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>> 167 5 Bad Paddies Talk Back This chapter highlights the voices of Irish newcomers, both new and newer Irish immigrants in Yonkers, and how they interact with the good Paddy Irish model. As with chapter 4, this chapter begins with the St. Patrick’s Day season but does so through the experience of these more recent arrivals to Yonkers. While conditions, both in Ireland and in the United States, have changed since the migration of earlier Irish cohorts to the city, legal status largely sets Irish newcomers apart from their predecessors. As such, these cohorts reveal how being undocumented often makes it difficult to conform to, or even care about, established benchmarks for Irishness in the United States, namely, hard work, order, loyalty, faith, and family. While a precarious legal status encourages indifference toward being a particular kind of Irish person in the United States, their sentiments nonetheless also suggest a greater certainty about America’s bipolar racial order. Many “new” Irish immigrants first immigrated to formerly Irish neighborhoods in the Bronx and Manhattan during the 1980s and later moved to Yonkers beginning in the early 1990s. At the same time, a “diversity” visa program (which will be discussed at greater length in chapter 6) allowed significant numbers of Europeans, and the Irish especially, to 168 > 169 contemporary Irish immigrants perceive to be novel. At the same time, the language of neoliberalism creeps into their discourse, including racially coded remarks to disparage those who fail to champion supposedly appropriate values and choices. While I examine the sentiments of new and newer Irish immigrants throughout the chapter, the concluding section on race focuses especially on more recent arrivals. Unlike assimilated Irish ethnics born and raised in Yonkers, the Irish white flighters, who have lived longer in the United States than in Ireland, or even the new Irish immigrants, who have resided here for well over two decades, the newer Irish have a relatively short tenure in their adopted land. As a result, they are better positioned to reflect upon their encounters with race. Their sentiments reveal the many ways in which race (and race thinking) is not automatic or natural but learned and, at the same time, a fundamental site of immigrant incorporation within the United States. St. Patrick’s Day in Yonkers: New and Newer Irish Helen hurried out the door that St. Patrick’s Day morning with her children , Shane and Maeve. They were running late, and Helen feared that they would miss the train. They were meeting Gemma and her two children , Cormack and Emily, at the Wakefield train station. Together we would journey into Manhattan and watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade on Fifth Avenue. Helen and Gemma are longtime friends who hail from the same town in Tipperary. They once shared an apartment in the Inwood section of Manhattan shortly after they immigrated to the United States in the mid-1980s. When they first arrived in New York, they overstayed their holiday visas and found work in domestic service. Helen attended to the elderly, while Gemma found work as a live-in nanny. They, like most of the new Irish, eventually changed their legal status. In 1991, Helen married Peadar, who now owns his own hardwood floor business. Two years later, Gemma married Tom, who works for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Both women left the workforce to care for their children, although Gemma also cares for another family ’s toddler part-time in her home. Both couples purchased homes in southeast Yonkers, where they currently live. Gemma and Helen adorn their children in attire suited for a St. Patrick ’s Day parade. Shane wears a green jacket with “Ireland” written 170 > 171 Helen: I guess so. But it’s different for our children with us being Irish. They play Irish sports over here. We take them home to Ireland every year. For us (pause), being Irish is more year-round. We don’t need a parade to be Irish. We are [her emphasis] Irish. So why do you take them to the parade? Helen: Even though I see my children as Irish, I guess they’re really American. This is what they’ll probably do when they get older. Do you go to the parade in Yonkers? Gemma: No. It’s a bit out of the way, isn’t it? Helen: I’m not too crazy about driving over to Getty Square. What’s that they call it? Ghetto Square? In contrast to many assimilated...

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