A man facing deportation to Haiti hangs himself in an American cell

In the 1970s a man named Turenne Deville was held by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, which decided to send him back to Haiti. On hearing it he hanged himself in his prison cell. What happened to him is one instance of a government telling a person where he may and may not be. The French and American authorities routinely expel people classed as aliens whose school age children hold citizenship by birth. Deville's death sits beside the wager made by the thousands of Haitians who put out for Florida in small boats, betting against the sharks, the waves and the Coast Guard on the reckoning that the odds at sea were the better ones. Deportation is normally discussed as an administrative act with a file number and a form. For the person named on the form it works as a sentence, and Deville treated it as one.

On 22 May 1964 an American ambassador presented himself in Port-au-Prince for the first time in four years, and Lyndon Johnson told the new Haitian envoy in Washington that he looked forward to close cooperation. The economic pressure Kennedy had applied began to lift. The Inter-American Development Bank found money for waterworks and the United States Navy resumed shore leave. Foreign aid ran above five million dollars a year. Duvalier was separately taking in about ten million a year through accounts that appeared in no budget, fed by the Regie du Tabac, a tobacco monopoly grown to cover cement, flour, sugar, milk, cars, textiles, matches and much else, with the cash moving through a private bank. No government or lender ever challenged those accounts in public. In late 1965 Duvalier opened talks with the Vatican and named his price, which was a Haitian bench of bishops in place of the French one. Paul VI agreed in August 1966, lifted the excommunication and sent a nuncio back.

In 1976 Port-au-Prince held about 638 thousand people, fourteen per cent of all Haitians and fifty eight per cent of everyone living in a Haitian town. Around the same period New York held about 300 thousand Haitians, while Cap-Haitien, the second city of the country, held 54,691. The same was true of the neighbours. Miami held more Cubans than Santiago de Cuba and New York more Dominicans than Santiago de los Caballeros. Across the Caribbean the capital swallowed the country: in the early 1970s a fifth of Cubans lived in Havana, a third of Puerto Ricans in San Juan, a sixth of Dominicans in Santo Domingo and a quarter of Jamaicans in Kingston. Two consequences followed for Haiti. Remittances from abroad became a support of the capital's economy, and the strongest opposition to Jean Claude Duvalier organised itself in New York and Miami rather than at home.

Zone I was the wealthy relatives that the people of Zone II hoped to catch. It sat southeast of the Champ de Mars and out in the further suburbs, and it accounted for 9.7 percent of the city. Family property was common at this level, Comhaire-Sylvain found, and these households were less religious than the rest of Port-au-Prince. The dependable road to a high income ran through the university, and from there into state administration, banking, shop ownership, law and medicine. She then listed the Sylvains among the families of Zone I. Her purpose in mapping the city this way was to show movement between the zones rather than to fix people inside them, and putting her own name into the scheme was part of that. It made her privilege visible and countable on the same terms as everyone else's. The ethnographer was not standing outside the system she was describing, and she wrote down where in it she stood.