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Raising Haiti: The Transmission Of Ethnic Culture Across Generations, Vadricka Y. Etienne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Raising Haiti” analyzes how ethnicity structures the romantic and familial lives of second-generation Haitian Americans living in Miami, FL to explore the continuance of ethnic culture into the third generation. Drawing on forty-one interviews and ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate the (re)construction and inculcation of Haitian cultural heritage via childrearing practices. I argue that Haitian American families negotiate the transmission of ethnic heritage, within a context of global anti-black racism, poor relationship with their proximal hosts, and the social value of ethnicity in multicultural Miami, through an understanding of the precarity of Haitian ethnicity. Without concerted effort through …