Linares, Luna, and other activists during the redrawing of district boundaries led to the creation of the majority-Dominican District 10 in upper Manhattan. In the 1991 elections Linares become the first Dominican member of the council, narrowly defeating Luna and , a hard-charging community activist in his late thirties. What may have given Linares the edge is that he reached out to include in his coalition Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other smaller groups in the district, evidently aware that while Dominicans were a majority in the district, only a minority of them were able to vote. The ferocity of the campaign seemed to reflect traditional politics in the Dominican Republic. Dennis DeLeon, head of the New

18 Emerging Voices

York City Commission on Human Rights at the time and not a Dominican, said to , “The Dominicans are the most political community I’ve ever seen in this city.” Other observers, however, saw the race as typical of normally combative New York politics and an indication that Dominicans were coming of age.

The Downside of Transnationalism

Despite initial inroads into New York politics, Dominicans in New York continued to struggle as the transient mentality took an increasing toll. Manufacturing jobs, which provided entry-level work for young immigrants past, were in steep decline in New York as the United States underwent a deep economic restructuring. In response, many Dominicans proved to be adept and determined entrepreneurs. However, as Roberto Suro and Anna Gorman of the local Bronx Beat newspaper have reported, profits from bodegas, livery-cab fleets, and other businesses more often than not were invested back in the Dominican Republic rather than reinvested in the community. Washington Heights, which once seemed to have the potential to become a thriving economic enclave comparable to what the Cubans built in Miami, suffered as a result. According to Dominican New Yorkers, a 1990 study conducted by Ramona Hernández and others, 47 percent of Dominican children in New York were living below the poverty line and unemployment was climbing. Subsequent studies showed that, overall, Dominicans in New York were becoming poorer and their education and English-proficiency levels remained among the lowest in the city. Nearly 30 percent of their households were on public assistance, double the city’s overall rate. Alianza Dominicana and the handful of other service organizations in the community were hard pressed to keep up with the fallout, and Washington Heights became increasingly vulnerable to infestation by the cocaine trade. Meanwhile, money and energy spent on politics and maintaining links back home came at the expense of building intermediary institutions that could pave the way for acceptance and integration into the U.S. mainstream. The isolation of the community and discrimination against Dominicans only worsened as Dominicans became stereotyped as drug criminals. At the same time, it was beginning to dawn on many that the prospects for a quick return home had dimmed. Years of supporting political parties back home had produced little improvement in the conditions there—social injustice, high unemployment, scarcity of goods and services, and pervasive corruption. Many of those in the diaspora who climbed the ladder out of poverty moved to New York’s suburbs and middle-class Dominican enclaves in Rhode Island and Miami. Those still determined to go back found that their U.S.-born children were not so inclined. Though the new generation struggled in overcrowded schools and on mean streets, they saw their parents’ ties to the Dominican Republic as nostalgic, and on visits back home they were turned off by the crumbling infrastructure, chronic poverty, and the growing resentment of Dominicans who had been unable escape it. As noted by Patricia R. Pessar, author of A Visa for a

Douglas W. Payne 19

Dream: Dominicans in the United States, in the 1980s Dominicans back home referred to immigrants as dominicanos ausentes, absent Dominicans, meaning they were still seen as belonging to the national family. In the 1990s they are more often called “dominicanyork” or cadenú, wearer of a gold necklace, underlining “the social distance that many island Dominicans seek to impose between themselves and Dominican immigrants and returnees.” In the early 1990s an increasing number of community leaders, business people, professionals, and academics, many of them second generation, began to focus more attention on the mounting problems in New York. More resources began to stay in the community in the form of reinvestment and support for service organizations. The Alianza Dominicana was able to expand its staff from about 20 in 1990 to nearly 150 in 1998. A number of anti-discrimination and rights groups were formed after the police shooting of a young Dominican in 1992. There also were renewed efforts to establish research institutes and public-policy organizations to inform the community how the U.S. political process works. Some failed because of personal and political infighting. The most successful has been the Dominican Studies Institute, established in 1993 at the City College of New York just south of Washington Heights, and directed by Torres-Saillant. The wake-up call for ordinary Dominicans in the diaspora, however, was the anti-immigrant climate mounting in the United States. The backlash was reflected in 1996 federal legislation which denied legal immigrants many forms of social assistance. The social safety net that many Dominicans with permanent residency status had come to depend on was being removed. New immigration rules also included restrictions on the ability of low-income legal immigrants to bring in relatives from abroad under family reunification. Dominicans were affected, too, by new federal legislation that expedited the deportation of illegal aliens convicted of a crime and allowed, as well, for the deportation of legal aliens with criminal records, even if they had completed the appropriate sentences for their crimes. According to the INS, the number of criminal deportees removed to the Dominican Republic jumped to more than a thousand in 1993, and reached nearly two thousand in 1997. Like Latinos throughout the United States, Dominicans “were shocked out of their sojourner mentality,” to use Roberto Suro’s phrase. Obtaining U.S. citizenship became a form of self-defense and thousands of Dominicans went to apply. Dominican community organizations in New York and throughout the Northeast had to expand their programs for citizenship and English-language training. Applicants included many elderly who had been in the United States legally for years but now were afraid of losing Medicare and Social Security benefits. According to the INS, in 1996 the Dominican Republic was the top country of origin for citizenship applicants in the New York metropolitan area, with more than 10 percent of the nearly 150,000 applicants. Dominican activists say the numbers have risen since then. The rush to naturalize was abetted by a 1994 reform of the Dominican constitution to allow for dual citizenship. Dominicans could now obtain full rights as U.S. citizens without giving up any at home. Dominican citizenship also was

20 Emerging Voices

granted to children born abroad to Dominican parents. Political leaders in the Dominican Republic acted out of a shared concern that the anti-immigrant climate in the United States threatened both the flow of remittances, a critical source of foreign exchange, as well as the traditional safety valve for relieving population pressure through emigration. According to a recent study for the Inter-American Dialogue and the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute by Deborah Waller Meyers, the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo has estimated Dominican remittances at $1.14 billion per year, somewhat higher than a 1995 estimate by the World Bank of $795 million. Myers calculated that remittances account for 7 to 8 percent of the Dominican GDP. The current Dominican government of President Leonel Fernández Reyna has actively encouraged Dominicans to naturalize in the United States. The bilingual Fernández is himself a product of the diaspora, having grown up and gone to elementary and high school in New York. Soon after taking office in August 1996 he came to New York to address the concerns of Dominicans in the United States, saying, “If you feel the need to adopt the nationality of the United States in order to confront the vicissitudes of that society stemming from the end of the welfare era…do it with a peaceful conscience, for you will continue being Dominicans and we will welcome you as such when you set foot on the soil of our republic.”

Prospects for Political Empowerment

Linares took office as a member of the New York City Council in January 1992 and has been re-elected ever since. His long-time nemesis, Espaillat, became the first Dominican elected to the New York State Assembly in 1996. The 72nd Assembly district, which encompasses most of Washington Heights, is nearly 80 percent Latino and more than 50 percent Dominican. Espaillat defeated John Brian Murtaugh, a 16-year incumbent. Since the 1991 council race Linares and Espaillat have been conducting what reporter Jonathan P. Hicks of The New York Times recently referred to as “one of the hottest political feuds in New York City.” Both have developed formidable organizations, both support candidates against each other, and both have their sights on higher office. They and other Dominican leaders are already pursuing reapportionment to create a predominantly Dominican congressional district after Census 2000. Some observers are concerned that the Linares-Espaillat conflict is hurting the chances for political empowerment. For example, political analyst Howard Jordan warned in 1997 that “the specter of mounting disunity hangs heavily on the Dominican political movement.” Jordan, who is Puerto Rican, feared that Dominican elected officials, preoccupied with internecine battles, were losing touch with the day-to-day concerns of Dominicans. Others are more sanguine. Torres-Saillant and Hernández note “that if two Dominicans run for the same office, the community will have to justify their vote on the basis of other than strictly ethnic loyalties. Dominicanness would not suffice. The candidate would have to show real substance, a real platform, and maintain a clear record.”

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The Dominican community in Providence, Rhode Island, where nearly a third of the children in city public schools are now Dominican, has produced an up-and-coming politician to watch. Victor Capellán, 27 years old, has run twice for the Rhode Island State Assembly since 1996 and each time has lost by only a handful of votes. In the 1970s, a number of Dominicans left New York for jobs in Providence’s jewelry and shoe factories, and suffered when the industries declined. As in New York, the transient mentality began to shift in the 1990s and Capellán now counts on the support of a new generation of Dominican entrepreneurs who have helped to rebuild neighborhoods vacated by former Irish and African-American residents. Until recently, Dominicans leased property; now many are developing it, including a new mall in downtown Providence. In the 1980s, Dominican activists and other Latino leaders lobbying on behalf of the Dominican community found it very difficult to get in the doors of New York State and City government. Howard Jordan, who at the time was director of the New York State Assembly Task Force on Immigration, was told point-blank by one Queens assemblyman, “Dominicans don’t vote.” In the late 1990s, Dominicans are on the way to putting that notion to rest. Depending on the political interplay among Dominicans and in New York City generally, the community could have its first elected representative in Washington some time in the next decade. Beyond that, however, there is some concern about the potential for exerting greater political influence nationally given that Dominicans are so heavily concentrated in the northeastern United States and generally affiliate with the Democratic Party. In New York City, for example, only 16 percent of registered Dominican voters are Republicans. Such one-sidedness limits the potential for acting as a swing vote. And while Democrats are generally more sympathetic on issues such as immigration, there is the risk, too, of being taken for granted by the Democratic Party itself, as other minority groups on occasion have learned. There is also the question of what happens if the machinery is put in place for Dominicans to vote in upcoming elections in the Dominican Republic through absentee balloting, as allowed by legislation passed in 1997 by the Dominican congress. Bernardo Vega, the Dominican ambassador to Washington, believes that Dominicans in the United States would account for up to 10 percent of the total electorate. At least one Dominican-American is pondering a run for the Dominican presidency and counting on votes cast in the United States, while others have proposed that seats in the Dominican congress be formally designated to represent Dominicans in the diaspora. At the same time, Dominican political parties still perceive the diaspora as an asset to be fought over and will be campaigning in the United States with new vigor. To what degree would all that distract from or otherwise undercut the movement toward greater political empowerment in the United States? Ambassador Vega believes that because of logistical difficulties and the expense, it is unlikely that absentee balloting in the United States would take place in the next Dominican presidential elections in 2000. A major problem is that Dominican consulates are headed by political appointees, and an entirely

22 Emerging Voices separate, politically neutral voting system would have to be set up. Moises Pérez, executive director of Alianza Dominicana, among others, is not as concerned about the negative potential of absentee balloting. Pérez says that it would have had far more impact in years past, but that now there is an entire U.S.-born second generation whose focus is on their lives here in the United States. “My 18-year-old daughter, it would never cross her mind to vote in a Dominican election,” he says.

Prospects for a Dominican Lobby

In the early 1990s Dominicans made a first attempt at forming an umbrella organization, the National Council of Dominican-Americans. A few forums were held, but the body never was formally incorporated and soon unraveled. It was principally a New York-based effort and some observers say it foundered at least in part because of infighting and interference by political forces back home. Moises Pérez believes that it was more a question of resources, weak organization, and a lack of galvanizing issues. “We hadn’t yet reached critical mass,” he says. A more promising initiative has recently been undertaken, the Dominican- American National Roundtable. Much of the impetus for the Roundtable has come from younger and second-generation Dominicans outside the New York area, while a number of veteran community leaders such as Pérez are involved as well. A steering committee was formed in early 1998 and in June nearly 50 representatives of community, business, political, and social-service organizations from throughout the diaspora adopted a mission statement at a meeting in Washington, D.C. The statement makes clear that the principal aims of the Roundtable will be to advance the political empowerment of Dominican-Americans and to influence the U.S. policymaking process on behalf of the Dominican diaspora. In that sense, it points to the crucial shift underway since the early 1990s, from the traditional sojourner mentality to one that says: We’re staying. “What sets the Roundtable apart is the firm commitment to establishing roots here in the United States,” says Manuel Matos. Matos, a 31-year-old lawyer, is the U.S.-born and -educated executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, which has been at the forefront in providing citizenship and English-language training in Washington Heights. The unifying concern that has energized the development of the Roundtable is immigration, much as it has been for activists in the West Indian diaspora. The Dominican American National Foundation (DANF), one of the pillars of the Roundtable, was formed in Miami in 1989 in response to the abuse of undocumented Dominican immigrants at the Krome Detention Center in South Florida. The Foundation is currently suing Attorney General Janet Reno and the U.S. Justice Department for mistreatment of Dominicans at the Miami International Airport. Although the Dominican community in South Florida numbers only in the low tens of thousands, it features a high number of relatively young professionals and business people, many who have moved down from the northeastern United

Douglas W. Payne 23

States. Margarita Cepeda, the current president of the DANF and project director at the Miami Beach Community Center, arrived from Rhode Island four years ago. Manuel Dotel, an accountant, came from New York and is a former president of the Miami-based Dominican Professional Associations, which has a current membership of nearly four hundred. The DANF, conceived on the model of the Cuban American National Foundation, nurtured links with other groups in the diaspora. But eventually it was realized that to maximize the potential political impact in Washington of the Dominican diaspora as a whole, a more encompassing, national-coordinating vehicle was needed. The first Roundtable planning meeting was held in Miami in December 1997, sponsored by the DANF, the Quisqueya In Action organization from Rhode Island (Quisqueya being the indigenous name of the Dominican Republic), and New York State assemblyman Espaillat. The steering committee, having adopted the mission statement in June 1998, is currently gearing for a national conference to be held in Providence in early 1999. Among others, key contributors on the committee include: Cepeda, Dotel, and Rhadames Peguero from the DANF; Capellán from Rhode Island; Pérez, Matos and long-time activist Dr. Rafael Lantigua from New York; and Roberto Alvarez, a Washington-based lawyer, restaurateur, and former Dominican diplomat. All say they are working to build the widest possible base, in line with the mission statement which says that the Roundtable “will reach out to all sectors, in particular the younger generations, so as to ensure the broadest inclusion of all Dominican-Americans.” The agenda for the conference in Rhode Island will include discussions on how the Roundtable would be legally incorporated as well as issues affecting Dominican-Americans as outlined in the mission statement: immigration reform, education, economic development, health and human services, public safety, and substance abuse. The conference will also focus on promoting Dominican culture as a unifying force within the Dominican-American community and building a solid, think-tank capability for the Roundtable. Once the Roundtable is formally established, the next step will be to create a permanent office in Washington. A number of those involved are aware of the potential pitfalls, which is why, they say, a great deal of time and deliberation have gone into the planning stages. All the meetings thus far have been held outside of New York as a hedge against the contentious politics there and to ensure that all Dominican communities are able to contribute to the project. Alianza Dominicana may be the largest Dominican organization anywhere, but as Pérez says, “We have allowed Miami and Rhode Island to take the lead so that this can work, so that the Roundtable can be bigger than just New York.” Cepeda says, “It’s about overcoming individual, parochial interests and developing a national solidarity for the sake of the coming generations.” Another potential problem is interference from and the continuing lure of politics back home. Cepeda believes that more money from the diaspora is still invested in Dominican politics than is being put into Dominican institutions in the United States. Matos nonetheless believes that over time the political ties will

24 Emerging Voices continue to loosen as new diaspora generations become more rooted in the United States. Raising funds also presents a challenge. At the moment, there seems to be agreement that the Roundtable should first seek support from the Dominican- American community to ensure its independence and to demonstrate to other potential backers that it is a solidly representative organization. Possibilities under consideration include building a dues-paying, individual membership base, and seeking the sponsorship of business organizations such as the Dominican-led National Supermarkets Association, which groups together about four hundred independent supermarkets that cater to and have helped revitalize inner cities in the northeastern United States. Other potential benefactors are the newly formed DOWS, Dominicans on , and the more than 60 Dominicans who collectively earn about $80 million per year as professional baseball players in the United States. It should be noted, too, that the Dominican embassy in Washington is supporting the Roundtable and raised enough seed money for the Roundtable to hire Rick Schwartz, a Washington-based consultant and former president of the National Immigration Forum with long experience advising the Haitian and Salvadoran communities on national organizing in the United States. One Roundtable member expressed reservations about the involvement of the Dominican government, but Ambassador Vega assures that the Roundtable will have to be self-sustaining from here on. In a conference presentation in 1997, months before the genesis of the Roundtable, Vega said that any Dominican- American umbrella organization would risk becoming politicized if it were dependent on the Dominican embassy in Washington or the consulate in New York. For the same reason, he said, it would not be advisable for such an organization to be connected with any of the Dominican political parties. The interests of the Dominican government and the diaspora converge primarily on immigration. But Ambassador Vega hopes that the Roundtable’s focus will also include trade issues between the United States and Dominican Republic. In his 1997 presentation he held up Jewish-Americans and Cuban- Americans as models for influencing Washington policy toward home countries. As noted in the section on the West Indian diaspora, however, those communities have fundamental, galvanizing issues to organize around—the security of Israel and opposition to Fidel Castro—and far greater resources. Ambassador Vega has met with Dominican-American leaders and asked that they contact Congress in support of NAFTA parity legislation. An unidentified businessman who was involved, and was later interviewed for a report on Latino ethnic lobbies by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, said that the problem was that while leaders understood the importance of the parity bill, ordinary people in the diaspora did not. To gather popular support in the diaspora for trade issues would require a tremendous educational effort. The Roundtable might someday decide to undertake the task, but for the time being the priority is to firmly establish the organization based on emphasizing issues of immediate concern to the

Douglas W. Payne 25

Dominican-American community. Most of the key individuals involved expect there will be a number of bumps in the road, but remain optimistic. Pérez says, “Our task has been to find common ground, to work on the issues we all believe in, and to accept that we will have differences. So far, so good.” Looking further down the road is the potential for enhancing influence by establishing links with other organized diaspora groups, for example, Central American organizations or the National Council of , the largest Latino advocacy group in the United States. Immigration issues would be the obvious basis for cooperation. Guillermo Linares, a member of the Roundtable steering committee, is also on the board of La Raza. While his New York City Council duties and involvement in the latest electoral dust-up in Washington Heights seem to have limited his participation in the initial planning for the Roundtable, conceivably he could provide a bridge between it and La Raza.

The

Dimensions

The 1990 Census counted 292,036 people who claimed that their primary ancestry was Haitian. Research by Alex Stepick of Florida International University indicates that there was a substantial undercount, particularly among Haitians with immigration-law problems who tend to shun census takers. Many recent Caribbean immigrants are wary of providing personal information to government representatives. Haitians are especially cautious because their experience under violent, repressive regimes at home has made them innately distrustful of anonymous authority figures. Adjusting for the undercount, Stepick concluded that the number of Haitians living in the United States in 1990 may have been as high as 450,000. Since 1990, according to the INS, Haitians have been arriving legally at a rate of around 15,000 per year. INS data indicated, for example, that in 1995 14,021 Haitians arrived legally in the United States, 18,386 in 1996. A majority of them are coming to South Florida, arriving there at a rate of nearly 10,300 per year. The INS estimated that as of October 1996 there were about 105,000 undocumented Haitians in the United States, 2.1 percent of a total undocumented population in the United States of about 5 million. The top country of origin was Mexico, with an estimated 2.7 million undocumented residents. Haiti placed fifth after El Salvador (335,000), Guatemala (165,000), and Canada (120,000). The Haitian diaspora in the United States is primarily concentrated in the New York City, Miami, and Boston metropolitan areas. The 1990 Census counted about 108,000 Haitians in New York State, 104,000 in Florida, and 26,000 in Massachusetts. The remaining 12 percent or so of Haitians counted by the Census were spread throughout many other states, with the larger concentrations found, in descending order, in New Jersey, California, Connecticut, , Maryland, and .

26 Emerging Voices

Estimates for the population of regional concentrations run substantially higher than the Census. The Caribbean Research Center at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn estimated, based on city-wide surveys, that in 1991 there were 237,600 Haitians living legally or without documentation in New York City alone, with nearly three-quarters of them residing in Brooklyn. Haitian community leaders in New York City say that today the total number of Haitians in the city could be more than half a million. Fedy Vieux-Brierre, a Haitian-American who for most of this decade was chief administrator for the City of Miami in the district covering the section, estimates that there are currently up to 150,000 Haitians in greater Miami (Dade County), and possibly more than 200,000 in South Florida overall. In December 1996 Charles A. Radin of The Boston Globe reported that leaders and observers of the Haitian community in Massachusetts generally believe that there were at least 70,000 Haitians in that state, with some estimates running as high as 120,000. The New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR) estimates that overall there are now between 800,000 and one million Haitians in the United States, or as much as 13 to 14 percent of the current population of Haiti.

Who They Are, When They Came

Until the late 1950s flowed primarily to , former French colonies in Africa, and French-speaking Canada. According to Stepick, only about 500 Haitians were migrating to the United States annually at that time. After Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier came to power in 1957, Haitians wanting to leave began to look more toward the United States. President John F. Kennedy, who was critical of human rights violations under the Duvalier dictatorship, invited persecuted Haitians to come to the United States. Thus began the first wave, mostly upper-class French-speaking elites in the early 1960s, followed soon after by members of the small, educated middle class, and later by members of the urban lower classes. By the late 1960s, according to INS data cited by Stepick, 7,000 Haitians were legally migrating to the United States annually. This wave of immigrants lasted into the 1970s. Most went to the northeastern United States—a majority to New York City, a lesser number to Boston—where they would form a relatively heterogeneous group reflecting all layers of Haitian society. The second wave occurred in the 1970s and 1980s following the death of Papa Doc and his replacement by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, in 1971. This exodus included generally poor, rural people with low levels of education and little or no proficiency in English. Their principal destination was South Florida, where they arrived from Haiti in dangerously packed, barely seaworthy boats. It was U.S. policy to deny refugee status to most Haitians arriving during this period. However, Haitian and U.S. immigrant advocates finally succeeded in achieving legal, permanent resident status for thousands of these recent arrivals in 1986-87. Many of them congregated in a northeastern district of Miami that came to be known as Little Haiti. Others continued north into Broward

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County, especially the Lauderdale and Pompano areas, forming the second largest concentration of Haitians in Florida. A third wave of Haitian migrants to the United States began after the Haitian military overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991. According to Stepick, an estimated 38,000 people fled Haiti in the first eight months following the coup. The large numbers of people trying to leave Haiti for the United States would not diminish until the Aristide government was restored in October 1994. Of those intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and making claims for asylum, the United States paroled about 30 percent into the country. Others, relatives of those already granted legal status, arrived legally under family- reunification provisions of U.S. immigration law and contributed further to the growth of the Haitian community in South Florida and, to a somewhat lesser degree, in the northeastern United States.

Initial Stages of Institutional Development

As Michel Laguerre relates in American Odyssey: Haitians in New York City, the first wave of Haitians organized themselves politically based on ideology and strategies to end the Duvalier dictatorship back home. In the initial phase, from the late 1950s through the 1960s, the diaspora was dominated by traditional, right-wing politicians, including former presidents, political party leaders, military officers, and former Duvalierists who had run afoul of Papa Doc. More than a dozen formal and informal groups coalesced around one or another figure. Most sought backing from the U.S. State Department for confronting Duvalier politically, and some looked to the CIA for assistance in mounting a series of failed military invasions of Haiti. In 1964, a number of those organizations formed the Haitian Coalition, but infighting took up more energy than did challenging Duvalier and the group eventually came apart. In the early 1970s a number of small left-wing and populist groups emerged in New York, rooted among mostly middle-class intellectuals, students, and some professionals who had arrived in the second half of the previous decade. Again, the principal organizing principle was confronting the dictatorship, now headed by Baby Doc. But as Laguerre notes, the capacity of these groups to produce political writings exceeded their popular following, and they displayed “more familiarity with standard Marxist thought than with Haitian empirical reality.” Still, they were the seeds of what in the 1980s would develop into a broad, left-center, pro- Aristide coalition. Laguerre also notes the proliferation of generally non-political Haitian voluntary associations during this period. A number were social organizations affiliated with Catholic churches, while others brought together people originating from the same town or areas in Haiti. Many were oriented toward maintaining cultural links with Haiti, but more than a few were based on mutual assistance and striving toward economic improvement in the United States. Because of racial discrimination and language barriers, very few Haitians of middle- or upper-class backgrounds were able to maintain their status after migrating. They, as well as

28 Emerging Voices

working class immigrants, therefore focused on making the most of available opportunities, particularly education for their children. As Stepick notes, the first arrivals in New York laid the foundation for a second generation, many of whom have been able to attain a significant level of success in business and the professions. The late 1960s saw the beginning of Haitian-Americans engaging in U.S. politics. Some were pre-Duvalier immigrants who had come to New York for economic opportunity, attended U.S. universities, and become U.S. citizens. Others were the more recently arrived members of Haiti’s educated middle class who had lost confidence in Haitian politics and expected to stay in the United States. The Haitian-American Citizens Society was formed from among that mix of people in 1968. According to Laguerre, it achieved some initial visibility when it was invited to a meeting of ethnic-group leaders by the Democratic Party and subsequently provided volunteers for Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. It supported black Democrat Percy Sutton, an also-ran in the 1977 race for the mayor of New York City. The group also established links with the Liberal Party in Queens and the Democratic Party in Brooklyn. That led to two of its leaders being nominated for New York State Assembly seats in the early 1970s, Max Laudun in Queens and Louis A. Brun in Brooklyn. Laudun lost by a landslide to a Republican opponent and Brun was defeated as well.

The Second Wave, a New Dynamic

While Haitian participation in U.S. politics was still in an embryonic stage and the existence of the Haitian-American community remained little known to most Americans, the wave of Haitian boat people to South Florida which began in the late 1970s became a national issue and set off a new, high-profile dynamic. Unlike those arriving from the Dominican Republic and the West Indies, who would not be directly threatened by an anti-immigrant backlash for at least another decade, the new wave of Haitians faced immediate and widespread rejection. As Stepick says in Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States, “During the 1970s and 1980s, no other immigrant group suffered more prejudice and discrimination than Haitians.” Despite the dictatorship in Haiti, and unlike Cubans fleeing the Castro regime, Haitians were considered by Washington to be economic rather than political refugees. The overwhelming majority were therefore denied political asylum and jailed in disproportionate numbers compared to undocumented people of other immigrant groups. Those who managed to avoid incarceration not only had to endure discrimination based on their status as triple minorities— black, foreign, and French- and Creole-speaking. They also had to deal with being named in the early 1980s by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta as one of the primary groups at risk for AIDS. That designation was not lifted until the end of the decade and left Haitians unjustly labeled as AIDs carriers. As a result, Stepick says, newly arrived, predominantly poor Haitians had difficulty finding even low-paying employment in the secondary job market.

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The plight of second-wave Haitians sparked the formation of a number of organizations which fought Washington for the right of Haitians to remain in the United States. These groups usually were founded by, or in conjunction with, U.S. immigrant-rights advocates. They relied heavily on funding from U.S. sources such as the Ford Foundation and the National Council of Churches, and on political support from the Congressional Black Caucus and other liberals on Capitol Hill. Two of the most influential were the Haitian Refugee Center (HRC), founded in Miami in 1975, and the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees (NCHR), founded in 1982 by 42 Haitian and U.S. religious, labor, and human rights groups. Eventually, the leadership of these groups passed into exclusively Haitian hands. Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, an activist priest from Boston, headed HRC from 1977, while Jocelyn McCalla became the executive director of the New York-based NCHR, which advocated on behalf of the rights of Haitians both in the United States and Haiti. These groups were instrumental in creating public awareness of the plight of Haitian immigrants and the conditions at home which had compelled them to flee. As related by Stepick, the HRC was the center of political activity in Little Haiti during the 1980s and early 1990s. It organized marches and demonstrations against U.S. policy and became a magnet for national and local media. The HRC and the NCHR, in conjunction with U.S. civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, also provided legal services to undocumented Haitians and initiated a series of successful class-action suits on behalf of Haitian asylum seekers. Victories in these cases finally moved Washington in late 1986 and 1987 to grant permanent residency status to more than 40,000 Haitians who were at risk of deportation. The fall of Baby Doc in 1986 and the emergence of Aristide and his Lavalas movement reverberated throughout the diaspora. Some in the older, more conservative generation got behind one or another of the old-line politicians who were jockeying for power back home. Immigrant-rights groups, leftist organizations dating back to the 1970s, and many voluntary associations mobilized to protest the massacre during the aborted 1987 election in Haiti and the continuation of military rule. The political and generational divisions sharpened when Aristide decided to run for president in 1990 after the military gave way to an interim, civilian government. When he and other candidates came to the United States to seek support, the war of words heated up between Haitian conservatives, mostly New York-based, and the broad coalition of pro-Lavalas groups which had developed from Boston to New York to Miami. Aristide drew tens of thousands of people at rallies in Little Haiti, Brooklyn, and in New York’s Central Park, indicating that his popularity in Haiti, where he would win the presidency with 70 percent of the vote, extended deep into the diaspora. Aristide’s overthrow by the military in 1991 unleashed another round of protests and lobbying in the United States on behalf of the new wave of Haitian boat people fleeing the bloody crackdown that followed the coup. The HRC, the NCHR, and other Haitian groups organized substantial demonstrations in Miami, New York, and Washington, mobilized popular support through Creole-language

30 Emerging Voices radio programs in Miami and New York, and sent Congress regular reports on human rights violations in Haiti. They were backed by the Congressional Black Caucus and other Democrats on Capitol Hill, the TransAfrica organization led by Randall Robinson, U.S. civil rights and church groups, and a number of President Clinton’s fund-raisers. The combined effort caused the White House in May 1994 to end the policy of summarily returning all Haitian boat people intercepted by U.S. ships, and led to the U.S. military intervention which restored Aristide to power the following October.

Here to Stay

When Aristide returned to Haiti, Gerard Jean-Juste and a number of other U.S.- based Haitian activists went with him to take positions in the new government. Hopes were high among the legions of Aristide supporters in the diaspora that he might finally turn the country around. But after years of corrupt, military rule and U.S. economic sanctions, there was little to go back to and most Haitians in the United States opted to wait and see. When Aristide’s second Lavalas government and that of his ally and elected successor, René Préval, were unable to bring about significant improvement in conditions in Haiti, disillusionment with Aristide and politics at home began to set in, and with it the realization among many that they were in the United States to stay. The Rev. Thomas G. Wenski, founding director of Miami’s Haitian Catholic Center nearly two decades ago and now the Auxiliary Bishop of Miami, says, “Before the return of Aristide, the focus of the community was almost exclusively on Haiti and U.S. policy. After, there was a sea change. The here and now became more important.” The shift came as the anti-immigrant backlash in the United States was mounting, reflected in new legislation that limited legal immigration and barred legal immigrants from many forms of social assistance. Although, according to Stepick, the Haitian diaspora has an unemployment rate “higher than probably any other sub-population in the United States,” research has shown that Haitians, no matter how poor, pride themselves on self-reliance and are generally reluctant to ask for government assistance. The principal concern therefore became the curtailing of legal protections for permanent residents, status that many Haitians obtained in the late 1980s. Haitian leaders, like their counterparts in the West Indian and Dominican diasporas, therefore began urging people with green cards to naturalize. Even though the Haitian constitution does not allow for dual citizenship, a right enjoyed by West Indians and Dominicans, significant numbers of Haitians have completed or begun the process of naturalization. In New York in 1996, according to the most recent data available from the INS, Haitians ranked fifth in numbers of people seeking citizenship, behind immigrants from the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, and Guyana. In South Florida that year, more than 10,000 Haitians obtained citizenship. “It’s like Haiti is a lost cause for them and they are now concentrating their energies on this community,” Roger Biamby, a

Douglas W. Payne 31

Haitian-American businessman and activist, recently said to the Associated Press in Miami. A second challenge has been to end the social isolation of the Haitian community. The 1990s have seen the emergence of dozens of Haitian-American organizations which advocate on issues such as education and health, provide counseling, and act as intermediaries between the community, local government, and service agencies. In Broward County, for example, where the 1990 Census counted more than 40,000 Haitians, a number of Haitian professionals recently started an outreach center for Haitian families. One of those involved, psychotherapist Margaret Armand, told the Miami Herald, “As a community we are here to stay. Many of us are not going back to Haiti and we need to make sure that our children have role models, and our adults have people they can turn to for help.” The Haitian-American Foundation, a Miami-based organization, recently developed a program in Little Haiti to improve English proficiency while teaching computer skills. The goal is to widen employment options for the majority of Haitians who have been relegated to agricultural, landscaping, and restaurant work. In New York, the Haitian Centers Council now encompasses eight agencies in the metropolitan area whose goal, according to executive director Henry Frank, is “to help Haitian immigrants establish themselves as productive, self-sufficient citizens in the United States.” Also in New York, the Community Action Project, a church-based organization which includes 15 congregations with an aggregate membership in the tens of thousands, helps Haitians fight for affordable housing, better education, and neighborhood economic development. Greater attention is being given, as well, to economic development. At the urging of Haitian-American leaders, the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce (GMCC) recently established the Haitian Affairs Group, giving the Haitian business community the same status in the GMCC as African-American and Latino business groups. Rudolph Moise, who heads the Haitian group, said in the Miami Herald that emphasis would be placed on addressing the lack of capital, the need for business-management training, and developing economic partnerships in Haiti. Fedy Vieux-Brierre, the former City of Miami administrator now in private business, is aiming to develop a “Creole” tourist district in Little Haiti, with the French Quarter in as a model. He envisions green-air markets, music, food, and art, as well as the necessary infrastructure such as hotels for conferences and business gatherings. “Only in Miami is there a Little Haiti, we should capitalize on that,” he says. The Caribbean Marketplace, built in Little Haiti in 1990 and modeled after Port-au-Prince’s famed Iron Market, failed in part because of a lack of investment. Vieux-Brierre hopes that today successful Haitian-Americans better understand that without their input the community will continue to suffer. There is promise, too, in the many first-wave and second- generation Haitians from New York, some successful in business, who are relocating to the Miami area and bolstering an emerging Haitian middle class there.

32 Emerging Voices

Meanwhile, the Haitian diaspora is utilizing the skills honed in mobilizing on behalf of Aristide to defend its interests in the United States. In August 1997 an estimated 20,000 protesters, more than half of them Haitian, marched across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan to protest the alleged torture by police of Haitian-American Abner Louima and discrimination against Haitians generally. Florence Bonhoumme-Camou, one of the activists involved, told the magazine City Limits that there were hundreds of grassroots Haitian groups in the New York area, each with ties to a particular hometown in Haiti. All it took, she said, was a series of phone calls to get the membership out. “Because we feel threatened all the time, we have a tendency to get together as one,” she said. The Haitian-American Alliance (HAA), a group formed in 1994 by mostly younger, second-generation professionals, was a principal organizer of the march. It utilized town meetings, addressed congregations, and reached out to West Indian and African-American organizations who share concerns about police brutality and discrimination. Though founded in Washington, D.C., the HAA has been most active in New York, where in June 1998 it held its third annual benefit and celebration of Haitian culture at Lincoln Center. Among those honored was the award-winning Haitian-American novelist, , and a portion of the proceeds from the $100-per-ticket affair went to the HAA youth scholarship program.

Prospects for Political Empowerment

Haitian-American leaders are encouraged by the increase in activities to promote the well-being of the diaspora community, but many believe that organizational capability overall is still weak. The ability to mobilize substantial numbers for marches and demonstrations can be an effective response to a crisis situation, they say, but lasting empowerment depends on building a constituency that can hold Washington and local governments accountable on a consistent basis. After the 1997 Louima march, Francois Pierre-Louis, head of the church-based Community Action Project, said to City Limits, “We didn’t like the government in Haiti and the only way to express that was through protest. We’ve been very good at that. But organizing to attempt change and build a base here in our own community, we’re very new at that.” Netlyn Bernard Samedy of the NCHR says, “The future of the Haitian community in the United States lies in achieving political power.” To that end, the NCHR instituted its Community Action Program (CAP) in 1995, part of its expanding focus on diaspora development highlighted by a change in name from the National Coalition on Haitian Refugees to the National Coalition on Haitian Rights. The new program is headed by Bernard Samedy, who arrived in the United States from Haiti in the mid-1980s and earned political science degrees from Hofstra University and St. John’s University. Its overall goal is “to increase the political effectiveness of the Haitian-American community, so that this community at the margins of power and recognition might soon begin to enjoy more fully the benefits of participating in U.S. democracy.” Key elements of the program include

Douglas W. Payne 33 citizenship and voter-registration drives, promoting civic awareness, and tracking policy shifts in social services and education at both the local and national levels. In early 1997 the CAP inaugurated training sessions on developing political leadership, organization building, and networking. A participant in the first leadership session was Rubain Dorancy, who a few months before, at the age of 25, became the first Haitian-American and the youngest person ever to be elected to a New York City district school board. District 17 sprawls through central Brooklyn and its population is nearly two-thirds West Indian and Haitian. Dorancy says that elementary and junior high school enrollment is nearly 50 percent Haitian. Born and educated in New York, Dorancy is a former junior high school teacher and is currently a director of the Haitian Community Health Center in Brooklyn. “My attitude was, wait a minute, we’ve been here more than 30 years and we still have no elected officials?” Dorancy says. Part of the problem, he believes, is that many of the Haitian “old guard” in Brooklyn prefer the status quo, in which unelected community power brokers ally with elements in the Democratic Party machinery in exchange for patronage. It is a phenomenon not exclusive to the Haitian-Americans. In his study on West Indians in New York, Philip Kasinitz refers to such power brokers as “ethnicity entrepreneurs.” “To effect real change means building representative grassroots organizations,” Dorancy says. That was the strategy he used in conducting his school-district campaign, drawing on core support from members of his college fraternity and former teaching colleagues, going door-to-door, and reaching out to African-Americans in the district. He got a boost from a get-out-the-vote drive by the NCHR, which reminded Haitian parents they did not have to be U.S. citizens to vote in school-board elections. At the same time, Dorancy has had to navigate the continuing divisions over politics back home, particularly in the Haitian-American media. There are a number of Creole-language radio programs and newspapers in New York, but as Bernard Samedy notes, much of the content is refracted through the prism of Haitian politics. “It needs to be more objective and accountable, less propaganda and demagoguery,” she says. Dormancy was criticized by Aristide supporters for being published in the conservative Haïti Observateur, even though his article focused exclusively on how to achieve political empowerment in New York. On a radio program, his viability as a leader was questioned because he has never been to Haiti. “My response was, we’ve got kids right here getting beat up because they are Haitian.” Dormancy is aiming for re-election in 1999 and, after that, the New York City Council. He believes that it is important to climb the ladder one rung at a time, “because that way you can build a lasting base and because you learn the nuts and bolts which you can teach to others.” Samuel Nicolas was the only Haitian-American who sought elected office in New York City in 1998. He had no prior political experience, but had gained prominence as Abner Louima’s cousin and spokesman. Running in the Democratic primary, he was looking to oust 20-year incumbent Rhoda Jacobs in the 42nd New York State Assembly District in central Brooklyn. Focusing on police

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brutality, the 39-year-old Nicolas gained the support of a number of African- American activists, including Rev. Al Sharpton. Nicolas also won the endorsement of the New York Times, which said that he “might bring a fresh burst of energy” to the predominantly Caribbean district. However, Nicolas’s candidacy proved controversial in the Haitian-American community after a number of activists claimed that neither he nor his father, Rev. Philus Nicolas, a prominent Brooklyn minister, had been critical of the military junta that ousted Aristide, and that Rev. Nicolas was once associated with the Tontons Macoute, the dreaded militia force created in Haiti by Papa Doc Duvalier. The Creole-language media in Brooklyn buzzed with these charges, all of which the Nicolases denied. Some of the harshest comments came from Ricot Dupuy, station manager of the influential Radio Soleil d’Haiti in Brooklyn. Before the controversy broke out, Tatiana Wah, chairwoman of the HAA, was quoted in a New York Times article about the prospects for Haitian-Americans gaining political clout in the United States. “For a long time, we have been outside, playing Haitian politics,” she said. “We’re behind, but it’s not too late.” It may not be too late, but the experience of Dormancy and Nicolas suggests that Haitian politics will remain part of the dynamic for some time. Further complicating the 42nd District primary race was the candidacy of Herman “Rock” Hackshaw, a young, Trinidad-born community activist who works as a counselor for the New York City Board of Education. Hackshaw looked to appeal to the large West Indian community in the district and won the endorsement of Carib News. Supporters of Jacobs, the white incumbent, hoped that Hackshaw and Nicolas would split the black vote and cancel each other out. As it turns out, Jacobs won easily with 58 percent of the vote, while Nicolas took 29 percent and Hackshaw 13 percent. In South Florida an unprecedented field of six Haitian-American candidates, five Democrats and one Republican, sought public office in 1998. Most were in their 30s and 40s. Five ran for seats in the state legislature, while Margaret Armand, the psychotherapist cited earlier, ran in the Broward County school board elections. A number of them had been involved in citizenship drives and hoped to benefit from the thousands of new Haitian-American voters. During the campaign, election talk dominated Creole-language programs on more than a half dozen radio stations in the greater Miami area. As yet, no radio station in South Florida is Haitian-owned. Politics in Haiti frequently crept into the campaigns, but were less of an issue than in New York. In one of the featured races, the Democratic primary for the Florida House of Representatives in District 108, which encompasses Little Haiti, there was friction between Haitian-Americans and African-Americans. The challenger, lawyer Phillip J. Brutus, declared the district “Haitian country,” causing Beryl Roberts- Burke, the African-American incumbent, to bristle. A number of African-American activists charged that Haitians were dividing the black vote. Brutus backtracked to say that he would represent all constituents, but the tension between the two camps was reminiscent of when African-Americans accused Una Clarke of “tribalism” when she first ran for the New York City Council on a West Indian

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platform in 1991. Brutus came within 58 votes of defeating Roberts-Burke, which was the closest any of the Haitian-American Democrats came to winning a primary victory. In November, Republican businessman Josaphat “Joe” Celestin takes on African-American Kendrick Meek, the winner of the Democratic primary in State Senate District 36, which covers a good portion of the Haitian community in northeastern Dade County. Celestin, who hosts a political talk show on Creole- language radio, said to the Miami Herald, “We live here, we buy homes here, we will die here. So naturally, it is time we get our share of the pie as well.” Meek’s mother and biggest political asset is U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek. Her congressional district encompasses Little Haiti, where she is popular because of her determined championing of Haitian causes in Washington. Given that voters in Senate District 36 also are more than two-thirds Democratic, Celestin seemed like a long shot at best. For the time being, it looks like Philippe Derose, the vice mayor of tiny El Portal in Broward Country, would remain the only Haitian-American holding public office in South Florida. Prior to the elections, a number of Haitian leaders said that politically the community had reached “critical mass.” But the results suggested that for Haitian-Americans, continued progress might depend on forming coalitions with other ethnic groups. Claude Louissaint, a first-time candidate in the District 30 State Senate Race in Broward County, seemed already to be moving in that direction. Louissaint, a 36-year-old special projects coordinator for the Florida Department of Children and Families, made a respectable showing by reaching out to West Indian as well as Haitian voters. He received support from Lauderdale Lakes mayor Samuel Brown and Lauderdale Lakes commissioner Hazelle Rogers who, as noted in the section on the West Indian diaspora, recently became the first West Indians elected to public office in South Florida. In the long term, such pan-Caribbean cooperation could be the key to getting someone elected to Washington.

Prospects for a Haitian Lobby

Some Haitian-American organizations, particularly the NCHR, have long experience in working the corridors of Washington. They can usually count on liberal allies on Capitol Hill, such as the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as U.S. civil rights groups and labor unions for support on immigration issues. Most recently, that coalition of forces helped secure passage of Haitian Refugees Immigration Fairness Act. The bill granted permanent residency to about 49,000 Haitian refugees who arrived before 1996 and is similar to legislation enacted in 1997 for Central American refugees. Notably, Haitian-Americans were able to secure backing for the bill from a number of Latino organizations, possibly heralding greater pan-ethnic cooperation on immigration issues. But Bernard Samedy says, “Immigration is only one short-term issue.” The challenge remains to build a national structure with broad community support to act as a voice on all issues that affect Haitian-Americans. As noted earlier, an

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array of Haitian-American advocacy and grassroots groups have emerged in the United States since the 1980s and since late 1996 the NCHR has been working to link them into a Community Action Network. But the NCHR, the strongest and most nationally focused Haitian-American organization, is concerned that many others still rely on make-shift structures and lack resources. When the NCHR started its leadership training program, Jocelyn McCalla said, “We have seen too many community organizations, even some of the most promising, fail after just a few years of operation.” Moreover, the Haitian Refugee Center, the focal point of Haitian advocacy in Miami in the 1980s and early 1990s, recently has been plagued by factional disputes and its funding has dried up. There also is the task of developing a common agenda around which disparate and geographically dispersed organizations can unite. The idea was discussed in July 1998 by Haitian activists and lawyers who were invited to attend the 25th annual convention of the Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad in . The physicians association has national reach but operates principally as a professional support group. Delegates from local Haitian-American legal groups took the first steps toward forming their own national association and were urged by the NCHR and other activists to develop a mission statement based on advocacy for the Haitian community in the United States. Bernard Samedy says the lawyers are looking to participate in the NCHR’s leadership program, but adds, “They still need vision.” Meanwhile, the Préval government in Haiti, paralyzed since 1997 and with few resources, appears neither interested in nor capable of supporting development of the diaspora. Some Haitian-American activists believe that is not a bad thing. Rubain Dorancy, for example, says, “If we are going to achieve things here, we have to transcend Haitian politics.” But most recognize that affairs back home will continue to impact upon organizational efforts in the United States. For example, there was a debate about the appearance of Mildred Trouillot, the wife of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, at the convention in Chicago. Trouillot, an attorney, was not one of the scheduled speakers but ended up addressing a lawyers luncheon on the possibility of amending the Haitian constitution to allow for dual citizenship. Some criticized it as thinly veiled politicking on behalf of Aristide, who intends to run for re-election in 2000, and a distraction from the business at hand. Others said she made a relevant contribution to the conference. One Haitian-American activist in South Florida who asked not to be identified said, “When the next election comes, Aristide and the rest of them will all be here. They don’t want our input, just our money.” The NCHR has not lessened its focus on democracy and human rights in Haiti. But as McCalla stated in late 1996 at the first conference on developing the Community Action Network, “Haitians living abroad must stop believing we can solve Haiti’s problems without gaining political leverage in a country such as the United States, which has such a large influence on Haiti’s present and future development.” A few months earlier, Tatiana Wah of the HAA, writing in the NCHR newsletter “HAITI Insight,” said, “Naturally, we do advocate maintaining close ties to our homeland.” But, she added, echoing the concerns of many activists in the

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Dominican diaspora, “It is also critical to envision an investment strategy in the United States…Haitians send millions of dollars to Haiti every year, and the funds—in great part—keep the Haitian economy afloat. But the money transfers also drain the assets of the Haitian-American community.” She concluded by saying that if Haitian-Americans developed a sound economic base and a unified political voice, “we can insist that U.S. policies in Haiti foster growth, competitiveness, and productivity.” The economic challenge for the diaspora is no greater than the political one. In her article, Wah said that the average annual salary of Haitian-Americans in 1996 was $15,300. That seemed to tally with the results of a demographic study produced by Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick a year earlier. Analyzing 1990 U.S. Census data, they found that 87 percent of the diaspora had incomes of $30,000 or below, while only 1.3 percent had incomes greater than $50,000. But the Stepicks found, too, that the Haitian diaspora is young, with 38 percent of the population 20-years-old or less. As noted earlier, many Haitian- American children, encouraged by their parents, are taking advantage of the opportunity for a U.S. education. They continue to confront discrimination and some are at risk of becoming part of the black underclass. But many others will join the small but expanding Haitian- and some will follow in the footsteps of Rubain Dorancy, enhancing the chances, at least in the long term, for developing a constituency with a voice to be reckoned with.

About the Author

Douglas W. Payne is a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. He has covered Latin America and the Caribbean since the early 1980s and reported on elections and political transitions throughout the region. He is the author of the CSIS Western Hemisphere Election Study Series reports on the 1998 St. Vincent and the Grenadines elections, the 1997 Jamaica, Guyana and St. Lucia elections, the 1996 Suriname and Nicaragua elections, the 1995 Trinidad and Tobago elections, and the 1994 Antigua and Barbuda and St. Vincent and the Grenadines elections. He is also the author of Storm Watch: Democracy in the Western Hemisphere into the Next Century (CSIS 1998) and Democracy in the Caribbean: A Cause for Concern (CSIS 1995). He has written for Harper’s magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Dissent, the Washington Post, the Journal of Commerce, the Miami Herald, the Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune.