1925 to 1929 · Haitianspan
The occupation starts keeping records, and women appear inside them
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Georges Sylvain's death marked a change in how Haitians organised against the occupation, and his posthumous collection Dix annees de lutte set out what the first decade had held: caco fighting in the hills, Union Patriotique work in the towns, and daily refusal everywhere else. The American side changed too. After the Senate commissions of 1920 and 1921 came to Haiti and looked, Washington told the occupying forces to moderate their conduct and to write more of it down. Two results followed. Fuller records produced a wider account of ordinary life, which is why traces of individual Haitian women survive in that archive at all. Wider surveillance also let the marines penetrate the caco networks, kill their leaders and reduce combat deaths. Haitians kept dying anyway, in traffic and in custody and in ordinary encounters with occupation officials, and the frustration built until the riots of 1929. On the day of Sylvain's funeral an American car struck two Haitians, one of them a child taken to hospital.
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