Haitians in L.A. Spread Out and Blend In

Rony St. Urbain and his family drive 45 minutes from Chatsworth to Eagle Rock three times a week to attend French-speaking Jehovah’s Witnesses services.

St. Urbain and 10,000 other Haitian immigrants in Los Angeles are used to traveling long distances to get together.

Tired of being associated with so-called boat people and the practice of voodoo, many Haitians in Southern California have resisted attempts to organize as a community, choosing instead to blend in across the region.

“They’re trying to get away from community,” said Joseph Kesner, 53, a Haitian who moved to Los Angeles from Miami in the early 1980s.

Yolette Dauphin, president and founder of the newly formed Haiti America Society, said most Haitians in Los Angeles want to avoid the stigma that usually comes with the formation of a new immigrant neighborhood.

“What do they call us in those places?” said Dauphin, speaking of Miami, home to the largest number of Haitians outside Haiti. “They call us ‘boats.’ We are not boats. We are professionals, businesspeople.”

Dauphin of Los Feliz said she created the Haiti America Society to bridge Haitians and Americans. One of her goals is to erase the myth that Haitians are poor, uneducated refugees.

Efforts to unify the community have failed because most Haitians are seeking to define themselves as members of the American middle class without tying themselves to the abject poverty and political instability of their homeland, she said.

Class Divisions Continue to Divide Immigrants

Alex Stepick, director of the immigration and ethnicity institute at Florida International University in Miami, says the lack of solidarity among Haitian Americans on the West Coast may come from the class divisions that exist in Haiti.

“The primary divisions are of the lighter-skinned folks against the other people; people with wealth and people without it,” said Stepick, author of “Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States.”

“Even in Miami, there are quite a number of Haitians who refuse to identify [themselves] as Haitian because they don’t want to be associated with refugees or boat people,” Stepick said. “The difference in a place like Miami and New York is you have enough of those other Haitians who identify with one another and who can create organizations. In areas with newer settlements, you don’t have enough other people to form Haitian organizations or a sense of community.”

In almost a decade, the number of Haitians in the Los Angeles area has doubled from 5,000 to 10,000, activists say. From 1957 to 1971, during the dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, many of the Caribbean nation’s elite fled to Montreal and New York City. Over the years, Canada has become a popular destination because educated Haitians speak French, as well as Kreyol, or Haitian Creole, said Eveline Dalencour, public affairs agent at the Canadian Embassy in Port-au-Prince.

Many Refugees Fled After 1991 Coup

The most recent influx of Haitian refugees to the United States occurred after the 1991 military coup, which ousted the nation’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. His support rested primarily with the poor, who fled the nation in boats heading to the Bahamas and Miami.

Between 1988 and 1994, Catholic Charities relocated about 1,000 newly arrived Haitian immigrants to Los Angeles, said Loc Nguyen, director of the group’s immigration and refugee department.

But the majority of Haitians in Southern California are not newly arrived immigrants. For instance, author and art collector Carine Fabius, 45, has been in the country for many years, Dauphin said.

Born into a prominent mulatto family in Port-au-Prince that fled Haiti in 1964, Fabius moved to Los Angeles from Miami in 1986.

Her home in Hollywood doubles as a Caribbean and Latin art gallery with its large collection of Haitian artwork. Statues and paintings, including canvases painted with dark-brown and black figures, animals in the wild and brightly colored landscapes, adorn almost every corner of the house. The most prominent piece, dominating a dining room wall, is an abstract painting of Erzuli, love goddess of Haitian voodoo.

Fabius said she had no idea how many Haitians lived in Los Angeles until she opened Galerie Lakaye in Hollywood 11 years ago with her French-born husband, Pascal Giacomini.

“Haitian people are so spread out here,” said Giacomini, 48. “It’s not like in other cities where you can point to a place where Haitians live. They say there are 10,000 here, but that’s 10,000 in the entire region.”

Haitian Seeks Others Scattered in Area

St. Urbain, who moved to California in 1996 to join his wife, Rolande, said he has been devoting much of his spare time to seeking out Haitians scattered throughout the San Fernando Valley to preach to them.

“It’s a little difficult finding not only people who speak French, but Haitian people,” said St. Urbain, 42. “You go to a house because the person’s last name looks French, but until you get there, you never know what they are.”

More than anything, said Los Angeles businessman Jordan Salomon, efforts to organize Haitians in the Southland will be defeated by class differences.

“I know people that want to do something, but the question is, who will follow?” said Salomon, 32, of Beverly Hills.

A Haitian Jew who grew up in Canada, Salomon was an intelligence advisor to Aristide before the 1991 coup. The great-grandson of one-time Haitian President Lysius Felicite Salomon, who ruled Haiti for nine years until he was overthrown in 1988, Salomon said he plans to return to Haiti in a decade to run for public office.

It would be difficult to form a Haitian cultural or political organization in Los Angeles, he said.

“Where would you put that group?” he said. “In Inglewood? In South-Central? Haitians who live in Pasadena or Beverly Hills would refuse to go to South-Central to associate with people who don’t have the same financial base. In Haiti, they would be of a different class.”