Domestic Workers and Foreign Occupation: Haitian Servants, US Marines, and Conflicts over Labor and Empire in Haiti, 1915–1934

Abstract

During the US military occupation of Haiti, domestic workers performed the crucial labor that allowed Marine households, the city of Port-au-Prince, and the entire country to function. In this sense, they represented a human infrastructure for the entire occupation. Their experiences show that the debates over labor, race, and sovereignty that defined the high politics of the occupation actually reached into private spaces where face-to-face interactions between occupier and occupied occurred. Domestic work, like other types of labor in the occupation, ran the gamut from highly coerced forms of unpaid child labor and convict work to various configurations of wage labor. Domestic sites influenced mutual processes of race-making, including the US exoticist obsession with Haitian Vodou. Servants’ conflicts with their Marine employers included—but ultimately went beyond—daily struggles over labor. Their proximity to marines influenced domestics’ participation in acts of anti-imperial activism, such as the Caco rebellion, and explains why servants were invoked by radical journalists and cultural nationalist writers who opposed US rule. Domestics’ activities also highlight under-explored areas of Haitian activism, such as their use of formal state institutions to seek redress and their participation in emerging forms of urban protest that included other members of the urban working class. Although novel and relatively small during the occupation, such urban protests have become a staple of Haitian politics in the present day.