Haitian Immigrants in the United States

Abstract

The formulation and maintenance of the United States’ social and cultural idioms have their roots and essence in the epic of world migration. Unquestionably, the substance of Americaness has been achieved through the travails and experiences of immigrants who have arrived on the shores of the United States from all parts of the world during the last five centuries to revitalize and reinvent the culture. According to Ware, immigrants and their children have not only contributed to the American nation, they are the United States (1940). Similarly, in his seminal book, The Uprooted, Oscar Handlin echoed the same sentiment when he wrote, “Once I thought to write a history of immigrants in the United States. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history” (Handlin, 1973: 3). Thus, in so far as nationalities from all over the world are represented in the North American nation’s population, the United States exemplifies the archetypical multiethnic and multiracial society. However, whether the immigrants had voluntary left or had been constrained to leave their native lands to start a new life in the United States, generally, they do not consider themselves as “transplanted” or “uprooted” people (Handlin, 1973). For them and even for some of their progenies who have never been in their parents’ homeland, the memories of the former society linger in their imagining and the circumstances through which they experience their U.S. realities attest to a narrative of historical continuity. Long after the immigrants have embraced the United States as their ’home,’ they and their progenies continue to nurture in their imagining the memories o f, at least, one foreign land (the hyphenated American) and still cling to the cultural legacies of, at least, one alien society (the ethnic American) (Sollors, 1986).