Living nan lonbraj la: Haitian Immigrant Young People Writing Their Selves Into the World

Abstract

Background Immigrant young people face many challenges in reconciling sociocultural differences that exist in their day-to-day experiences (e.g., school, home, peers), which raises important questions for how school settings can support these students’ navigation of these experiences. Much is yet to be learned about the manifestation processes for these young people. This is especially true for Haitian immigrant young people as they encounter racio-cultural dynamics in the U.S. (e.g., through racism and classism) as they work to construct their Haitianness and straddle the different cultural domains they live out. Context This article focuses on understanding the lived experiences of three Haitian immigrant young people. The young people included two siblings (ages 22 and 16) and a third child (age 8). Interview methodology was used in order to capture stories from the viewpoint of the young people. The mothers of these young people were also interviewed in order to corroborate the young peoples’ experiences and understand greater contexts of their families. Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences (e.g., tensions, cultural flexibility) of the three focal young people of how they fashioned various identifications of Haitianness. Two siblings were selected in order to analyze how their experiences of growing up in the same family might yield (dis)similar experiences, and the third child, who was the youngest interviewee, was selected to understand how various identity decision-makings were beginning to be formulated at a younger age. The student interviews specifically focused on background information (i.e., age, school attended), stories told to them by family members or those outside the home about Haiti, how they self-identify and why, perceptions of them in school, what people knew about them in school and what they didn't know about them and why, literacy practices at home and at school, and their lived experiences with friends and family members. In addition, the parent interviews helped us to delve into the parents’ expectations and their successes and difficulties in raising children with a Haitian background in the U.S. Findings The findings unveiled very different experiences for each of the three focal young people that showed tensive and unproblematic decisions they made as they navigated what it meant to be a Haitian immigrant. While some of the individuals’ choices preserved more Haitian heritage than others, their decisions revealed how they each occupied plural consciousnesses as they postured varying racial and linguistic selves at school and home. Examples of student choices included acclimating to dominant (“white”) views of what it meant to excel in school settings, setting one's self academically apart from peers in order to be beyond reproach, creating private networks of friends who provided cultural validation, viewing one's self as race-less, ascribing to Haitian work values, tying particular language abilities to cultural identities, and masking ethnic heritage at school.