MIAMI — Haitian restaurants bloomed here in the 1990s and 2000s as their reputations grew for serving ambrosial rice and bean platters at cheap prices. On the weekends, barbecue smoke perfumed street corners and backyards as lines of customers formed.

Many of their owners and customers had come to South Florida in the previous three decades to escape the oppressive governments of the Haitian presidents François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier.

But in the United States, they continued to encounter social oppression and everyday slurs. Cat-eaters: That’s how some people referred to Haitians while I was growing up in North Miami in the 1980s and ’90s.