Remembering St. Patrick's Battalion on March 17

international | racism & migration related issues | other press

Thursday March 17, 2005 16:47

by redjade

Irish Asylum Seekers from America

During the buildup to the Mexican-American War (1846-8), scores of immigrant Irishmen joined the army for the $7 a month. “The U.S. anti-immigrant press of the time caricatured the Irish with simian features, portraying then as unintelligent and drunk and charging that they were seditiously loyal to the pope,” Anne-Marie O’Connor wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “But cheap Irish labor was welcome. Irish maids became as familiar as Latin American nannies are today.”

Harsh treatment did not end after the Irishmen enlisted in the armed forces. “Anglo soldiers often harassed them, beat them up,” said Robert Ryal Miller, author of Shamrock and Sword.

After President James Polk incited hostilities by sending U.S. troops into disputed territory...and many of those Irish soldiers who found themselves heading west to fight a war of conquest were Catholic.

“They resented the treatment of Catholic priests and nuns by the invading Protestants,” explained Rodolfo Acuña, author of Occupied America.

“This is a story about assimilation,” historian Peter F. Stevens added. “A lot of these guys deserted because of the anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner movement.”

One such deserter was John Riley, an Irishman from Galway who swam across the Rio Grande after asking permission to go to Mass. “As the U.S. Army marched through Mexico’s northern deserts, others followed, and Riley became captain of a 200-member rogue column in the Mexican army,” explained O’Connor. “At San Luis Potosi, convent nuns presented them the hand-stitched banner that foreshadowed their eventual romanticization.”

A wartime newspaper correspondent from New Orleans described the banner as made of “green silk, and on one side is a harp, surmounted by the Mexican coat of arms, with a scroll on which is painted, ‘Libertad para la República Mexicana.’ Underneath the harp is the motto ‘Erin go Bragh’ (Ireland for Ever). On the other side is painting...made to represent St. Patrick, in his left hand a key and in his right a crook or staff resting upon a serpent.”

continues at
http://www.mickeyz.net/news/mickeyz/fullarticle/remembering_st_patricks_battalion_on_march_17/

Mexican-American War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican-American_War

Saint Patrick's Battalion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Battalion

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Remembering St. Patrick's Battalion on March 17