Rara appears in Prospect Park on a Brooklyn Sunday

Haitians had been settling in New York for thirty years, and Rara had surfaced there in bursts: at demonstrations against the Duvalier government in the early 1980s, and during strikes involving Haitian labour groups. None of it was organised. The summer of 1990 changed that. A band called Rara Djakout was founded in Brooklyn, and a full Rara went out in Prospect Park every Sunday, the same people returning each week to dance and to add verses. Musicians from the Haitian roots movement started it after a drumming circle in the park refused to lend them a drum. They borrowed drums from a friend, came back the next day playing Rara, and walked past. Word of mouth brought hundreds of young people out. By 1995 four separate bands were playing in Prospect Park and in Central Park on summer weekends. Lifted out of Lent into July, the New York Rara had no queens, no cemetery visits and no seven year contracts with the spirits.