Overview:
The Queens Public Library’s resolution to digitize The Haitian Instances’ full print archive from 1999 to 2012 marks a historic preservation effort for Haitian American journalism. Founder Garry Pierre-Pierre displays on the publication’s origins, challenges, and evolution beneath present writer Vania André, highlighting the digitization as each a technological and ethical milestone in preserving the Haitian diaspora’s story.
When the Queens Public Library introduced it might digitize the complete print run of The Haitian Instances from 1999 to 2012, it didn’t simply make a technical resolution. It made an ethical one. It declared that the voices, debates, triumphs and traumas of a group should be remembered—not buried within the mud of forgotten archives.
That’s why this second feels monumental. It’s not nearly newspaper pages being scanned and saved within the cloud. It’s about rescuing reminiscence. It’s about saying to future generations: We have been right here, we mattered, and that is what we lived by means of.
It’s been greater than 25 years since I first started mulling the thought of launching The Haitian Instances, an English-language newspaper for Haitians. On the time, many so-called specialists insisted the idea was doomed to fail. Any media geared toward Haitians, they argued, needed to be in French or Kreyòl. However I had a unique Haitian in thoughts. My era. The English-speaking, U.S.-born or -raised Haitian People who understood French so long as it stayed in church, and spoke Kreyòl—properly, principally after we have been mad or hungry.
It was a counterintuitive transfer, and the media enterprise isn’t precisely recognized for being forgiving to outliers. In actual fact, launching an ethnic newspaper in English was thought of a bit like attempting to open a ski resort in Gonaïves—formidable, barely absurd, and doomed by the local weather.
Associates and supporters requested me, “Are you positive that is sustainable?” Actually, I wasn’t. However I didn’t care. Not as a result of I had a genius enterprise mannequin—I didn’t. However as a result of I believed, deep in my intestine, that The Haitian Instances was essential.
On the time, I had what many would name a dream job at The New York Instances: status, energy, and even a Pulitzer Prize. I left all of it behind to launch this publication. In doing so, I sacrificed my monetary stability, examined the endurance of my family members and dove headfirst into uncertainty. Would I do it once more? With out hesitation.
Why? As a result of The Haitian Instances wasn’t only a newspaper—it was a compass after we have been misplaced, a lantern when others went darkish.
Through the years, we informed the tales that wanted to be informed. We reported on the brutal beating of Abner Louima by NYPD officers in 1997—a second that galvanized a era. We coated the 2000 police killing of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Haitian American safety guard whose loss of life additional revealed the stress between our group and regulation enforcement. We documented the devastation of the 2010 earthquake and the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
And simply final 12 months, we have been focused—doxed and swatted—after difficult an absurd rumor circulating in Springfield, Ohio, that Haitians have been stealing and consuming folks’s pets. Sure, that actually occurred. And sure, we stood agency within the face of it.
One factor has remained true all through all these years: if we don’t inform our personal tales, another person will. And once they do, they may distort them, diminish them, or erase them altogether.
That’s not simply unhealthy journalism—that’s management malpractice.
Right this moment, I do know that when a significant story breaks about Haiti or Haitians, journalists in newsrooms throughout the nation pause and ask themselves: “What’s The Haitian Instances going to say about this?”
That query is a quiet affirmation that we’ve develop into an important a part of the media panorama. We’re not merely reporting the information—we’re shaping the narrative.
Haiti has many mates. However in moments of disaster—and there have been many—we don’t simply want mates. We’d like fighters. And The Haitian Instances has by no means shied away from lacing up the gloves.
As we digitize our print historical past, we’re doing greater than importing recordsdata. We’re importing goals. We’re encoding our resistance. We’re placing our reality on file—line by line, headline by headline—in order that future generations can uncover who we have been and what we stood for.
That legacy was entrance and heart on Saturday afternoon, Sept. 27, when the Queens Public Library hosted a one-hour dialog between me and Vania André to mark the digitization effort. Greater than 50 folks attended. I mirrored on the previous, sharing tales each memorable and maddening—those that formed The Haitian Instances, and in some ways, formed me. Vania spoke passionately concerning the future: her editorial imaginative and prescient, her dedication to innovation, and the way the publication will lean into AI and rising applied sciences to proceed serving Haitians throughout generations and geographies.
At one of many lowest factors in my skilled life, when the publication was struggling to outlive and I wasn’t positive how for much longer we might maintain on, I met Vania. She got here into the image with readability, dedication, and the sort of regular willpower that may’t be taught. Collectively, we rebuilt—brick by digital brick, story by painstaking story.
She introduced imaginative and prescient. She introduced coronary heart. And he or she introduced her personal journalistic chops to the desk. Right this moment, I’m proud—deeply proud—that she has taken over the mantle of management. As writer and editor-in-chief, she represents each continuity and alter. Along with her on the helm, I do know The Haitian Instances will proceed to evolve, to problem, and to function each a chronicler and a catalyst for the Haitian expertise within the U.S. and past.
This archival milestone isn’t just a possibility to look again, however an opportunity to outline what comes subsequent. The digitization of The Haitian Instances‘ print period ensures that our group’s narrative received’t be misplaced to time or buried beneath misrepresentation. It anchors our historical past whereas illuminating the trail ahead. With Vania main the subsequent chapter, the story continues—not as a repetition of the previous, however as a renewed dedication to reality, group, and presence.