People who grew up in Little Haiti in its heyday have a lot of the same memories: women carrying baskets on their heads with products to sell, Rara bands filling the Friday night air with music, the smell of Haitian cuisine seeping from the windows. The culture was everywhere.
But the once-vibrant community that welcomed wave after wave of Haitian immigrants has changed so much in the past decade that the remaining homeowners in the community that are of Haitian descent wonder if their dwindling numbers can keep the culture alive.
Institutions like the Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Chef Creole and Libreri Mapou still serve as cultural anchors for the neighborhood, which was officially named “Little Haiti” in 2016, but for Haitians who own homes in the area, it feels like “a ghost town.”…