Recently, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting welcomed more than 2,600 episodes of The Haitian Hour/Lè Ayisyen/L’Heure Haïtienne into the archive. Broadcast on Columbia University’s WKCR 89.9 FM from 1969 to 2002, the program documented the everyday lives, politics, culture, and experiences of Haitians on the island and across the diaspora.
To celebrate the collection’s arrival in the AAPB, our team spoke with Ayanna Legros, daughter of program founder Lionel Legros, an interdisciplinary historian of the 20th-century Caribbean and Latin America, and steward of the Lè Ayisyen collection. We discussed the program’s origins and evolution, its role in Haitian community and political life, and the decade-long effort to preserve its history.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
How did L’Heure Haïtienne come to be?
L’Heure Haïtienne was founded after the 1968 student takeover at Columbia University. Following the 1968-1969 campus uprising, during which students protested the university’s complicity in oppression, including its entanglement with the Vietnam War, military research funding, and the appropriation of parkland from Harlem, WKCR opened its programming to new voices. In response, in November 1969, a group of international students, mostly Haitian, launched “Haiti cette Méconnue” (“Haiti, This Unknown”). The program’s purpose was to educate the public about Haitian culture. For the first broadcast of this “musical postcard,” the founders invited Raoul Guillaume, an exiled Haitian musician, who spent an hour discussing the differences between Haitian méringue and Dominican merengue, in English and French. While the original creators of the program had good intent, there was a clear need for a broadcast to be in Haitian Creole because of the recognition that the broadcast initially reproduced an elite, Frenchified Haitian culture, to the frustration of some members of the student group. Over time, division grew, and a new cohort was formed.
What resources helped you to understand the program’s origins?
One document that helped me truly understand the formation of the program was Dr. Nina Glick-Schiller’s field notes from 1968 and 1969 while she was a graduate student at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology. I knew her scholarship, including Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home, which she co-wrote with Dr. Georges Eugene Fouron, but I had no idea that anyone had studied migration so closely that they took field notes on members of my family and their friends.
Nina and I connected during COVID-19, and without her field notes, the meaning of that first recording would have been much less clear. The field notes helped me follow the founders’ debates about language, class, education, their relationships to Haiti, and their goals for the program. It was a magnificent find. I better understood the origins of the program’s history. At first, the show’s mission was to start a sonic movement that could teach the public about Haitian culture. With a new team of students, it became more political.
How do you feel the show evolved across its 32‑year run?
In 1970, a reconstituted team redirected the program’s focus toward the everyday lives and realities of Haitians on the island and across the diaspora. The team embraced Kreyòl, the language of the Haitian majority, to reach a broader audience, and “Lè Ayisyen” (Kreyòl)/“L’Heure Haïtienne” (French)/“The Haitian Hour” was born. When I began processing and logging the unprocessed materials on my own, I was able to spot the differences across the collection. In some periods, the episodes are labeled in French; in others, they are labeled in Haitian Creole. Over time, you hear more and more Haitian Creole on the recordings, until it becomes an exclusively Haitian Creole radio show. This shift reflects the struggle to embrace Haitian Creole as Haiti’s indigenous language, both on the island and in the diaspora.
One of the most obvious changes was the program’s time slot. Sometimes the show ran from 6 AM to 10 AM; at other times it was cut to two hours, from 8 AM to 10 AM. The time cuts came when the radio program drew criticism or reprimands from university administrators, the student board, and WKCR 89.9FM’s own station manager. These time slot changes were always connected to politics. So, throughout the years, you hear different time announcements.
From oral history interviews, I know that whenever there were certain moments when the broadcasters were being more surveilled than usual, they played more music and discussed less politics. Another covert strategy was to speak in Haitian Creole and communicate ideas through proverbs and metaphors about injustice.
The years that are most interesting to me are the 1980s because there are so many intersections of different issues and the tone is so politically charged. Issues included Jean-Claude Duvalier’s suppression of the free press, the HIV/AIDS crisis, liberation theology movements in Latin America, and Haitian boat refugees. There are broadcasts, especially during the 1980s, when there was a lot of focus and emphasis on the political situation in Guatemala and El Salvador, which I believe is a major commonality between the Radio Haïti (Radyo Ayiti) archive and Lè Ayisyen’s archive. There were discussions in the 1980s about migration and non-entrants. The 1980s recordings are dynamic because they include in-person interviews with protest attendees. You can hear the chants, speeches, rally cries, and demands for change.
One tone shift that I really appreciate is that there is a clear, growing awareness of the need to support a blossoming Haitian community. There is a gentleness towards parents who are trying to navigate building bridges between their children and themselves, and how to hold their kids accountable in their schooling and education. Of course, there are also different approaches to parenting in the U.S. in comparison to Haiti, so the program offered a toolkit for parents navigating all of the challenges of cultural difference in New York.
What was the audience of L’Heure Haitienne?
Regarding the audience, I know that it went beyond a strictly Haitian community. I have met more than one American who listened to the show just because they liked the sound of the Haitian Creole, wanted to learn the language, or found the music to be compelling and beautiful to listen to. I really love serendipitously learning from people that they were listeners of the program. This discovery has been revealed through banter at cafes, restaurants, and churches, and with taxi drivers and academic conference attendees. I have been told, “I used to listen to L’Heure Haitienne!” That demonstrates the impact of the show and its legacy.
How did the program serve as a space for Haitian exiles to debate and organize?
There were talk shows and call-in hours which allowed for great debates. I also have letters from Brooklyn, New York to France whereby listeners write about specific topics discussed on the air. Even though the show was limited to the Tri-State area, people carried copies of episodes in suitcases and transported them to others. This makes it clear that the political future of Haiti required the active participation of people across the world. Change requires unity and also imagination. Ulrick Joly, founder of the Haitian trade union movement and a former political prisoner forced into exile, corresponded with the program.
By debating openly on the radio, Haitians were able to express and debate their hopes and visions for democracy in multiple parts of the world. I would argue that one of the most politically charged and heavily debated topics on the program was Jean-Bertrand Aristide and “Operasyon Lavalas” the day that his inauguration was broadcast. His sermons were transported between Port-au-Prince and New York clandestinely, and these recordings ignited much debate in the diaspora.
Sometimes these debates caused intense tensions, as exemplified on the cover of the Columbia University Spectator, where the journalist Spencer Harrington stated, “the show purports to keep the Haitian community in the tristate area informed about activities in Haiti and other U.S. Haitian communities. But the show’s controversial politics have brought a host of death and bomb threats, as well as threatened lawsuits, against the show’s inflammatory program director and broadcaster, Lionel Legros.” There were multiple moments throughout the show’s history that spurred debates which ignited deep tensions within the Haitian community, but these tensions also allowed for much-needed debate and proved that migration is not about moving from one land to another land, but for many Haitians it means a life of dreaming about a better future through transnationalism and continued conversations.
How did L’Heure Haïtienne influence community identity, political memory, and everyday life among Haitians in New York?
Lè Ayisyen/L’Heure Haïtienne promoted the use of Haitian Creole and English. While newspapers were available in the Haitian New York Community dating back to the 1960s, radio offered a more communal space for people to connect in the indigenous language of Haiti, as opposed to French, which was greatly associated with class divisions.
The program allowed people, when they first migrated here, to have a free resource. It was a non-commercial radio program with airwaves that went across the tristate area, and when people did not have direct access, they would make copies on cassettes and send them to Canada, France, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The messages of the program circulated in many ways. Migration is always a challenging thing to navigate for anyone, but when a demographic is Black, non-English-speaking, and coming from a nation that has been stigmatized by the United States dating back to its independence, it was critical for Haitians to connect and protect one another in as many ways as possible. Granted, political, social, and class divides always exist in immigrant cultures, but music, for example, was a way for Haitians to maintain their positive memories of home.
Music groups like Atis Indepandan played a key role in promoting a Haitian culture that was authentic and also honest about the realities of the nation while also holding onto rich sonic traditions of Haiti’s West African roots and folkloric culture. Someone like “Alix” Tit Pascal played a key role in influencing community identity, and his impact has lived on today through the music of Afro-Cuban artist Aruan Ortiz. Haitian culture is very rich, and Haitian New Yorkers made efforts to hold onto their own roots without feeling the constant pressure to assimilate to American culture. Radio helped people navigate their everyday lives.
The radio program also allowed people to have conversations that may have been considered more taboo in Haiti. For example, many young people in the Haitian community were not encouraged to question the role of the Catholic Church in Haiti, despite the obvious reality that the Catholic Church became an extension of colonial rule in Haiti. Many priests were white. Nuns in schools could hit and whip children if they spoke Haitian Creole in school rather than French. My mom has shared with me that during the Christmas season, the lightest-skinned girl was given the role of Mary. Haiti is often celebrated as the first Black independent republic in the New World, but this historical achievement of defeating French colonialism has not eliminated the contradictory realities of Haiti as a society where, during my mother’s childhood, the Catholic Church had intense power and control. My mom was drawn to feminist ideas because she witnessed a great contradiction: impoverished women were told that Jesus gives women children and that they should procreate abundantly, but denying birth control to a woman living in poverty does not make sense if she lacks the resources to feed her kids. Radio in the diaspora allowed for these critical feminist conversations to take place. Women at the radio station recognized important dates like International Women’s Day, and they were joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, who discussed the health needs of Latin American women.
Can you describe the discovery of Radio Haïti in New York tapes within the collection and why they matter historically?
The best resource explaining the story of Radio Haïti in New York/Radyo Ayiti Nan Nouyòk is the article “From the Other Side of the Sea: Rasanblaj/Reassembling Haitian Radio Archives of Exile,” co-written by me and Dr. Laura Wagner, former Radio Haïti archivist at Duke University. The toughest part of working on the Lè Ayisyen/L’Heure Haïtienne was that I foresaw the deep value in this collection. I would often leave my graduate student courses and go home at night and organize the materials on my own based on the years listed on the cassette tickers, and then, after accomplishing that task, I began to separate materials. I invited the Radio Haïti archivist to my home and made dinner and asked her to look over all of these cassettes that said, “Radio Haïti in New York.” I did not understand how or why these cassettes ended up in the Lè Ayisyen collection. She took the cassettes back to her office, and we separately sought the answer. She spoke with Jean Dominique’s widow, Michèle Montas, who passed the collection to Duke University, while I spoke with my father about the origins of these cassettes. Michèle Montas was excited to hear about the preservation, and my father explained to me that Lè Ayisyen recorded Jean Dominique and Konpè Filo while they were exiled in New York and even went into detail about their escape from Haiti to Caracas, Venezuela, which was done with the help of Lè Ayisyen, which did a fundraiser on the radio. My father even saved the ticket stub of Konpè Filo’s flight to Venezuela, which, to me, showed the extent of solidarity that the Haitian diaspora felt towards the Haitian people who continued to fight for the right to a free press and journalism rights during Jean-Claude Duvalier’s time in power. There is a rich interview conducted by Daniel Huttinot with Jean Dominique, in which he discusses what it is like to live in New York City.
Dr. Ian Whittington put out a call for a Special Issue of The Global South called “Radio Cultures of the Global South,” and during COVID, with the support of historian Dr. Alejandra Bronfman (SUNY Albany) and Dr. Carolyn Birdsall (University of Amsterdam), Laura and I brainstormed, wrote, and published this piece. I am grateful for the support that I received because those cassettes were then added to the Radio Haïti Archive, which was a confidence boost because it was one step forward in this critical, but at times very lonely project initiative.
How does the value of tèt ansanm shape your archival practice and the preservation of Haitian radio history?
There are many Haitian Creole proverbs that define Haitian culture, and one of the most well-known ones is “tèt ansanm,” which literally translates to “heads together.” Haitian culture does not focus on individualism. The idea is that collective action benefits everyone at the end of the day. Unity helps everyone complete their goals, from the farm to an organizing committee. There are other expressions about carrying the same amount of weight as a collective to reach a goal. Togetherness, solidarity, community, and collective action are what allow a goal to be achieved. I had to speak with a lot of people to determine how to complete this project. I was inspired by the work of the Radio Haïti Archive project at Duke, and conversations with Laura were very beneficial to me. We discussed how historians typically walk into a library and see archivists as someone who gives boxes or folders to them, but when a historian and archivist work together, new stories can be unearthed.
Tèt ansanm is already a value in the home I grew up in, but it was especially beneficial as I approached the digital preservation finish line. Phil Masciantonio, the station manager at WKCR 89.9FM, helped me acquire and purchase boxes to pack materials and tapes. An invitation to speak at The Association for Recorded Sound Collections led to an introduction to Michelle Kelley at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and these connections were made at the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force. On a nitty-gritty level, Bano Ernest, a Haitian militant who did extraordinary work with SELA, literally climbed through the original toolshed hit by Hurricane Sandy to help me pull out items. I believe that I was able to make so many connections and receive support because I constantly talked about the project, presented my archival work and anthropological-historical work at conferences, and spent as many opportunities as possible to network with others. I was determined to complete this project while my parents were still alive, and my goal was achieved. I am very proud of that achievement.
Are there particular conversations in the archive that have stayed with you over the years?
Yes, of course. The story about the Domsey Strike means so much to me now. Immigration and labor rights were important then and are still very important today. The Domsey Strike began in 1989 after an African American worker by the name of Giles Robinson was fired because of his interest in promoting better working conditions. Workers became very frustrated by this injustice, and there was a fight to build a union to protect workers. The testimonies that came out of the Domsey factory were horrific. For example, one Haitian woman had her lunch thrown out, one woman peed on herself because she did not get a bathroom pass in time, and other workers were called AIDS carriers while on the picket line. A documentary by Stanislaus Joseph, Matt Noyes, and Gillane Seaborne entitled Domsey an Grèv helped me understand the horrific injustices that workers experienced, along with the photographic work of Frantz Michaud.
Today, Haitian immigrants still deal with labor violations, struggles to unionize, psychological abuse, sexual harassment, and xenophobia, and this has proliferated with the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
For someone new to the collection, is there an episode, era, or theme you recommend as an entry point?
A major complexity with this collection is that there is no descriptive metadata for every single episode. Everything in the collection exists exactly as it is labeled and written on the cassette tapes from that time period. This is definitely a decision that was hard to make, but it was necessary because it would have taken even longer for the collection to be released to the public. For anyone accessing the collection for the first time, I highly encourage people to select a topic that they are interested in before plunging in.
A good starting point is attempted entries of boat refugees into the United States. For historians interested in histories of the Caribbean, specifically Cuban and Haitian detention experiences, I highly recommend listening to recordings about Guantánamo Bay. There is a very powerful interview of a Haitian woman who discusses her experience living in hiding in Haiti and then escaping, only to end up in prison. She discusses how people cried every day and slept by rats. The testimony of Haitians was dismissed in U.S. courts, so it is important to hear this raw testimony by a Haitian woman. The interview was conducted on January 25th, 1993, which was an extremely tumultuous time in Haiti defined by the first coup d’état against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his reinstatement into power.
What do you hope listeners take away from the program?
I hope that listeners better understand the significance of radio in Black studies and Black history at large in the diaspora. Historically, people of the African diaspora have used oral history and storytelling as a way to remember the past and pass down information to the next generation. This is a tradition that has been passed down by the people of Africa dating back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Haitians are African peoples, and so radio is a part of a longer legacy of oral communication. Yet I also want people to understand that radio is not simply oral history studies. It is its own field, so when people quickly state that “radio is oral history,” I have to stop and clarify how my radio preservation work over the past decade is much more complex than just oral history.
For this project, I independently trained myself in archival preservation work, especially as it relates to environmentalism like hurricane damage, oral history methods, metadata compilation, storage temperatures, and protocols to protect ephemera.
Listeners of the program can learn how much the program focused on grassroots stories. American, French, and Canadian major news outlets have, at times, completely ignored the viewpoints and stories of Haitians themselves. This causes false narratives about Haiti and Haitian culture. If members of a community do not find ways to tell their own stories and preserve their own histories, someone else will tell them.
For me personally, I want listeners to understand that political and social movements cannot happen without consistent community initiatives over decades. Nothing happens overnight. Lè Ayisyen broadcasters were doing all of this community organizing work and recordings while raising kids, sending money back home to relatives in Haiti, running the SELA community center in Brooklyn, building coalitions across the U.S., and constantly trying to assess which leaders both in Haiti and in the diaspora could be trusted and not trusted. This was not easy work. Regardless of the highs and lows and the political wins and failures, the broadcasters kept showing up time and time again. Many showed up to rallies and protests with cassette recorders. Democracy does not function without full participation of everyday citizens.
What future scholarship or community storytelling do you hope this archive inspires?
Anyone who wants to do non-profit work in Haiti can benefit from listening to the collection. One time I was introduced to a white American who was blonde and bright-eyed and had already spent time doing non-profit work in Haiti, and she said, “Haitian Creole has no grammar rules.”
I cringed in my chair and had to remain calm as my blood boiled. It is simply incorrect and so harmful because it perpetuates the idea that Haiti is still this “broken nation” with no professors, linguists, thinkers, or educators, and it completely dismisses the fact that the everyday Haitians, from the North to the South to the East to the West of the nation, have different accents and expressions. Another thing that I hope that the collection teaches people is that Haitian Creole is not a “broken language.”
When I taught at CUNY Hostos, I had a Caribbean-American student say out loud that “Creole is a broken language” in a class that I was teaching called “Fundamentals of Public Speaking.” I had to stop the student and correct them in real time. I decided for the next lecture that I would put the Haitian Creole dictionary in their hands and have them read the opening pages of the Haitian Creole dictionary. It is a huge and large dictionary that is bilingual. I wanted the student to literally feel the weight of their words. After that experience, I knew that he would never make such a comment again, and that was my goal. The first step in combating racism is understanding the simple fact that Black people think! Haitians have a culture, tell stories, and preserve their pasts, including in the way that they speak. This is an uphill battle, but an important one. I have had the privilege of taking writing classes in Haitian Creole with Professor Jacques Pierre at Duke University as an Independent Study and Professor Nicolas André at Florida International University through the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) through the US Department of Education.
My hope is that, in the meantime, students learn and practice Haitian Creole by listening to this program. While I have, of course, spent a significant amount of time thinking about how the collection will impact the work of historians, the collection is for everybody. It is for the Haitian linguist in Port-au-Prince interested in becoming a professional translator. It is for the Haitian American artists, like Jennica Drice, who used a recording from the Lè Ayisyen archive for their exhibition, “Between Us: An Exploration of What Migration Carries Through a Domestic Lens” at the Haul Gallery in Brooklyn, New York this year. It is for the Haitian Canadian child who was not taught Haitian Creole by their parents and is now curious about it. It is for my parents who are interested in their own past work.
Additionally, a major hope of mine is that the collection will also proliferate scholarship about HIV/AIDS. Scholarship is still dominated by the voices of queer, white men who were able to navigate the crisis differently than Haitians because of their citizenship, skin color, financial advantages, kinfolk networks, and medical access. The story of HIV/AIDS and Haiti has been told, but not to the extent that I would like to see. CUNY Brooklyn College Haitian Studies Institute is a great resource, but their archive needs materials that extend for more years. It is a critical, historic, and painful chapter of Haitian history that also sparked beautiful unity and demands for change. Independently, I want to write more about this, and I plan to share more ideas with CUNY HSI inaugural archivist, Obden Mondésir, about how to amass as large of a collection as possible.
This has been a momentous project for the past ten years of my life, so I am determined to write a book. I am excited to see what people take out of the collection. History has been preserved, and though this is one of the toughest projects that I have ever done, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. When Miranda Villesvik, Digitization Project Manager at GBH, told me that the collection had been fully digitized, I cried on Zoom as I listened to the first recording that I clicked on. There has been an intense attack on education in both Haiti and the United States. Libraries and schools have been burnt down in Haiti. Grant funding has been slashed in the United States. It has been very frustrating to see these global attacks on education. Living between these transnational threats to historical preservation has been so demoralizing, but these attacks also got me to the finish line on the days that I felt completely exhausted by this work and utterly alone. Without the support of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, Library of Congress, and the GBH, this collection would not live on like this. I hope that others feel inspired to pursue the preservation of their own family histories, find value in radio history, and recognize that Haitians are resilient people with a beautifully complex history.
