Overblog
Editer l'article Suivre ce blog Administration + Créer mon blog

Le Monde du Sud// Elsie news

Le Monde du Sud// Elsie news

Haïti, les Caraïbes, l'Amérique Latine et le reste du monde. Histoire, politique, agriculture, arts et lettres.


"We need ’em worse than they need us’: how Haitian workers feed the US". Témoignage d'une anthropologue de parents haïtiens, née aux USA. Bon à savoir...Mais en anglais.

Publié par siel sur 7 Octobre 2024, 20:35pm

Catégories : #AYITI ACTUALITES, #AYITI EXTREME DROITE, #AYITI ECONOMIE, #CULTURE, #PEUPLE sans mémoire...

On a foggy morning in June 2021, I left my Durham, North Carolina, home to travel two and a half hours to rural Whiteville, North Carolina, population 5,000-ish. I headed there to meet some of the town’s newest, albeit temporary, residents: 200 Haitian migrants employed as blueberry pickers.

These farm workers put food on our tables – and on family tables back in Haiti. But they’re a less visible work force in our food supply chain, toiling largely out of sight on farms in places like Columbus county, with its miles of fields. They are doubly invisible among US guest workers, who overwhelmingly hail from Mexico.

 Travailleurs agricoles haïtiens aux USA.Sources Le Monde Fr

But Haitian migrants also come to the US and locations across the hemisphere to work in food production or other service industries. Their numbers have increased after the devastating 2010 earthquake, and many have been able to use temporary protected status (TPS) to stay and work in the US due to conditions that make it hard to return home.

Others brave unsafe border crossings into the Dominican Republic’s sugarcane fields for abusively low wages. Some board rickety boats to voyage into Turks and Caicos’s shark-filled waters to serve tourists in luxury resorts. Many endure human trafficking into Maryland to pick tomatoes or risk getting whipped by border patrol agents as they walk across the arid US-Mexico border. And as anthropologists Vincent Joos and Laura Wagner once pointed out, there’s a good chance your Thanksgiving turkey was processed by Haitian workers in North Carolina.

During the pandemic’s peak, I volunteered to do Kreyòl translation so the Whiteville workers could get what was then a scarce commodity, the Covid vaccine. Because non-Spanish-speaking migrant farm workers were often an afterthought (then and now), there were few Covid-specific health resources in the Kreyòl language Haitians speak.

I’m a scholar of Haitian migration, and much of my writing and research is inspired by my own family history. My paternal grandmother arrived in the US in 1963, and my father joined her in New York a few years later. I grew up knowing about urban Haitian enclaves all over the US, from Queens to Miami’s Little Haiti. However, few people have documented or even know about Haitian life in the rural US, especially in the south.

Acting as an intermediary between English-speaking nurses and the Haitian migrants, I saw a different part of the Haitian diaspora in small-town America. By now, most of us have heard that thousands of Haitians have migrated to Springfield, Ohio, to escape volatility at home. In Springfield, they boosted an ailing midwestern factory sector only to become targets of racist rhetoric from the Trump-Vance ticket and others.

It’s become popular to spread false narratives about Haitians, to deride our community as one of criminals and resource vampires. Those unfair charges ignore the history of how western powers plundered Haiti, undermined its existence and fostered systemic crisis.

Haiti’s role in world food systems dates to the 1700s when French colonizers called it the “Pearl of the Antilles”. During the transatlantic slave trade, it ranked among the world’s top sugar and coffee producers. When the Haitian Revolution brought the end of slavery on the island and its leaders declared their independence, Napoleon Bonaparte obsessed over the loss of his empire’s crown jewel. France later forced the young country to reimburse former enslavers for losing their once-captive workforce – an indemnity of 150m francs with added interest over time. For decades, the US and other countries refused to recognize Haiti, the world’s first independent Black nation. And we wonder why Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere, after centuries of extraction, a Wall Street-fomented US occupation and a succession of coup d’états.

The workers I met in Whiteville were far from “takers” or “illegals”. They held H-2A visas that permit approved businesses to hire foreign labor when US workers aren’t available or interested in open jobs. Bruce McLean Jr, an extension agent in Columbus county, believes that anywhere from 20% to 25% of all blueberry pickers in south-eastern North Carolina are Haitian.

Suite de l'article dans le lien

Commenter cet article

Archives

Nous sommes sociaux !

Articles récents