A report by RACHELLE SALNAVE for the Miami Herald.

I call Little Haiti home. Though I don’t physically live there, it’s part of what I refer to as “My Miami,” and a big part of what makes this city so cool. Over the past seven years living in South Florida, I’ve had many moments reflecting on the similarities between Harlem, the place I was born and raised, and Haiti, the country where my spirit flies to every night as I dream.

Just like Harlem, Little Haiti has been viewed negatively; it’s perceived as a tough ghetto. Drugs, gang violence and abandonment have overshadowed the positive cultural contributions. But the truth is that Little Haiti is a place like any other, where people work and spend time with family and friends, fall in love, make great art. Viter Juste, known as the “Father of Little Haiti,” led the community in renaming the neighborhood, from historic Lemon City, which was one of the oldest black neighborhoods in Miami, to Little Haiti, because of the mass exodus of Haitians who settled in the area due to the political instability in Haiti in the 1970s. But this settlement of Haitians in Miami, and the subsequent renaming of the area, exacerbated the divide between Haitians, African Americans and other black Caribbean communities. Something similar happened in Harlem, too. As a kid, this divide led me to hide my identity because of the teasing and hazing most Haitians received in school. It was a tough time and easier to pass as African American than to acknowledge being Haitian.

Little Haiti was not the most attractive place for my family, the typical pseudo-Haitian bourgeoisie. They were able to achieve slight opportunity and stayed far away from Black Harlem and the Haitian community in NYC. And like most South Florida Haitians who tasted a bit of the American dream, they left Little Haiti and invested their modest earnings in other communities in Florida, such as Kendall or Broward County.

Regardless of the economic hardships and disparities and lack of government investment in Little Haiti, the people of the community, many of them so-called “boat people,” persisted despite prejudice and discrimination, and they opened businesses, bought homes, worked multiple jobs to try to get to their piece of the dream, and created one of the most culturally relevant communities in Florida.

I fell in love with Little Haiti when I screened my documentary film, “Harlem’s Mart 125: The American Dream,” at the Little Haiti Cultural Center back in 2010. It was a pretty new facility at the time, and I began to meet fascinating people. I loved to eat at Leela’s Restaurant, grab a book on Haiti at Libreri Mapou, stop by the Little Haiti Thrift Store to sift through their “made in Haiti” jewelry and get my dance on at Big Night in Little Haiti (now called Sounds of Little Haiti), a free Haitian music concert every third Friday of the month at the Cultural Complex. The center began to attract all kinds of amazing programming, and as years went by, the cultural activities began to grow. Under Sandy Dorsainvil, the former director of the Cultural Complex, and groups like NEP2, the Haitian Cultural Alliance and others, in just a matter of three years, Little Haiti became what is now one of the hottest cultural enclaves in the city of Miami.