"We're All Irish": Transforming Irish Identity in a Midwestern Community

Abstract

With a solemn air, my grandmother Mary B. O’Neill told me, “When you ride in a parade, you have to wave the right way” as she slowly demonstrated her instructions.1 With all the possible earnestness of a five-year-old, I internalized the “correct” wave and performed it to perfection when I accompanied the local homecoming queen in a 1976 parade. Both the parade and my small role in it, as the “junior attendant,” were ritualized annual performances in Everly, Iowa, a rural farming community of approximately 800 people of EuropeanAmerican descent situated in the northwest corner of the state. But, the image of my young self perched on the back of a convertible in a long velvet dress waving exactly as I had been instructed falls horribly short in my memory, particularly because my grandmother did not witness it. She died unexpectedly, a few days after the last advice she gave me. I never had the opportunity to ask her how she knew about proper parade etiquette, or why she insisted that my dress for the occasion be a green one. It is only recently, as an adult following the scholarly path of the anthropologist, that I have been led to weave together the threads of my grandmother’s life with issues of memory, culture, and Irish identity in Midwestern America. My grandmother, Mary O’Neill Wilbur, born in 1918, knew about parade etiquette because—as I discovered after piecing together the rarely mentioned event in my family—she appeared in one. The parade she participated in was not just any local celebration, the kind that is a common cultural practice in rural communities in the Midwest. She was, in fact, an invited guest at the historic inaugural festivities of the St. Patrick’s Day celebration in O’Neill Nebraska, in 1967. As many of her seven daughters recounted when I began to ask ques-