PROPOSAL TYPE
Individual
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Additional Presenters
RELATED TOPICS
- Labor and Economy
- Memory
- Place
- Public Engagement
- Social Justice
ABSTRACT
Last September, the Leadville Irish Memorial was unveiled, funded mostly by the Irish government and featuring the names of over 1300 mostly immigrants. The average age of those buried in this pauper cemetery is 22, half of them infants and stillborn. The pauper cemetery holds the remains of immigrants who moved to Leadville during the height of the silver boom. They found themselves in a death trap at 10,200 feet, dying of epidemics and mine accidents. Trapped in dangerous jobs, they formed unions and struggled to change their working conditions, only to see two strikes crushed by the Colorado National Guard.
This memorial grew out of my 22 years of research into the Irish immigrant community that lived in 19th century Leadville.
DESCRIPTION
My goal for this proposal is to share this important story about the historical value of memorializing paupers, those who were buried without names or recognition in a massive pauper cemetery. This has been a twenty year effort, with teams of student researchers and fundraising effort across Colorado’s Irish and Irish American communities The story of this journey sheds light on issues of class hierarchy, labor, immigration, and the state of Irish America in the 21st century.
The Leadville miners, mostly immigrants, formed unions and fought for fair pay, an eight hour day, better safety conditions, and the right to form a union. Their efforts were met with Governors mobilizing the Colorado National Guard under Martial Law with orders to arrest striking miners. Although this is an Irish memorial, the names of all of those buried in the Catholic Pauper section of Evergreen Cemetery are listed on the memorial.
Despite the momentum and energy that this project fueled within the Irish and Irish American communities, tensions began to develop around competing interpretations of the meaning of the memorial. For myself and the team of students who did the research, the meaning was simple: honoring the solidarity that these ethnic communities found and their struggle for survival through honoring worker and immigrant struggles today. In other words, if we were spending all of this energy to honor 19th century immigrant workers, we ought to also be using the memorial to shed light on the lives of 21st century immigrant workers, particularly since nearly half of Leadville today are migrants who do the most dangerous work in the surrounding ski resort towns. To this effect, we built bridges with the Spanish-speaking community in Leadville, mostly from Chihuahua and Central America, with the Colorado Labor community, and relatedly with the Southern Ute Nation. The latter bond was built under the notion that honoring a displaced and occupied people (Irish immigrants) necessitates honoring the original inhabitants of the region.
The resistance to some of these efforts speaks to the state of Irish America today and makes for an important story about how an ethnic memorial can be co-opted by powerful interests in that community and re-shaped to lose it’s original meaning.
I am looking either for more panelists or for ideas on elaborating and focusing this proposal. I have thought of presenting this to a NCPH conference since it started in 2016.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: James Walsh, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 10, 2024. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.