Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
www.politicalgeography.com
Making difference: conflict over Irish identity
in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade
Sallie A. Marston *
Department of Geography and Regional Development, Harvill Box 2, University of Arizona, Tucson,
AZ 85721, USA
Abstract
The controversy surrounding the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade suggests that Irish
ethnicity in the United States is still an important site of identity formation and fragmentation.
In this paper I examine the New York City parades between 1990 and 2001 where a conflict
has developed between the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the
Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, who want a place in the parade but have been denied
entrance. The identity politics that surround the St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy suggest
that for diasporic communities, ethnic and national identities are highly contested and that
boundaries—some hard and fast, others more permeable—are constructed along any number
of axes. For the construction of Irish identity in New York City within-group identity is disputed across a number of these axes with the most important difference being sexual identity,
particularly when it is being performed in a public space.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All
rights reserved.
Keywords: Nationalism; Ethnicity; Sexuality; Irish; Irish-American; Identity
Introduction
Nineteenth century St. Patrick’s Day parades have been the focus of scholarly
attention in the United States and Canada for several decades (Cottrell, 1992;
Goheen, 1993; Moss, 1995; Meagher, 1985; Marston, 1989; Marston, 1991). These
events have received especially careful attention from historians and political and
historical geographers who offer various explanations of their significance to the
* Tel.: +1-520-621-3903; fax: +1-520-621-2889.
E-mail address: [email protected] (S.A. Marston).
0962-6298/02/$ - see front matter  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 6 2 - 6 2 9 8 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 5 1 - 8
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S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
Irish immigrant community as well as the wider Anglo-American society within
which they were performed. Most scholars, though differing on the particulars, have
explained the St. Patrick’s Day parades of the nineteenth century as complex urban
rituals that commented upon socio-economic and political conditions in Ireland as
well as the US and Canada. The parades have been seen as instrumental to the
construction and maintenance of an Irish national identity in North America and to
making symbolic though temporary political claims to urban space (Moss, 1995;
Marston, 1991). After the mid-twentieth century, interest in the St. Patrick’s Day
parades declined as scholars tended to find newer urban rituals, such as the Puerto
Rico Day parade or Gay Pride parade, more theoretically provocative and revealing.
Indeed, even the New York Irish-American community had come to see their parades
as rather routine affairs. After 1955, the two most consistent themes in the official
history of the New York City (NYC) St. Patrick’s Day parade are the state of the
weather on 17 March and problems of heavy drinking among the spectators
(Ridge, 1988).
Beginning in 1990, the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade—as well as similar parades
in other large US cities like Boston and Chicago—became a highly charged, politically volatile cultural event that revealed the lie in the oft-repeated incantation that
‘on St. Patrick’s Day everyone is Irish’. The popular press has been consistent in
interpreting the parades as high profile staging grounds for contemporary struggles
over political, social, and cultural identity in the US. The conflicts in Boston reached
such a litigious pitch that the US Supreme Court was called upon to decide whether
parade organizers could legally exclude groups from joining in the privatelyorganized use of the public thoroughfares for marching. 1
In this paper my primary goal is to understand in NYC how different narrations
of the Irish national community come together at this particular moment in history
to fragment identities and construct boundaries between people perceived to share
a common cultural history. I examine the St. Patrick’s Day parade in NYC as a
central political and cultural ritual that negotiates identity through the use of public
space. I understand identity construction as “the complex repertoires which people
experience, use, learn and do in their daily lives” and which they perform publicly in
both routine and ritualistic ways in order to assemble an ongoing sense of themselves,
particularly with respect to others (Jenkins, 1997: 14). I examine the NYC parades
between 1990 and 2001 during which time a conflict has developed between the
organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), and the Irish
Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO), who want a place in the parade but have
been officially prevented from marching under their organization’s banner. I understand the parade as a site of boundary construction in the making of difference with
respect to recently deterritorialized immigrants from the Republic of Ireland and
1
The case, ‘John J. Hurley and South Boston Allied War Veterans Council v. Irish-American Gay,
Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston’, was decided 19 June 1995 with Justice David Souter delivering
the unanimous opinion for the Court. GLIB, as the Boston Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay group is known,
formed explicitly for the purpose of marching in the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade to express
their pride in being Irish and gay and to support ILGO’s attempt to join the parade in NYC.
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
375
Northern Ireland who have been reterritorialized in NYC. The St. Patrick’s Day
parades in NYC are, like other anniversary events, symbolic statements about the
current state of the local social order (Smith, 1999). Moreover, as events that are
self-consciously enacted in and shaped by the space within which they are performed,
they are of abiding interest to geographers concerned with the use of space as a
political act.
The AOH, organizers of the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade for over a century,
claim that it is the oldest and largest ethnic parade—and perhaps the most well
known of all parades—in the US. The AOH is an Irish Catholic charitable society
founded in NYC in 1836 and incorporated in 1853 with roots in nearly 300 years
of radical religious and agrarian struggle in Ireland (O’Dea, 1923; Ridge, 1986). The
earliest members of the ancestor organizations of the AOH in Ireland served, in the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as protectors of priests and parishioners during the illegal celebration of the mass (prohibited by the British) and
as guerillas in a covert movement against alien and absentee landlords. In later years,
these evolving secret societies operated in Glasgow and Liverpool where large populations of Irish immigrants settled. When Irish men began migrating in significant
numbers to the US in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is assumed
that members of some of these older secret societies were among the migrants and
that these individuals reorganized themselves in their new country. John Ridge, an
AOH historian, provides details of the founding activities of 1836 that lead eventually
to the birth of the US AOH in NYC and its diffusion throughout the country. A
charter granting permission to organize a branch in the US from the ‘Brethren in
Ireland and Great Britain’ stated the following:
All members must be Roman Catholics and of Irish descent and of good moral
character, and none of your members shall join any secret societies contrary to
the laws of the Catholic Church. . . Be it known unto you that you are at liberty
to make such laws as will guide your workings and for the welfare of our old
Society, but such laws must be at all times according to the teachings of the Holy
Roman Catholic Church, and the obligations we send to you, and all your workings must be submitted to any Catholic priest when called for (Ridge, 1986, p. 11).
The NYC AOH of the late twentieth century, while unarguably still shaped by its
early history—especially its strong connection to Catholicism—has grown and
changed over the one hundred and sixty-plus years since the original charter was
received. Presently there are numerous divisions of the AOH and the Ladies AOH
(LAOH) operating in New York County under the broader authority of the New
York County Board, which contains Manhattan.
A booklet, published in 1991 in honor of the election of the late Frank Bierne to
the Chairmanship of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of the
founding of the AOH in 1986, quotes Mr. Bierne’s understanding of the relationship
of the New York County Board of the AOH to the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.
In 1853, the AOH as an organization was incorporated by the legislature of the
State of New York. The State Courts of New York State at once recognized the
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legal right of the New York County Board of the AOH to organize and conduct
the Parade in its own name. As a result, the Rules and Regulations for organizing
and conducting the Parade have been made by the New York County Board.
Each year at a regular New York County Board meeting a formal motion is made
and passed by members to hold a St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan—which
is New York County.
Such formal action authorized the New York County Board, under the law, to
legally seek a Police Permit from the New York City Police Department to hold
the Parade in the following year and to establish a Committee to make arrangements for it.
The Parade Committee, each year, issues affiliation invitations to AOH Divisions,
County Boards, the New York State Board and the National Board, Irish County
organizations and others who have qualified as marching units the previous year.
Regardless of how many years an Organization has marched, its affiliation invitation must be received by the Organization before it can be represented by delegates at the Parade Committee meetings for the next years’ [sic] Parade, its
preparations, and marching participation. Delegates from all affiliated units elect
a Chairman and a board of officers who have the responsibility for producing and
directing the parade on March 17th (Bierne, 1991, inside back cover).
Official photographs as well as direct observation of parade participants indicate
that the leadership of the various AOH divisions, are older men from their mid-60s
to their early 80s. Women of a younger age, perhaps from their 50s through their
early to mid 70s, appear to constitute the leadership of the various LAOH divisions.
The Catholic Church and the practice of Roman Catholicism are central to the values
and beliefs of AOH and LAOH members. Mass is routinely attended by many of
the parade participants—and all of the leadership—on the morning of 17 March.
The Archbishop of the Diocese of New York plays an important role as spiritual
leader of the NY County Board as well as in the NYC parade when he celebrates
‘the solemn pontifical mass’ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the morning of the parade
and observes the parade committee as they commence the procession. The Archbishop is also occasionally a participant in the parade.
The contrasts between the AOH and ILGO are marked in a number of ways. ILGO
has a very short history in NYC. Two recently arrived Irish immigrants first
organized it in early 1990 as a social organization for other young gay and lesbian
Irish immigrants living in NYC. In October 1990, after marching in the June NYC
Gay Pride Parade, the group decided to apply to the AOH for permission to march
in the 1991 St. Patrick’s Day Parade. At this point, ILGO was an energetic and
expanding organization with both Irish and Irish-American gay and lesbian members.
In January, ILGO was told that although the AOH NY County Board had received
their application to parade, they were being turned down as their application was
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
377
received too late and there was no room in the parade for them. Scarcely a year
after its founding as a social organization, the group began to mobilize as a political
one whose primary aim was to be included in the most important public demonstration of Irish nationalism and ethnicity in North America.
ILGO membership is largely made up of young people, some of whom are immigrant Irish, others who are Irish-Americans, and still others who are neither but are
homosexual men and women living in and around NYC and sympathetic to the ILGO
cause of participating in the parade. Some members declare themselves to be deeply
religious Roman Catholics while others claim no religions affiliation whatsoever. It
is clear to members of ILGO however, that their exclusion from the parade is very
much derived from a conservative Roman Catholic orthodoxy that condemns homosexuality. ILGO is a relatively young organization whose once-primary objective of
promoting social interaction and cultural appreciation among recent gay and lesbian
Irish immigrants over the years has been overshadowed over the years by its political
preoccupations with the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
The parade in March 2001 marked the 240th event; an event that was first
organized in 1762. The contemporary and very lengthy procession, which marches
along Fifth Avenue from 44th to 86th Streets, routinely includes at least twenty-five
units with anywhere from three to thirteen contingents within each unit. The participants include marching bands, pipe and drum corps, equestrians, baton twirlers,
schools of Irish dance, Irish, Irish-American, and other politicians, Irish-American
veteran associations and other military groups, schools, colleges, police contingents,
firefighters, and the various Irish-American voluntary organization divisions such as
the AOH, the Emerald Society, the Gaelic Society and the Irish County Societies
from throughout the tri-state area as well as the US and Ireland. The parade typically
lasts for approximately six hours, and is often referred to boastfully as the longest
parade in the world.
The fact is that the St. Patrick’s Day parade in NYC has become an archetypal
ethnic ritual. It is the ‘parade of parades’; still the most enduring and popular of all
in the history of the city (and probably the US). I use the parade as a window onto
the practices and meaning systems as well as the anxieties of contemporary US urban
cultural life by taking up the challenge raised by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson
to “move beyond naturalized conceptions of spatialized ‘cultures’ and to explore
instead the production of difference within common, shared and connected spaces”
(Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 16). Toward that end, I abandon a basic and long
standing assumption about urban ethnicity in the US: that identity and place can be
linked unproblematically.
It is not uncommon, for instance, in US urban studies to speak of the ‘Boston
Brahmin’ or ‘New York Jews’. Such conceptualizations assume that space is a stabilizer of culture, “a neutral grid on which cultural differences, historical memory, and
societal organization are inscribed”, (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 7). The assumption
of the existence of a harmonious localized culture implied by these terms is problematic and certainly not supported by the case I describe here. In short, it is not possible
to use a concept like ‘the New York Irish’ and have it express what is most meaningful about the construction of sameness and difference among people of Irish decent
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S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
in that city. Instead, it is critically important to understand the categories of Irish
and American born ‘Irish’ (whom I refer to as Irish-Americans) not as fixed and
pre-given identities but as a starting point for exploring the making of difference in
a city shaped and reshaped by the changing currents of globalization.
While the term ‘New York Irish’ can be seen to do injustice to the complexity
of Irish ethnic identity in that city, it does signal that there is an important connection
between place and cultural identity. While on the other hand, we should not accept
the notion of the ‘New York Irish’ as a stable conceptualization that can be unproblematically compared with the ‘Boston Irish’ or the ‘Chicago Irish’. On the other,
we should recognize that historical and contemporary local geographies very powerfully shape common understandings of who belongs to the Irish or any other national
community. Although Irish and Irish-Americans living in NYC are unarguably
shaped by different place histories than those in other US cities—or for that matter
anywhere—a more important point I seek to make is that even in NYC, Irish and
Irish-Americans do not automatically share a consistent and coherent sense of what
it means to be a member of the Irish national community. Indeed, different narrations
of what it means to be Irish (or Polish, Greek or Ukrainian, etc.) are always and
everywhere in play within particular places and across space more generally
(Smith & Jackson, 2000).
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, NYC is a dynamic, political, cultural,
and social space of flows connected to other spaces around the globe, at once similar
and quite different to what it was in the nineteenth century. Currently, it is at the
top of the international urban hierarchy (along with Tokyo and London) functioning
as a command and control center for the contemporary capitalist world system
(Sassen, 1991). One key flow fueling its role as a central organizing node in the
world system is the immigration of laborers—skilled and unskilled—from around
the globe. The labor market entry of young, often well-educated men and women
from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, is part of this larger process of
international migration into NYC (O’Hanlon, 1998). These immigrants have moved
to NYC at the same time that the Republic of Ireland has begun to experience dramatic economic growth. Many have emigrated from Northern Ireland to escape
‘the troubles’.
A country once peripheral to the economic core of Western Europe, the Republic
of Ireland is now one of the most dynamic. Once a country with a predominantly
agricultural/rural economic base, the Republic is now the ‘Celtic tiger’ with a booming industrial economic base derived from manufacturing in microelectronics, pharmaceuticals, computer technology and electrical engineering (MacLaughlin, 1997;
bib:Wickham and Murray, 1982). Yet, beginning in the early 1980s, many young,
well educated, single Irish men and women have come to the US in the tens of
thousands each year. They leave, as Ray O’Hanlon has pointed out, despite the
increasing promise of an expanding economy at home because, “the lofty employment targets of successive governments could never quite match demographics”
(O’Hanlon, 1998, p. 17). Once in NYC, these turn of the twentieth century migrants
have moved into all ranks of the employment hierarchy in the city, but often into
the lower middle and middle reaches where entry level professional and well-paid
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
379
service occupations are the norm. 2 Thus, in class terms, these new immigrants are
not significantly different from their contemporary American-born Irish counterparts.
And, it is apparently not differences around class that shape the current antagonism
between the AOH and ILGO. Instead, it is that sexual identity when it is being
publicly performed currently makes the difference to Irish-American identity in
NYC. As I discuss in greater detail below, however, it is important to be aware that
other identities very decisively mediate attitudes about the public performance of
sexual identity and complicate a straightforward interpretation of the St. Patrick’s
Day parade conflict as a bifurcated one. In short, a simple opposition of heterosexuality versus homosexuality vastly under-represents the complexity of the conflict. It
seems clear that recent Irish migrations to NYC have resulted in fragmentation and
heterogeneous mixes of belonging and political allegiances in which nation and ethnicity have become especially perplexed sources of identity.
The analysis of the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parades reported here is mostly based
on newspaper accounts. The newspaper reports cover the period between 1990 and
2001 and include items that have appeared in major US metropolitan papers including The Boston Herald Traveler, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Sun
Times, and especially The New York Times. Also assessed is reporting on the parade
controversy from two Irish-American newspapers published in NYC, The Irish Voice
and The Irish Echo. Eight AOH leaders and seven ILGO leaders, identified through
newspaper articles and organizational publicity materials, were also interviewed. The
interviews lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours and were based on a set
of open-ended questions directed at eliciting information about sources and practices
of Irish and Irish-American cultural identity. The newspaper reports of the parade
and the interviews have enabled the assemblage of a history of the exclusion of
ILGO from the annual event and the AOH’s public justification for that exclusion.
Supplementary data include ephemeral documentary materials generated by both
AOH and ILGO, and to a limited extent, interviews conducted with AOH and ILGO
members by a research assistant and myself.
A brief history of the conflict
Table 1 identifies the major elements of the conflict between the AOH and ILGO
as well as conflicts within the AOH and the outcomes of lawsuits, appeals, protests
and political maneuverings. 3 Late in 1990, the sponsors of the parade, the Manhattan
2
Establishing legal residence in NYC (and other US cities) has not been easy for many of the Irish
immigrants who arrived in the US after the mid-1960 immigration quota system was enacted. O’Hanlon’s
book, ‘The New Irish Americans’, traces the history of Irish immigration to NYC during this period,
focusing on the efforts of the Irish Immigration Reform Movement to make permanent residency in the
US more possible for Irish people.
3
It should be pointed out that the AOH has said publicly that members of ILGO are encouraged to
march in the parade so long as they do not march with a banner that declares their sexual identity and
that they conform to the rules of the parade.
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S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
Table 1
Chronology of the AOH-ILGO conflicts over the St. Patrick’s Day Parade
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
March: Mayor Dinkins enables ILGO to march without banner.
December: Manhattan Chapter of AOH votes again to ban ILGO. Dinkins instead awards the
parade permit to the NY State Board of the AOH.
January: NY State AOH decide in early 1992 that they too will ban ILGO from marching under
their own banner.
March 14: Judge Maldonado of the NYC Commission on Human Rights rules against ILGO and
the city, ruling that the AOH sponsors of the parade do in fact have a First Amendment right to
discriminate, since it is they who define the nature of this Roman Catholic ritual.
March 16: ILGO are beaten again in a separate Federal Court case, Judge Leval refuses to order
the AOH to admit ILGO into their parade.
March 17: Gay and lesbian demonstrators stage a protest march on 5th Avenue protected by
police in riot gear, before the official parade begins.
January: Dinkins awards the parade permit to a new sponsor, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade
Committee Inc.
February: St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee Inc., lacking support and fearing a widespread
boycott of the event, withdraw their sponsorship.
February 26: Federal Judge Duffy rules Mayor Dinkins cannot force the AOH to include ILGO
and their message, and that the city must award the parade permit, without delay, to the
Manhattan AOH.
March 17: Dinkins refuses to march but his opponent, Rudolph Giulliani does. 228 lesbian and
gay demonstrators arrested during pre-parade protests.
March 17: Mayor Giulliani marches in the parade. Gays and lesbians demonstrate in a pre-protest
outside the NY Public Library
March 15: Federal Judge Keenan rejects the latest request made by ILGO to gain entry to the St.
Patrick’s Day Parade, marching under their own banner and their bid to stage a separate parade.
March 17: John Cardinal O’Connor is Parade Grand Marshal. 88 gay and lesbian demonstrators
arrested.
June: US Supreme Court unanimously rules, citing the right to freedom of speech, that parade
sponsors have a constitutional right to exclude since parades are a form of expression.
March: Federal Judge again denies ILGO permission to hold their own St. Patrick’s Day parade.
March 17: 43 gay and lesbian demonstrators are arrested. Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams
marches at the head of the parade.
March 17: 236th St. Patrick’s Day parade is held. Its theme is the 150th anniversary of the Great
Famine. On Fifth Ave., 150,000 marchers and over 1 million spectators observe a moment’s
silence. 35 gay and lesbians demonstrators are arrested.
March 17: Former Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds is the Grand Marshal, and the 200th
anniversary of the 1798 Rising is the theme. 100 gay and lesbian supporters demonstrate, 14
ILGO members arrested. NYPD Gay Officer’s Action League also excluded. Martin McGuinness,
of Sinn Fein, marches.
March 17: Actress Maureen O’Hara is the Grand Marshall of the 238th St. Patrick’s Day Parade
which draws upward of 275,000 onlookers. ILGO again demonstrates in front of the Public
Library on 43rd St. where 17 demonstrators are arrested.
January: debate raged over whether Hillary Clinton, then a candidate for the US Senate from NY
state should march in the parade.
March 17: The 239th St. Patrick’s Day parade occurs with Ms. Clinton present. ILGO
demonstrates at the Public Library and along the parade route. The ailing Cardinal O’Connor fails
to celebrate mass or view the parade for the first time in 16 years.
March 17: Senator Hillary Clinton noticeably absent in this year’s parade joins the Syracuse, NY
parade where gays and lesbians are welcome. Three members of the Irish Queers are arrested for
assault and disorderly conduct. ILGO members demonstrate at the Public Library. The new
Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Edward Egan celebrates his first St. Patrick’s Day mass.
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
381
chapter of the AOH, received a request to march in the forthcoming 1991 St.
Patrick’s Day parade from ILGO. Citing a long waiting list, the AOH denied members of ILGO permission to march under their own banner in the parade. The AOH
resolutely defended their decision, but Mayor Dinkins became involved as ILGO
accused the AOH of discrimination. This was an important early battle, and ILGO
had a significant ally in Mayor Dinkins who persuaded Division 7 of the NY County
AOH to accept the gay and lesbian marchers in their contingent in the St. Patrick’s
Day parade, albeit without a banner of their own. When the day arrived the Mayor
relinquished his traditional position at the head of the parade and instead marched
with ILGO, only to be taunted, jeered, and showered with beer for the length of
the parade.
In December of 1991, the NY County Board of the AOH voted again to ban
ILGO, and Division 7 of their own order, from the forthcoming 1992 parade. In
response, Mayor Dinkins instead awarded the parade permit to the NY State Board
of the AOH, which had previously publicly expressed their embarrassment with the
actions of the County Board for refusing to allow ILGO to march. Upon receipt of
the permit however, the NY State AOH decided in early 1992 that they too would ban
ILGO from marching under their own banner. Mayor Dinkins retaliated by formally
charging the county, state and national chapters of the Catholic fraternal order with
illegal discrimination. The Mayor believed that since the parade took place on the
city’s thoroughfares it was a ‘public accommodation’, and was therefore subject to
NYC’s civil rights laws. On 14 March, however, Judge Maldonado of the NYC
Commission on Human Rights ruled against ILGO and the city, deciding that the
AOH sponsors of the parade did, in fact, have a First Amendment right to discriminate, since it was they who defined the nature of the ritual. And on 16 March ILGO
was turned down again in a separate Federal Court case, when Judge Leval also
refused to order the AOH sponsors to admit ILGO into their parade. In response to
the Human Rights Commission’s decision and the federal court decision, on 17
March, gay and lesbian demonstrators staged a protest march on Fifth Avenue, protected by police in riot gear, before the official St. Patrick’s Day Parade began.
In October 1992, the issue of ILGO participation in the St. Patrick’s Day parade
was raised again when the NYC Commission on Human Rights decided to reverse
the ruling that their own chief judge, Judge Maldonado, had made earlier in March.
In January 1993, the Dinkins administration awarded the parade permit to a new
sponsor, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee Inc. This committee was allied
with Dinkins, and it was their aim to include ILGO in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
By early February, however, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee Inc., lacking
support and fearing a widespread boycott of the event, withdrew their sponsorship.
Furthermore, Federal Judge Duffy of Manhattan ruled that Mayor Dinkins could not
force the AOH to include ILGO and their message, and that the city must award
the parade permit, without delay, to the NY County Board of the AOH St. Patrick’s
Day Parade Committee. On 17 March, Mayor Dinkins refused to march but his
opponent in the impending city election, Rudolph Giulliani did as 228 lesbian and
gay demonstrators were arrested during pre-parade protests.
From 1994 through 2001, the parade has continued to be a site of legal and polit-
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ical conflict as ILGO members have been refused entry under the own banner and,
in response, have staged protests that have become counter-rituals to the St. Patrick’s
Day parade. The ILGO annual counter-rituals are largely oriented around protest at
the Public Library. There, banners are exhibited and sympathizers assemble to support ILGO members who routinely attempt to block the parade by staging a sit-down
maneuver on Fifth Avenue. These individuals are dragged off to police vans and
taken to the local precinct. In addition to the pre-parade sit-down, once the parade
actually commences, additional ILGO members and sympathizers along the sidelines
wave Irish flags, shout slogans, and brandish signs such as those displayed in 1998
declaring ‘Homophobia is the Religion of Cowards’, and ‘We Will not be Excluded’.
Within the parade, ILGO members and sympathizers, incognito in the line of march,
have pulled large cloth banners from pockets or from under their coats and displayed
them. These obvious infiltrators are quickly rustled out of the parade by the NY
police or parade marshals, and frequently taken to the local police precinct under
arrest.
The most significant moment in the continuing battle between the traditional sponsors of the parade and gay and lesbian groups seeking a place in the line of march
came in June 1995 when the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the
sponsors of the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade, the South Boston Allied War
Veterans Council, commanded by John ‘Wacko’ Hurley. Their decision was that the
Council had a constitutional right to exclude the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Irish
Group of Boston (GLIB) from marching since GLIB’s message was deemed counter
to that of the Veteran’s Council. Framing the issue as one of free speech and not
as one of access to public space, Justice David Souter stated that parades are predominantly a form of expression, not just motion.4
This very condensed history of the conflict suggests that the ability to determine
group identity rests to a great extent upon the power to control access to the parade.
The current dominance of the AOH in the St. Patrick’s Day parade conflict is premised upon its ability to control the public, official presentation of Irish identity. On
St. Patrick’s Day, Irish identity is unquestionably made in the streets of NYC where
the AOH possesses the power to subvert and de-legitimate ILGO’s constructions of
Irish identity and assert its own identity as the authentic one. Although early on
ILGO had the support of the Mayor’s Office, with David Dinkins’s 1994 mayoral
loss to Rudolf Guiliani, that significant political resource was lost. By 17 March
1995, Cardinal O’Connor, Grand Marshal of that year’s parade and then probably
the most influential Irish-American Catholic in the city, was denouncing homosexuality from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.5 Three months later the US Supreme
4
Although the Supreme Court decision was directed at interpreting the free speech implications of
the First Amendment, its impact on popular understandings and practices around public space is also
significant. The most trenchant legal analysis of the public space impact is bib:Sunder, 1996, who analyzes
the fragmentation of discursive and physical space that the decision creates.
5
Several of the ILGO interviewees have said that O’Connor’s sermon was read from the pulpit of
every Roman Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of New York on 17 March 1995. I have been unable
independently to verify this.
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
383
Court ruling was announced allowing parade organizers to determine who may parade and who may be excluded. Using sexuality as a boundary that divides “us” and
“them”, the AOH has been able to prevent ILGO from participating in the most
symbolic and public ritual of Irish ethnicity in the US.
Thinking about difference
The controversy surrounding the St. Patrick’s Day parade in NYC very clearly
revolves around antagonisms related to the interaction of nationalism, ethnicity, and
sexuality. Consequently, it also involves the maintenance of hierarchies of power
that frame the relations within and between the two groups enabling hegemonic
control by one over the representation of ‘Irish’ identity in NYC. 6 Importantly, the
struggle between the AOH and ILGO is also very much about monopolizing the
space across which a particular imagining of the community can be enacted and
projected to a wider audience.
At a high level of abstraction, Alonso’s formulation of the relational nature of
nationalism and ethnicity is helpful in its identification of the central significance of
state formation to each. She writes:
Nationalism is partly an effect of the totalizing and homogenizing projects of state
formation. These projects produce an imagined sense of political community that
conflates peoplehood, territory, and state. But state formation also generates categories of Self and Other within a polity [emphasis added]. In contrast to nationalism, ethnicity is partly an effect of the particularizing projects of state formation,
projects that produce hierarchized forms of imagining peoplehood that are
assigned varying degrees of social esteem and differential privileges and prerogatives within a political community. (Alonso, 1994)
Although understanding nationalism and ethnicity as derived from the processes
of state formation is an important insight, it does not tell us enough about how they
are practiced ‘on the ground’. Indeed, comprehending the nature of the struggle over
who can perform Irish identity on the streets of NYC in the parade on St. Patrick’s
Day requires us to posit conceptualizations of ethnicity and nationalism at a much
lower level of abstraction.
At the level of actual practice, Jenkins provides a set of propositions about ethnicity that, in combination, constitute a useful model (Jenkins, 1997). He writes that:
6
The problematic nature of ethnic labels is particularly obvious in the case of recent immigration
from the Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to New York City. To identify an individual as
Irish or Irish-American is not an easy accomplishment. What should a person who grew up partly in
Northern Ireland and partly in NYC be called? What should a person who grew up in Dublin but has
taken out US citizenship papers be called? Members of the AOH with whom we spoke routinely called
themselves ‘Irish’ and not ‘Irish-Americans’. Clearly I still have not very satisfactorily resolved this problem.
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“1) ethnicity is about cultural differentiation. . . identity is always a dialectic between
similarity and difference; 2) ethnicity is centrally concerned with culture—shared
meaning—but it is also rooted in, and to a considerable extent the outcome of, social
interaction; 3) ethnicity is no more fixed or unchanging than the culture of which it
is a component or the situations in which it is produced and reproduced; 4) ethnicity
as a social identity is collective and individual, externalized in social interaction and
internalized in personal self-identification” (Jenkins, 1997: 13–14).
Most salient with respect to the St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy is the first of
Jenkins’ propositions that refers to boundary making between minority and majority
groups—and, I would add, even within groups—in the production and reproduction
of ethnic difference (Barth, 1969). lnternal boundary making is especially relevant
to understanding how the AOH constructs a collective Irish identity in NYC that
may be in conflict with individual or sub-group ascription. In short, there can be
more than one ethnicity in operation even within groups that claim a common cultural heritage.
Nationalism as practiced on the ground is equally important to understanding the
conflict over entry into the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Again, Jenkins provides a helpful summary set of propositions that distills current thinking on the subject. He writes
that “. . . nationalism is an ideology of ethnic identification which: 1) is historically
and situationally contingent; 2) is characteristic of the politics of complex societies
(states but not necessarily nation-states); 3) is concerned with culture and ethnicity
as criteria for membership in the polity; and 4) claims a collective historical destiny
for the polity and/or its ethnically defined members” (Jenkins, 1997: 146).
The relevance of nationalism to the St. Patrick’s Day parade case study is that,
like ethnicity, there may be different versions of nationalism operating within and
among groups at different times. Certainly the latter point is made by Boyce in his
monumental work, Nationalism in Ireland (Boyce, 1995). Ultimately, like ethnicity,
we need to understand the concept in its plural construction—nationalisms—as bodies of knowledge also organized with respect to criteria of group membership and
principles of “us” and “them”.
Comprehending the challenge that homosexuality poses to the AOH is also about
recognizing the importance of ‘boundary maintenance’ and the differences that make
a difference in the context of group identification. For the adversaries in the St.
Patrick’s Day parade conflict, sexuality, especially the public declaration of sexual
identity, is a difference that is socially marked in the extreme. Through publicity,
sexuality has the potential to shape the perception of other identities, in this case
especially ethnicity and nationalism but also how gender and religion (including
respectability and morality) are bound up with them. For example, AOH interviewees
were consistent in their understanding of the St. Patrick’s Day parade as both a
solemn and a religious event. In reference to ILGO marching in the parade, an LAOH
member in her late 50s was careful to make clear that ILGO (the group of
individuals) was not kept out of the parade, their banner (their message) was. An
AOH interviewee was the most expansive and explicit in his understanding of the
purpose of the parade and the impact ILGO would have on that purpose. He stated:
“The New York parade is about decorum. And the people in the parade… they won’t
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
385
let nonsense go on. In fact, the whole thing with the homosexuals… you know we’re
not going to take any nonsense whatsoever. It’s not a political thing, it’s a religious
thing, but certainly they can have their views.” This interviewee also criticized the
St. Patrick’s Day parades held throughout small towns and cities in the United States
as “atrocious” and “appalling” because they lack the solemnity and religious purpose
of the NYC parade.
As Mosse (1985) has shown, sexuality (and class class constructions of morality)
is very much central to the production of nationalist discourses. In his work on
nationalism and sexuality, Pryke (1998) pushes this point further to investigate sexuality in national conflict and nation-building. His contribution to the literature most
relevant to the St. Patrick’s Day parade case is to identify the range of practices
used to control aspects of sexuality that deviate from the accepted norms of the
nation. As he points out, nationalism involves cultural and social homogenization.
When conflict threatens prevailing notions of the nation, stereotypes emerge and
become accentuated as a way of reinscribing homogenization. This is undoubtedly
the case with the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade where (at least two and likely many
more) constructions of Irish nationalism are in operation around the conflict. The
dominant national stereotype promoted by the AOH, is one that draws upon norms
of middle-class respectability, religious morality, and the proper public presentation
of the male bourgeois self.
The conflict over who may parade is very much about who can be part of the
national community where identities based on particular constructions of sexuality,
determined in large part by Roman Catholic moral frameworks, are of central importance. Gender constructions also figure into the conflict, though they are far less
contentious at the moment. Constructions such as these emerge from group notions
of an ‘imagined community’ that rely on an acceptance of an immemorial past and
a future constructed on selected traditions appropriated from particular place-based
histories and memories. In the case of the AOH, these memories include a pronounced attachment to religiosity as well as highly gendered constructions of the
hyper-masculinized and the hyper-feminized, which carry with them an implicit
assumption of heterosexuality (Nash, 1997).
Susan Smith, in discussing the politics of difference, has argued that “where identities are made is likely to have a bearing on which markers of difference—class,
gender, ‘race’, and so on—are salient and which become veiled” (Smith, 1999: 139).
Furthermore, following Bhaktin, how these identities are made is also important.
The annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in NYC is a serious official event “designed to
be observed rather than engaged with and used to persuade society to meet certain
(political and moral) ideals” (Smith, 1999). In the parade, the street is very much
central to the very formal enactment of nationalism and ethnicity—and, by implication, sexuality—that is being broadcast to a remarkably wide audience reaching
far beyond the parade route. The conduct of the parade along Fifth Avenue can been
seen as a particular production of space–time where the past and the present are
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merged. 7 At the same time that the use of the public space of the street connects
to parades past, it also signals a projection of the past into the present where a certain
history of a people is offered up for mass consumption. Furthermore, the parade
must be viewed at different spatial scales from the scale of the bodies that are
acceptable/unacceptable inscriptions of ‘Irishness’ to the street, the city, the region
and the globe. And at each of those scales identities are produced and understood
in different ways.
In 1998, the parade was broadcast nationally (by NBC) connecting NYC and the
spectacle of the parade to viewers in locales throughout the US and carried by news
programs throughout the world. The parade itself contains participants from throughout the NY metropolitan region, the US, Ireland, and, more recently, as far away as
Japan. Fifth Avenue, the street down which the parade is conducted, is also an
important space that is remade on St. Patrick’s Day. Each year the parade follows
the same route and each year it symbolizes a re-enactment of the rise to respectability
of the Irish immigrant in NYC. The parade suspends the routine activities of the
street and replaces them with a ritual that effectively possess that space for a brief
time (Davis, 1986). Forty-one blocks of Fifth Avenue are given over to the parade
entirely and a green line is painted down the center of the thoroughfare each year.
Fifth Avenue, a commercial artery connecting some of the most powerful and prestigious individuals and firms in NYC to the rest of the city, the country, and the
world, on St. Patrick’s Day becomes a space that lends credibility to those who
parade along it. The parade, having been controlled by the AOH for over one hundred
years, is a phenomenon that transforms for one day the urban space of NYC into a
very different place where a highly stylized form of identity is hegemonic and alternative claimants to that identity are turned into trespassers.
For each group, the AOH and ILGO, Irish identity is, in many ways, both different
and the same. The point is that ethnicity and national identity must be understood
as both nominal and virtual such that the label, Irish (in NYC), should not be conflated with the experience of being Irish (in NYC) either theoretically or empirically.
“Nominal identification is a matter of name and classification; virtual identification
encompasses the consequences of name and label (i.e. what the nominal means in
terms of experience)” [emphasis in the original] (Jenkins, 1997: 41).
Although sexuality is currently the preeminent difference that makes a difference
in Irish identity to NYC, other differences mediate attitudes about sexuality and
publicity including age and gender. For the AOH, it is clear that Irish identity as it
is performed publicly, is constructed around the similarities of a particular age cohort.
These similarities include common religious practice and a shared cultural history
and politics played out and interpreted within the historical context of NYC’s labor
market, political arena, schools, social clubs, and churches, as our AOH interviewees
7
McNamara notes that as early as 1830, Fifth Avenue had become an important parade route. As he
puts it: “Certainly, it gained considerable favor in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as hotels,
clubs, and other institutions on Fifth Avenue increasingly became part of many celebrations. . . There
was little official celebration as far north as Central Park, however, until the twentieth century”
(McNamara, 1997).
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
387
made clear. The governing membership of the AOH—the ones who control the parade—are mostly World War II generation males. They began to assume control of
the AOH—a key NYC cultural, political and social institution—after the war and
have continued to increase their power and authority over it and related cultural
institutions. Their understanding of what it means to be Irish in NYC is the one that
counts at the turn of the twentieth century. Or to use Jenkins’s construction, the
AOH has the power to arbitrate “how the world is and how it ought to be”. Interestingly, however, within that group, dissent and disagreement about the contours of
that identity have emerged.
An LAOH interviewee believes, as does AOH historian John Ridge, that the ‘oldguard’ is in decline (Ridge, 1988). She cites the increasing leadership of women in
the organization as evidence for this. If the LAOH gains ascendance, this interviewee
feels that change will certainly occur around various aspects of the parade. For
instance, she claims that she, personally, has no objection to inviting ILGO to march
publicly in the parade and believes it will not be long before that happens. Thus
gender and the tensions between masculine constructions of Irish identity in New
York and the role of women in the maintenance and remaking of that identity may
begin to play an increasingly important role.
The 1993 newspaper report of the conflict among and between various chapters
of the AOH—the NY State Board, the County Board and the Dinkin’s-influenced
St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee—also suggest that other identity based divisions
exist within AOH. The adversaries in this aspect of the conflict seem to have been
divided by age with many middle-aged, apparently more liberal members of the first
1993 St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee Inc. confronting the older, more conservative members of the County Board, and eventually backing down. Thus it appears
that age is also an important identity that helps to mark the boundary between those
who are tolerant of homosexuality—despite the Church’s stance—and are willing to
invite ILGO to march and those who oppose their public inclusion of homosexuals.
It is important to be aware that the personal ratification of Irish identity within
ILGO is also complicated. Newspaper reports and television coverage suggest that
ILGO is composed largely of recent, young—in their 20s and 30s—immigrants from
the Republic of Ireland as well as Northern Ireland. Information from an ILGO
contact as well as interviews and attendance at ILGO press conferences and demonstrations indicate, however, that ILGO is a ‘polyglot’ organization. While the group
did originate as a social club for Irish gays and lesbians immigrating to NYC in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the political trajectory that the group has taken also
appears to have transformed the membership. While some of our interviewees are
indeed immigrants from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, others are
first, second and even later generation Americans of Irish decent. Still others are not
Irish or of Irish decent and are allied with ILGO as gays and lesbians sympathetic
to their cause. Thus attachment to patria is very complicated among ILGO members.
The ratification of an Irish Catholic identity within ILGO appears to have little
to do with Roman Catholicism as practiced in the US but more with the political
cause of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. For instance, none of our interviewees
identified as currently a practicing Roman Catholic although several have said that
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being raised Irish-Catholic is an important influence on their identity. 8 One of our
interviewees reported that there is some disagreement about the relevance of Roman
Catholicism to ILGO group members. Some members of ILGO maintain a strong
attachment to Roman Catholicism. In contrast, one member of the organization
stated: “Coming out of the closet means coming out of the church.” While Roman
Catholicism is at the heart of the objections to ILGO participation in the parade
raised by members of the AOH, most ILGO members appear to have little interest
in the Catholic aspects of Irish identity in NYC. Indeed, after sexual preference, the
axes of identity that are most prominent for many ILGO members are Irish national
culture and the politics of Northern Ireland.
While there is a great deal of solidarity within ILGO around the St. Patrick’s Day
parade issue, it is important to point out that within the larger NYC gay community
there is disagreement about the legitimacy of ILGO’s demand to be admitted to the
parade. Newspaper reports as well as our interviewees indicated that some members
of the NYC gay community feel that the Gay Pride parade represents all gays and
lesbians and that ILGO should be content to participate in that parade. The response
to this criticism by one of our interviewees is instructive about the multiple meaning
systems that inform social identity. He states:
We were chanting “the AOH is anti-gay and you don’t have to be that way, the
AOH is anti-gay but please don’t raise your kids that way”, and this woman with
her two kids by their hands, she’s like, “you’re sick, you’re sick” screaming at
us. And I wish everybody who is gay could see that because I think that’s what
disturbs me most about this issue. It’s that many gay people are not supportive
of ILGO. They think we are troublemakers, they believe we have our own parade
in June [Gay Pride Parade]. Or they think this is fun for us or that, can’t we
just be Irish and march with a county [an Irish county association] or something
like that?
This interviewee and other ILGO members feel this criticism from the larger NYC
gay community misses the point: that they are the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization and gay and lesbian identities are not their only identities.
The identity politics that surround the St. Patrick’s Day parade in NYC are complex. The St. Patrick’s Day parade controversy suggest that ethnic and national identities are highly contested internally as well as externally and that boundaries—some
hard and fast, others more permeable—are constructed along any number of axes.
For the construction of Irish identity in NYC, within-group identity is fought over
across a number of these axes where differences over sexual identity are mediated
by identities of age, gender, religion and perhaps even with respect to residency
status (citizen or alien). For the Roman Catholic AOH, sexuality is the most relevant
8
Although none of our interviewees identified as practicing Roman Catholics, they did tell us that
some other ILGO members are devout, actively practicing members of the Roman Catholic Church. While
some of these individuals attend mass and belong to conventional parishes, other are members of gay
congregations that operate outside the approval of the Church.
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
389
boundary and a boundary that is most salient when Irish identity is being performed
in a public space.
Conclusion: on St. Patrick’s Day everyone isn’t Irish
By adopting an approach to social research which argues that aesthetic questions
relating to taste, style and performance cannot be divorced from political questions
about power, inequality and oppression, popular festive forms might be seen to
be as central as voting behaviour to an understanding of how people make history,
geography and difference. (Smith, 1999: 133)
Clearly, the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade is a popular ethnic and national ritual
embedded in a complex politics of domination and empowerment that has enabled
the subversion of some identities and the assertion of others. Moreover, the NYC
St. Patrick’s Day parade is now, and for most of its long history, a site of confrontation over different sorts of politics, as the history of the parade by John Ridge
(1988) makes clear.
The disciplining of difference and the imposition of particular discourses of identity that are at the center of the contemporary St. Patrick’s Day parade conflict are
enabled by hegemonic control over the event exerted by the AOH. Importantly,
Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony locates its production in civil society
where it is “a problematic, contested, political process of domination and struggle”.
Using the recent St. Patrick’s Day parades as a window onto contemporary US urban
cultural life, I offer several observations.
The first observation is that an adequate understanding of identity construction
and maintenance must take into account the space and place within which these
practices occur. Publicity—or acting out an identity in public—is very much at the
heart of the conflict over ILGO’s admission into the parade. It is one thing to be
Irish and homosexual in private; it is quite another to be public about that identity.
Thus, for the keepers of Irish identity in NYC at the turn of the twentieth century,
sexuality is an issue that cannot be projected publicly. The particular style of the
national imagining is controlled and performed spatially by the AOH in a ritual
event that effectively culminates their everyday worlds, worlds that have little room
for homosexuality.
The second observation is that identity must be understood as both nominal and
virtual (Jenkins, 1997). While identifying oneself as Irish is ‘all in a name’, the
experience of being a person of Irish decent in the US is mediated by all sorts of
other dimensions of identity, in this case the most prominent of which is sexuality,
though other dimensions reinforce and complicate it. It is useful at this point to recall
Jenkins’ fourth proposition and its emphasis on the centrality of social interaction
in the production of shared meaning. Indeed, the conflict that has arisen around the
meaning of the St. Patrick’s Day parade to the AOH and ILGO is as much bound
up with a perceived common cultural heritage as it is with lived social relationships.
I would also argue that minority and majority understandings of identity must be
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S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
recognized, though I would push further to insist that within group constructions
may be equally important such that more than one ethnicity and nationalism—in this
case—appear to be operating at the same time. Thus I find the notions of ethnicity
and nationalism as in part as much about making and maintaining boundaries within
‘us’ as it is between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
A third observation is that the cultural use of space is a political act that can
routinely require adjudication if not the show of outright force by the state. Thus,
in attempting to comprehend the cultural politics of difference, we must begin to
come to grips with the ways in which the state enables or constrains the performance
of identity particularly how the state understands and regulates the use of space in
the constitution of cultural performance. The case of the St. Patrick’s Day parade
controversy demonstrates that if the dominant code of conduct for national imagining
becomes threatened, it is the state’s role to adjudicate and possibly restore the social
practices and meanings that regulate its dominance. The parade conflict is clearly
subscripted by a legal history that underscores the role the state is increasingly being
called to play in negotiating the ways that difference is produced through space. In
addition to the yearly arrests of ILGO demonstrators by the NYC police, the appeals
by ILGO to participate in the parade have been extensively litigated and arbitrated
by the local, regional and national state, most decidedly to the advantage of the
national imagining held by the AOH. In effect what the AOH has been able to
accomplish is the construction of a status hierarchy of inequality based largely on
sexuality and enforced by state power.
In assessing the relationship between the globalized media and the resurgence of
nationalism in the late twentieth century, Morley and Robins (1995) point to the
practices of ethnic groups to revive mythic constructions and old traditions. These
returns to tradition help communities to imagine themselves as homogeneous and
pure as opposed to the cultural hybridity that globalization produces (Balibar &
Wallerstein, 1991; Featherstone, 1990). The contemporary parade and the conflicts
generated around it might best be seen as a response to what Kobena Mercer (1990)
calls “the sheer difficulty of living with difference”.
The St. Patrick’s Day parades of the last twelve years in NYC crystallize many
of the social, political, and cultural tensions that structure contemporary urban life
in the US. The AOH see themselves as defenders of a rich and tenaciously-held
identity and the parade is their day to protect and project that identity derived from
a carefully and contentiously constructed national history. 9 The ability of any one
group to control the parade is tantamount to their ability to authenticate the contours
of the Irish/Irish-American national community and the history upon which that community is constructed. In short, the St. Patrick’s Day parades of the last decade or
so—if not the last two hundred years—are about policing the boundaries of the
cultural territory which, at the moment, is particularly hostile to group norms about
9
It should be pointed out that over the three hundred-year history of the parade in NYC there have
been numerous conflicts. For instance, the history of Irish Protestants losing control of the parade to Irish
Catholics is an important identity conflict that occurred during the early years of the parade. The desire
to allow women to be Grand Marshals of the parade is another more recent one.
S.A. Marston / Political Geography 21 (2002) 373–392
391
sexuality. As Morley and Robins (1995) (p. 47) argue, identity formation—nationalist
or otherwise—is not an abstract question but “. . .it is a matter of the relative power
of different groups to define national identity, and their abilities to mobilize their
definitions through the control of cultural institutions”. The St. Patrick’s Day parade
in NYC is unarguably the most well-established cultural institution belonging to
people of Irish descent in the US. Whoever holds the right to determine the content
of the parade holds the right to represent the past as well as the future. The challenge
to the St. Patrick’s Day parade that ILGO offers is a profoundly destabilizing one
for the AOH because it undermines their imaginings of heimat, as a place of wholeness, unity, and integrity and shows it to be just as diverse (and disorienting) as the
US social order.
Acknowledgements
The research upon which this paper is based is part of a project conducted with
the research assistance of Adrian Mulligan. The research could not have been completed without his generous and insightful collaboration. I would like to thank the
members of ILGO and the AOH who participated in interviews as well as Janet
Jacobsen, Miranda Joseph, Michael Heffernan, and the anonymous reviewers who
provided substantial and very insightful comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I am
grateful to the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the University
of Arizona for financial support of the project.
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