Laguerre studies Upper Belair, a hillside quarter of Port-au-Prince, from close range. He lived at its edge, worked for months under the eye of a Duvalierist militiaman who wanted to know what he was collecting, and had to overcome the suspicion of vodou practitioners who took him for the agent of a rival society.

The quarter is not presented as an isolated fragment. Laguerre reads it through dependency: small personal retailing squeezed by wholesalers who organise supply from outside, and survival strategies shaped by unequal dealings with a local elite of merchants, militiamen, religious leaders and patrons who share little beyond an interest in the poor remaining poor.

He carries the same logic outward to the Caribbean primate city itself, at once satellite to a metropolis abroad and metropolis to its own hinterland, and to the emigrant populations in New York and Miami whose numbers now dwarf those of provincial cities at home.