The Irish-Americans who became “white” and those who did not

Irish members of the NYPD.

Like other European settler and immigrant groups, the story of the Irish coming to the United States is one of fast-changing political allegiances. 

While the colonization of Ireland by the British military began in 1155, the native Gaelic-Catholics retained control of the majority of the isle for over 400 years. The seventeenth century however would bring unprecedented levels of settler-colonial violence, land theft, and cultural destruction. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes that in this era, “The Celtic social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated while the entire population was brutalized.” After conquest, penal laws arose that forbade Irish from inheriting property, serving in government, speaking Gaelic, bearing arms, practicing Catholicism, and more. 

In time, Irish people began joining secret societies such as “the Defenders” that served as local defense for peasant communities, broke down fences to protest the theft of their land, and participated in broader political activism. Many also became members of “the United Irishmen,” an organization hundreds of thousands strong that sought to unite laboring class settler-Protestants with the native Catholic majority in an attempt to end English control of the country entirely. Yet when millions of these Irish Catholics arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s as poor and heavily stigmatized people, many began to realign themselves politically. Due to propaganda from their bosses and the allure of American whiteness itself, they made the tragic choice to turn away from struggles against ruling class and colonial power and toward anti-Black racism.

Eula Biss tells us that significant numbers of Irish Americans, 

“…proved themselves white by opposing abolition, driving free Blacks out of the occupations they shared, destroying Black homes and churches in riots, joining militias, and organizing themselves into violent gangs like the Killers. And so, in the process of proving themselves white, the descendants of the Defenders became Killers.”

Amidst calls from the famed anti-colonial Irish leader, Daniel O’Connell, that Irish Americans ally themselves with enslaved and free Black people and take on the cause of abolition, most did nothing and many did the opposite.

But some took a different path. During the same period that a manufactured famine drove millions of Irish away from their homeland, the United States government invaded Mexico. Newly arriving Irish refugees were quickly conscripted as soldiers. One particular regiment of 700 troops, including many of these immigrants, deserves our attention. Known as La Batallón de San Patricio (St. Patrick’s Battalion), these soldiers saw the war for what it was—an invasion to expand the empire of U.S. enslavers and to advance the corporate pursuit of “manifest destiny.” Their political analysis along with their experiences of anti-Catholic discrimination from U.S. military officers led them to defect and change sides of the war. They became a recognized unit of the Mexican Army in 1846 and engaged in extremely effective “military resistance in terms of their organized hits on the US Army.” Despite their ultimate defeat, “Los Patricios'' became Mexican folk heroes and are still celebrated today. 

Historian Patrick Higgins describes the significance of the battalion with the following words that are worth quoting at length here:

“A lot of times I heard this story told that these were just Irishmen serving in the army. But actually… only two-fifths of the battalion were Irish-born and others among that group were Polish, German, Dutch and English immigrants who were Catholic. I think that this is significant because it’s one of the few times in the history of US settler-colonialism where, going beyond just labor solidarity which overcomes racism… settlers of European descent from several different European countries gave their full participation to resisting the US empire… We can theorize that these men saw in the example of Ireland, which they used as their symbol, an instance of struggle drawn from European history that was anti-colonial struggle, that was a struggle of resisting a great big empire. I find that encouraging.” 

Most European settlers and immigrants arrived in the land we now know as the United States after experiencing displacement, cultural attack, and impoverishment at home. Time and again, they were quickly pushed by the social power of white supremacy to forget these histories of oppression and resistance, to adopt a romanticized history of the white American elite as their own, and to draw on this false history for meaning and identity. This fabricated “white” identity directed them to see Black and Brown people as their enemies and the corporate plunderers of workers and the planet as their friends. The purpose of white racial socialization has always been to turn people who were resistors of ruling class empire into its foot soldiers. Time and again, settler colonialism, imperialism, and racism were spoken of by elites as strategic "safety valves," ways to channel popular dissent away from themselves and toward specific targets, state-sanctioned outlets through which the European masses could unload the trauma of their own dispossession onto a stigmatized "other." 

The Patricios are an example of those who, at the risk of their own lives, didn’t give into the pull of this socialization. Instead, they defected from supremacy in the most explicit way possible. As Higgins suggests, a part of this may have had to do with a refusal to let go of their own history and the conscious choice to remain rooted in it within the new political context in which they found themselves. 

For those of us who are white, the Patricios can offer inspiration to do the same. They can show us that our emergence as genuine partners in the work of social change depends, in part, on our capacity to understand our past—to find answers to the questions: What happened to us? How were our people manipulated to play a destructive (and self-destructive) racial role within a growing capitalist empire? What lineages were stripped from us in the process and how can we reclaim them in service of building a different world today? 

For all organizers and activists, the Patricios and their coalition with Mexican communities experiencing invasion can be a reminder that there has always been a hidden yet unbroken legacy of multiracial resistance to the system of racial capitalism that we live under—and that this legacy as a whole is worth forming a deep connection with. If we are to do the difficult work of repairing historical harms and building collective political power among working people who have been strategically divided for centuries, we must root ourselves and our movements in the stories of those who have done it before us.

A plaque in Mexico City commemorating Saint Patrick's Battalion. The text translates to the following: In memory of the Irish soldiers of the heroic Saint Patrick's Battalion, martyrs who gave their lives for the Mexican cause during the unjust U.S. invasion of 1847.