Between 1990 and 1995 McAlister followed Rara bands through the Artibonite, around Port-au-Prince and later into Prospect Park in Brooklyn, producing the first ethnography of the festival. Rara starts where Carnival ends and builds through Lent to Easter, when processions of drummers and bamboo trumpeters walk for miles, halting at crossroads, bridges and cemeteries to do ritual work for the spirits while the saints are absent. Those six weeks are treated here as the one season when the rural and urban poor take public space in large numbers, which is why wealthier Haitians call it dangerous and why army governments watched it closely. Song lyrics carry much of the analysis. They mock the powerful, comment on the coup against Aristide, the embargo and his return, and in New York they address police violence and life as a migrant. Chapters also examine ritual labour, sexual vulgarity, military hierarchy and effigies burned as Jews.