Raising Haiti: The Transmission of Ethnic Culture Across Generations

“Raising Haiti” analyzes how ethnicity structures the romantic and familial lives of second-generation Haitian Americans living in Miami, FL to explore the continuance of ethnic culture into the third generation. Drawing on forty-one interviews and ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate the (re)construction and inculcation of Haitian cultural heritage via childrearing practices. I argue that Haitian American families negotiate the transmission of ethnic heritage, within a context of global anti-black racism, poor relationship with their proximal hosts, and the social value of ethnicity in multicultural Miami, through an understanding of the precarity of Haitian ethnicity. Without concerted effort through familial decisions such as partner choice and cultural socialization, Haitian Americans jeopardize their continued existence as a distinct ethnic diasporic entity. The findings provide a nuanced understanding of the continuation of black ethnicity across generations and the construction of a diasporic blackness in the U.S. context