Lessons From One of Texas’s Earliest Immigration Waves

Digital subscribers can listen to this article. Subscribe today for unlimited access to Texas Monthly. Already a subscriber? Log in. Dallas’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Festival is billed as the largest celebration of its kind in the Southwest, drawing more than 100,000 people to the city’s Greenville Avenue neighborhoods, where revelers down green Jell-O shots and pints of frothy Guinness. Even if they weren’t tipsy, many of these partygoers would be surprised, presumably, to learn that during the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants were seen not as white but in the words of one historian, “as another race, so foreign that they could never be absorbed into the United States.”In his 1995 book How the Irish Became White, the scholar Noel Ignatiev argued that these immigrants—driven…

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