Death, Remembrance, & Cemeteries in the U.S. West

Western History Association Los Angeles, California 26-29 October 2023

Session Information TBD

An Gorta Mór, Scéalta na Reiligí: The Great Hunger, Storytelling Through Irish Catholic Cemeteries in Oregon

In the nineteenth century over 2.1 million people left Ireland, desperate to escape poverty and An Gorta Mór, or the Great Hunger. Those who remained were often buried in mass graves, and many deaths during the trips abroad went unacknowledged. Between 1850 and 1860, Portland, Oregon’s Irish immigrant population rose from one to ten percent, and the “Famine Irish” started the city’s first Catholic cemetery in 1858. Irish influence can be seen throughout Oregon’s Catholic cemeteries, and Portland is home to one of the country’s few monuments to An Gorta Mór. Today, cemeteries in Portland and Corvallis, Oregon tell the story of the state’s past and serve as a physical and spiritual link to Ireland. This presentation examines how Irish Catholic cemeteries in the Pacific Northwest were not just built on the foundation of the immigrants who were buried there, but on the memory and trauma of widespread death during diaspora.

Fellow panelists:

The Problem of Death: Necropolitics in the Railroad Bracero Program of World War II Chantel Rodríguez, Minnesota Historical Society Cemetery Work in the Twentieth Century Urban West Allyson Brantley, University of La Verne It’s Not Easy Being Green: Conservation Cemeteries as Healing Spaces for Border Necropolitics, Climate Misaction, and Environmental Recovery Jesus Villa, Arizona State University

Materializing Ambiguous Loss: Heritage, Memory, and Uncertainty in an Occupied Border Zone Gabriella Soto, Arizona State University