Jordi Ruiz Cirera
Nounoune Jules and her husband Fabius Clement at home in Tijuana’s Zona Norte. They share the house with their fourteen-year-old son and two Haitian men, since they cannot afford to rent their own place.
When she started her three-month journey to the United States, Nounoune Jules had the assured gait of someone who knew where she was headed.
At thirty-seven, she was older than many of the Haitians traveling from Brazil to the United States, but she planned to go light. She, along with her husband and thirteen-year-old son, would wade through chest-deep water in the rivers of Panama and follow smugglers in the jungles of Nicaragua. After an earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, the United States quietly allowed Haitians who arrived via the southern border to stay temporarily. Jules gambled on the promise that her family would be let in. In 2016, a year after Brazil entered the deepest recession in its history, they started heading north.
After New Year’s Day in 2017, when Jules finally trudged down the streets of Tijuana, Mexico, she found that America had ended its policy. It had started deporting people to Haiti. Her family ended up in a shelter near the border fence, then moved into a tiny house with two Haitian men who were also out of luck.
By January 2018, an estimated 3,000 Haitians were living in the Mexican state of Baja California. The majority had moved to Brazil after Haiti’s earthquake, the deadliest natural disaster recorded in the Western Hemisphere, destroyed the capital, Port-au-Prince. Brazil had granted them visas, partly to fill jobs ahead of the Olympics and the World Cup.
“My son hasn’t been to school in a year,” Jules tells me on the one-year anniversary of her departure from Brazil. She prepares fish and plantains after returning from the warehouse where she works. “When there are drunk people in the street, they could hit him. Every day people tell me, ‘Don’t let him go out.’ ”
“My son hasn’t been to school in a year.”
Tijuana is a historic crossing point for immigrants, but residents there were not used to seeing black people on Constitution Avenue. Tensions were exacerbated by the United States’ strange pact with the Mexican authorities: It required that each Haitian wait in Tijuana for an interview with American immigration officials, forcing the local shelters to rush for space. One thirty-year-old Haitian, Anel Verdieu, slept on a sidewalk for two months, praying that he, his wife, Marie Lovely Verdieu, and their five-year-old son would be among the small number of Haitians let in to America each day.
The United States did not deport Haitians previously because their country, after a string of crises, was considered unfit to receive deportees. The 2010 earthquake had left a death toll in Haiti of 300,000. Aid efforts there fumbled as more than $13 billion was mismanaged or never delivered. And United Nations peacekeepers accidentally started a cholera epidemic.
The United States, in addition to granting the short-term humanitarian parole, also allowed 60,000 Haitians who entered the country before the earthquake and in the first year following to stay on Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Even though later arrivals were not eligible for TPS, they were lucky, in a grim sense: Though parole technically allowed them to stay only up to three years, they would not be deported unless they had a criminal record.
“It all depends on the numbers,” Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University School of Law, tells The Progressive in an interview. “[If it looks] like a crisis, a surge, a new tsunami coming in, that becomes, in terms of optics, much more political.”
In fiscal years 2016 and 2017, 15,000 Haitians crossed into the United States. The U.S. government dispatched an extra hundred officers to San Diego, across the border from Tijuana, to respond to the lines of people at the crossing between the countries. By September 2016, amid reports of 40,000 more on their way north, the Obama Administration announced the impending end of parole for Haitians.
What would happen to all those, like Jules, who remained in Tijuana?
Jules met her husband, a God-fearing man named Fabius Clement, while working in the Dominican Republic. She left for Brazil with him about five years ago. By the time they headed for the United States, she was leaving behind the foundation of a house for which Clement, a forty-year-old construction worker and security guard, had made the blueprint.
The problem with Tijuana, says Jules, is the danger. Pressured by Americans’ illegal drug consumption, cities like Tijuana have remained under the thumb of drug cartels. By last August, infighting between the cartels had left more than a thousand people dead, making 2017 the city’s bloodiest year on record. Luckily, Jules wasn’t close to any of the shootings. But, in the mornings, she sees other activity: sex workers with late-night eyeliner posted in front of clubs and junkies waiting for their dealers on her block.
As she hurries to work, Jules passes the oyster salesmen in black plastic aprons and the taco vendors serving bar patrons, then delivers a lunchbox to Clement. He has a scab on his palm from his job de-kerneling corn; she goes to work husking tomatillos, or Mexican green tomatoes, for export to the United States. When her Mexican boss counts the crates she’s finished, the pay is far less than what she earned cleaning a local church in Brazil.
Fabius Clement will de-kernel this truckload of corn. He arrived in Tijuana from Brazil together with his wife and fourteen-year-old son to cross into the United States, but he is now stranded in the border city.
Clement estimates that he earns $9 daily in Tijuana, instead of the $35 he took home in Brazil. It’s not enough to get anywhere else or send money to relatives in Haiti. The remittances of those who’ve fled now make up more than a third of Haiti’s GDP. “A Christian man cannot lie,” Clement says. “What has made me saddest is the situation with work. That’s why we can’t stay here.”
Foreign countries, including the ones now rejecting Haitians, drove their fists into the country years earlier. The United States occupied Haiti in 1915 and did not leave for nineteen years, as it “rewrote the constitution, forced chain gangs to build roads, and brutally suppressed rebellions,” writes Jonathan Katz in his 2013 book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster.
Regine O. Jackson, an associate professor at Agnes Scott College and editor of Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora, said the earthquake was so devastating in part because of earlier U.S. policies: Americans forced Haiti to import their rice, which steam-rolled local farmers, and to slaughter all Creole pigs—a staple of the Haitian diet—before replacing them with ill-suited American ones.
Twentieth-century migration out of Haiti spiked after 1957, when François “Papa Doc” Duvalier started a brutal dictatorship that continued until 1986 under his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.
In a major shift, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest, became Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1990.
But Aristide was unseated by a military coup whose leaders were on the U.S. payroll even as they murdered his supporters. Aristide returned to power in 1994, stepped down in 1996 before being re-elected in 2000, but once more fell to a U.S.-backed coup in 2004.
Starting with Ronald Reagan, successive U.S. administrations interrogated Haitians on boats headed out of Haiti, held them at Guantanamo Bay, then forced them to go through refugee interviews in Haiti. The majority were denied entry.
By the time the earthquake hit, the years of conflict had taken their toll. “The earthquake made it impossible to ignore what was going on in Haiti and the dire need of these Haitian asylum seekers,” Jackson says.
By now, Jules and Clement imagined they would find something better than menial labor for pennies in Baja California, a state that hangs off the mermaid form of Mexico like a shrunken left arm.
But, as is common in immigration crises, the Haitians slipped out of the limelight as quickly as they had stumbled into it.
Founded ninety years ago, the wood-paneled Baptist church where Jules heads for Sunday worship and evening Bible teachings had never sheltered immigrants until the Haitian crisis.
The pastor of the church, Juan Manuel Serrano Nuñez, said that the majority of his Haitian parishioners crossed into the United States; others returned to Brazil or Haiti, or made it to Canada after they were released by American authorities. Those who remained in Mexico came to the pews for special Creole services. They lowered their heads and prayed for answers.
Faniel Clement, Jules and Clement’s teenage son, missed all that he had left behind: in Brazil, the hours perfecting a basketball move that made the ball spin back to him, tricking his opponent; in Haiti, the cousins he used to ride his bike to visit; in Mexico, a Haitian girl he had a crush on who lived in a church along a dirt road far from the center of Tijuana. She left to seek asylum at the American border.
Jordi Ruiz Cirera
Inside the First Baptist Church of Tijuana, which holds a service for the Haitian community on Sunday mornings. The church became a shelter for Haitian migrants between October 2016 and April 2017, hosting some 110 people at the peak of the crisis.
For the first few months, finding a legal status for such a large population presented a problem, but the Mexican government issued one-year humanitarian permits to all of the Haitians. Ruth Gaxiola, the coordinator of the Iglesia Central del Nazareno, which had sheltered Marie Lovely Verdieu and her son, said that Haitians struggled to obtain sufficient medical care and were not immediately granted the identification number sometimes required for formal employment.
The majority of Haitians are dispersed across the city, but the largest neighborhoods have mushroomed near places that used to host them. The most prominent is beside the church where Faniel’s sweetheart had lived. The eccentric pastor, Gustavo Banda, said he built a church of such extreme proportions in the Scorpion’s Canyon, whose high slopes make it prone to flooding, because God sent him three prophets before all the Haitians came. He then built a series of plywood homes outside, in part with savings from economics projects at a local college and the sale of his specialty hens. He called the area Little Haiti.
Other Haitians, just like the enamored Faniel, were figuring out how to restore routine to their upended lives. Twenty-six-year-old Gloiguens Voltaire, who was waiting for refugee status from the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, worked during the day at a remote-control factory before he started selling hair extensions. But in the evenings, he went with his Haitian girlfriend and his cousin to a local bar, Las Pulgas, to dance.
Voltaire was living in a blue house with other people, including a cousin who had also made the journey from Brazil, and he thought about bringing his son to Mexico. His baby was six months old when Voltaire had last seen him in Haiti. At the time, Voltaire was so timid, he feared holding the boy because “his bones were so fragile.” But he had traveled across ten countries since then, and nothing seemed to be the same as before.
In a makeshift consular office in a Tijuana shopping mall, behind a glass door, Christopher Faustin files stacks of passport renewal applications. He had been a Spanish teacher back in Haiti, a car painter in Brazil, and a translator in Mexican shelters. Then he became an informal representative for the Haitians, because there was nobody else who would help them navigate the bureaucracy.
His task is now to clear up the paper mess that migration across Latin America left behind. He has to file the paperwork for babies who were born in transit, for the adults who lost their documents en route, and for those who have migrated for so long that their passports are expired. He himself came with other migrants from Brazil, then watched a trickle of his people continue to seek asylum in the United States, the only legal recourse left to them.
Ximena Rojas García, a local midwife, has been caring for women that were under strain, because of the conditions in which they traveled. She consults with Marie Lovely Verdieu on the delivery of her second child, a girl named Lovenda. She checks the vitals with her tools: stethoscope, to know if there’s a heartbeat; thermometer, to know if she’s running a fever; blood pressure machine.
By the time they crossed Latin America, women at the border checkpoints had babies dead in the womb, and some did not know it. Since malnutrition had delayed their menstruation, others did not know if they were pregnant. Marie Lovely could not stop vomiting after she left Gaxiola’s church, then lost weight. But a month before the baby’s arrival, with the help of her husband Anel’s translation, she had set up a small apartment with a donated cradle and exercised by walking her son to and from the local public school.
She would soon give birth to a Mexican baby.
On the other side of the thin curtain from where her son slept on the floor, she decided she could take the risk of deportation from America. She would wear small flower-shaped earrings that she brought from Brazil. She would save money and buy canned fish, and sell her burners and refrigerators.
“Imagine [Mexico] were your house,” says Ardelio Vargas Fosado, the commissioner of the Mexican government’s National Migration Institute, which regulates the entry and exit of all immigrants. “You have a budget for your father, your mother, and your brothers, and enough for you to go to school. All of a sudden, ten cousins arrive. You’re going to allow them to stay for a week, perhaps two weeks, but it’s simple: You don’t have enough. Today, Mexico does not have the capacity to absorb a large quantity of people and give them a chance at a dignified life.”
Faniel, with a teenager’s logic, suspected they lived near the border so they could dart across at any moment, as though a hidden gate might open. The year had made him philosophical, and people often mistook the lanky boy with a man’s deep voice for someone far older. He’s been thinking of how much he wants to leave.
“When I cross into the United States, we’re going to have our things,” he says. “And some years later, I’ll find a woman—an American, a Dominican, a Haitian—and we’ll live better.” It is a fantasy of stability, along with the not-yet-burnt-out dream of being a basketball player, saving up for the house he once had, and then never being uprooted, never having to pay lip service to someone else’s vision of where he should go. “We’re not going to stay here forever.”
Maya Averbuch is a reporter based in Mexico, where she specializes in migration. Follow her on Twitter at @mayaaverbuch.
Jordi Ruiz Cirera is an independent photographer based in Mexico. Follow his work on Instagram at @jordiruizc.