Our Past is Haiti’s Present: An Interview with “Secondhand (Pepe)” filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi
Pepe in Haiti. Images used with permission.
In the 1960s, as part of an international aid program, the US started shipping huge loads of secondhand goods to Haiti. Many older Haitians still refer to their secondhand clothes as “wearing kennedy,” a nod to the president at the time. Another word commonly used to describe these goods is “pepe.” Preachers were said to cry Paix! Paix! (”Peace! Peace!”) to calm down the excited crowds awaiting new loads of items to sort through.
Today, anyone in the Miami, NYC, and Boston areas — cities with large Haitian immigrant populations — is likely to run into someone at a flea market or thrift store collecting goods to take home to Port-au-Prince. Secondhand (Pepe) (clip) is a short documentary showing this remarkable trade in goods, as it explains the history of secondhand clothing in our country. Filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell, a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard, and Vanessa Bertozzi, a graduate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, who now works at Etsy, were curious about the tradition of secondhand clothing. From 2003 – 2007 they visited ragyards in Miami, went through archives in London and Washington DC, and traveled to Haiti to see the pepe markets for themselves.
Shell says Haitians sometimes dress better than Americans because they are used to tailoring their secondhand clothes to fit. While the pepe market makes it difficult for Haitian tailors to sell their own designs or traditional fashions; the cheap cost means, as one woman in the documentary explains, they can “adopt the look that is on television without much effort.” Shell describes the country in an essay in Transition as completely absent of traditional retail, “interiors lie vacant, transformed into makeshift dwellings or pepe depots. Chain stores and standard clothing outlets dot only the poshest streets of Petionville. Whereas McDonalds, Walmart, and American banks have invaded other Caribbean and Latin American countries, Haiti operates at the level of the individual seller and transaction.”
The US has a long complicated history imposing trade embargoes on Haiti, but we never ceased shipping secondhand goods. With the benefit of cheap items, comes the cost of serving as a dumping ground. Shell describes the city of Miragoane, which receives shipments of pepe nearly every day, as “blanketed, literally, by a downy coat of secondhand clothing. It grows out of the ground and into the street, onto every surface, a sartorial network — buildings, barrows, man and machine-made structures, everywhere. Each unsold piece is full of memory and possibility, the ghosts of its previous wearers and the portents of its future ones sharing the same textile skin.”
Secondhand (Pepe) is also a creative film with innovative collage-like usage of archival images and footage. (Shell and Bertozzzi also have Flickr sites with more images.) You can purchase a copy of the documentary on Etsy. Over email I asked the filmmakers about their experience making the documentary.
How did you first find out about the secondhand (”pepe”) clothing market?
We became interested in the stories of secondhand clothing when we were college students together in the late 1990s. We went to thrift stores and began to talk about where the clothes came from – and think about the different stories they would have, depending on who bought them – and where they traveled. In 2002, an article in the New York Times Magazine, discussed the international trade in secondhand clothing and after reading it, we decided to make a film on the subject.
We were living in Boston at the time and started going to secondhand stores where we met many immigrants involved in collecting secondhand clothing for shipment to their home countries. We were particularly struck by the stories of many of the Haitian immigrants we met during our first days of interviewing and shooting, and went to the pier in East Boston where clothes were shipped to Saint Marc. We set out to follow the story of the clothing they purchased – pepe –as it made its way overseas. From there, we got increasingly interested in the history of the secondhand clothing business, and the way it has been shaped by, and shaped, the diasporic experiences of a diversity of immigrant communities in North America.
Who delivers the goods to Haiti? Is it only coming from the US?
There are all sorts of ways and means for pepe to arrive in Haiti. Sometimes individuals in Boston, Miami or New York fill containers, or old cars, with clothes and put them onto boats destined for the port cities of Port-au-Prince, Miragoane or Saint Marc. Other times, people fill up bags with old clothes that they transport on the airplane when they return home to visit friends or families. Small scale pepe business people, might buy a whole bale at a warehouse in Florida and have it shipped over, where it would be received at the port by a business associate. Our sense is that most of it is coming from the United States these days – though some from Canada and France as well.
What does pepe mean?
That’s a good question. The complexity of what pepe means is what motivated us to make the film. It can mean all sorts of things and can at different times have the sense of a noun, a metaphor, an adjective, and an identity. Some of the connotations include: old clothes; free cloth; foreign goods that have already been used.
What sort of things can you get?
Everything.
A woman in the documentary mentioned some Haitians have spiritual apprehension toward wearing someone’s old clothes. Did you meet anyone who felt this way?
Yes we did – old clothes might well carry the spirits of their previous owners and people have many ideas about how to clean, or purify clothes –lemon juice, vinegar, dry cleaning and so on.
Have most Haitians learned to sew or is there a market for tailors?
We saw and spoke with many tailors advertising their services, though perhaps not as many as in years past. The tailors that we spoke with had a difficult time selling their original designs and traditional Haitian clothing. They were working altering pepe.
What other kind of jobs has the secondhand market created?
Sorting, storing, transport, as well as multiple stages of sale, re-sale and re-re-sale. However all this has to be seen in relation to the jobs that have been lost.
Did they really use clothes as currency at one point?
In a sense. . . but we wouldn’t say “as currency” – more like “in the place of currency.” When the paper or coin currency of a nation is unstable and in short supply, it is not uncommon for a good (and often a relatively plentiful good) to take the place of currency – via a kind of generalized barter.
Film screening at Garment District in Cambridge, Ma.
Are there controls in place to keep people from sending over real junk, such as inoperable gadgets or stained items? Do they recycle unwanted things?
As far as we could tell, there was a lot of “junk” being sent over. Even pepe cars marked “no brakes” on their windshields. However, appliances or cars might be used for their parts. Stained clothing might be used as rags or upholstery stuffing. Haitians are very resourceful in ad-hoc engineering and repurposing. That said, we did see an incredible amount of trash and pollution. It was hard to tell whether this was due to the lack of sanitation services or the flood of discarded pepe.
What does the pepe market look like?
First off, we should note that you can find pepe for sale on pretty much any street in Haiti. It seemed as though pepe lined the sidewalks with small-time vendors selling a few things by hanging them up on the walls by the sidewalk. Then we also visited all types of dedicated marketplaces. Some were very concentrated with just clothing, and these were often by the ports, where the clothing would arrive. Sometimes the pepe would be sold within larger markets where you could also find food and other goods. Sometimes the clothing was sorted into different areas or by peddler’s specialty — you would have the used shoe guy over here and the lady that only sold t-shirts over there.
In one of the largest markets in Miragoane, just outside of the gates of the port, in the central town square — you had people opening up boxes and making preliminary sortings. In the Saline marketplace in Port-au-Prince, there was an incredible expanse of peddler/tailors set up with sewing machines, sitting among mounds of clothing, under tents sewn together from fabric scraps and old blankets. It gave us a very visceral sense of the flow of goods and the ways in which they were being altered.
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