Istwa Nou

The Foyer stood near the houses of Zone III and across the road from the stadium. By Comhaire-Sylvain's own mapping, Zone III was the most mixed part of Port-au-Prince, the place where the city's classes overlapped most heavily and where people from different zones were most likely to be in the same street on the same day. That made it a meeting place. The women's league had not put its school there by accident. It had put it at the hinge of the city, at the point where a woman who sold in the market in LaSaline and a woman from a family with property were most likely to cross. Everything the league wanted to do, teaching literacy, sewing, hygiene and civic rights across class lines, depended on the two of them actually meeting. The location was the strategy, and the map was how they found it.

Zone II accounted for 16 percent of the urban population and lay within the parishes of Sacred Heart, St Anne and St Joseph. Comhaire-Sylvain recorded no Protestant churches there and no ounfo she knew of. The largest employer was the state, followed by the big import and export houses, retail trade, teaching and the clergy. She wrote that this was the middle class of the Pan American Union survey, and she put the phrase in quotation marks. The marks were the point. The people in the zone included families of humble origin who had won some public standing over one or two generations, and people whose chief ambition was to catch up with wealthier relatives. That is a description of movement, not of a settled stratum, and the borrowed vocabulary of an international agency could not hold it. A zone with no temples and no chapels was organised around something other than worship. It was organised around the salary and the ambition.

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.