Virginelle Jerome — one of the voices featured in WYSO's "Haitians in the Heartland" series — is shown here as a child in Haiti. (Photo: WYSO/Virginelle Jerome)
New on 91.3 WYSO: Haitian-American stories
- Published: March 8, 2025
A lot has been said about the community of residents who have come to neighboring Springfield from Haiti — in regional and national news reports, sound bytes, social media posts and elsewhere in print, radio, television and online.
Most of those stories — some of them based on harmful stereotypes and disinformation — have been told by folks on the outside of the Haitian immigrant community, looking in.
Now, a group of five Springfield residents from Haiti have begun telling their own stories, using their own voices. “Haitians in the Heartland” is a new series produced at WYSO 91.3 as a collaboration between WYSO’s Eichelberger Center for Community Voices and Springfield’s Haitian Community Alliance.
The series, which aired its first segment Wednesday, Feb. 19, features the narratives and voices of Miguelito Jerome, Virginelle Jerome, Luckens Merzius, Gerly Philidor and Jacques Adler Jean Pierre.
The News spoke this month with the Eichelberger Center’s Director Will Davis and Managing Editor Chris Welter. They said “Haitians in the Heartland” grew from the confluence of several factors, but its seeds were sown several years ago, when then-WYSO reporter Alejandro Figueroa — now a reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting — began forming relationships within Springfield’s Haitian community. In particular, Welter said, Figueroa got to know the folks who ran New Diaspora Live, or NDL, the Haitian-American radio station in Springfield; though it ran programming for more than three years, NDL is currently on an indeterminate hiatus as of early this year.
Welter’s own introduction to NDL and some of its staff came last September, when he was in Springfield ostensibly to cover the town hall event held by former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Standing in line to get into the event, Welter said he began chatting with Luckens Merzius and Miguelito Jerome, then followed them back to the NDL studio at CoHatch down the street.
“I thought, ‘Honestly, I don’t really care about this town hall, and I’d rather go chat with these folks.’ We started talking about this idea — and [Figueroa] had kind of started the idea of doing something like [‘Haitians in the Heartland’], but it just didn’t come together,” Welter said. “By [last year], I was at the Center for Community Voices, so I felt like it was within Will’s and my wheelhouse now to actually do something like this.”
Davis added that Ohio Humanities, which has provided funding for past WYSO projects, had reached out to the Eichelberger Center following the presidential debate earlier the same month, in which President Trump repeated damaging false allegations about Springfield residents from Haiti. Ohio Humanities floated the idea of helping to fund a “storytelling project with the Haitian American community in Springfield.” Though the funding isn’t currently available — Ohio Humanities, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, put a pause on issuing grants following Trump’s federal funding freeze — Davis said WYSO was “committed to doing it anyway.”
But it was really the interest and passion of the radio professionals who form the nucleus of the storytelling within “Haitians in the Heartland” that drove the creation of the series. Most have backgrounds in broadcasting and/or reporting; Miguelito and Virginelle Jerome were radio professionals in Jérémie, Haiti, and hosted programs on NDL in Springfield; Jacques Adler Jean Pierre is an internationally known visual artist and poet and a print, television and radio journalist; and Gerly Philidor was a radio music host in Haiti for 20 years, and continued broadcasting in Springfield at NDL. Luckens Merzius was new to radio when he came to Springfield, but got his first on-air experience at NDL and became the station’s public relations manager.
“The people from NDL were saying, ‘What we really need right now is a frequency to get our message out,” Welter said, adding that, because NDL was an online radio station, reaching a wider audience “posed some challenges.” WYSO could help with that — particularly as NDL is currently offline.
“We hoped to provide opportunities moving forward for these professionals to do their craft,” Welter said, noting that, like many who have emigrated from Haiti, several of the series’ producers are working jobs not related to their chosen professional vocations. “And we’re hoping we can expand our partnership with the producers so we can have more regular contributions from them.”
Unlike most folks who come into the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices — which routinely trains new participants in radio storytelling and production — the five producers for “Haitians in the Heartland” brought years of experience with them through WYSO’s doors. Davis said the producers also came brimming with ideas, and the sky was really the limit when it came to what the group could put together — enough that the series, which is set to air weekly on Wednesdays through March 23, “may have a few more” installments.
“In the course of making the series, we’ve gotten some interesting recordings and we’ve got some bonus material,” Davis said. “So we’ve started out with six episodes, and we certainly have that — and they’re strong episodes — but we may just continue to do more after.”
Episodes in the series include interviews with family and friends, personal reflections and poetry, among other subjects. Noting WYSO’s three divisions — news, music and storytelling — Davis said “Haitians in the Heartland” falls in the latter category.
“It really is uniquely coming from them, including the format they chose to tell their stories,” Davis said. “It was a very creative process [and] as a kind of executive producer, it’s been interesting to work that way, and there’s a lot of variety.”
Welter added: “With all of our producers, there’s a real humanity and a different flavor to each story.”
And bringing the humanity of each of the storytellers and their subjects — and, implicitly, the wider community from which they come — into sharp focus is at the heart of the series.
The News reached out to several of the “Haitians in the Heartland” producers, but was unable to arrange interviews prior to press time. However, in the series’ first episode, three of the producers spoke to their motivations for creating their pieces and their desire to illuminate truths about the folks at the center of the stories — including what brought them to the U.S.
“I think one of the questions that most people might have is what’s the situation in Haiti right now, and how that situation kind of influenced us to migrate to the U.S.,” Miguelito Jerome said in the opening episode.
“That’s what I would want our listeners to think about — reasons that could push you to leave home and not necessarily wanting to leave home but still having to do so, and the different sacrifices that we had to make,” Virginelle Jerome said, later adding: “I want others to see the humane side, and hear the stories about the journeys that some of us had to take.”
“Everybody has a different story,” Merzius said.
New episodes of “Haitians in the Heartland” will be released Wednesdays on wyso.org, and will air during “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
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