Presentation of a Subordinate Group Member

I have chosen the Subordinate Group - Irish Americans. According to the Dictionary of American History, approximately 50,000 to 100,000 Irishmen came to American in the 1600's, and approximately 100,000 more arrived in the 1700's. They migrated from Ireland by ship in masses under extremely dire circumstances, many died crossing the ocean due to disease and the dismal conditions. Many of the ships that brought the immigrants over became known as "coffin ships". Upon arriving they were segregated from the other colonies and were eventually assimilated into a wide society. "Indentured servitude" ( typically a young, unskilled laborer contracted to work for an employer for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities needed during their term of indenture.) was an especially common way of affording migration and in the 1740's the Irish made up nine out of ten indentured servants in some of the colonial regions.

During the second half of the 1840's was one of the grimmest periods in my Irish history. Due to the great famine caused by the blight which struck a number of successive harvests which was Ireland's staple food, the potato. Millions died or emigrated to the United States of America. Most of us were escaping the terrible social and economic conditions as well as the penal laws that enacted by the British to annihilate our Celtic heritage and Catholic religion. My family was one of the hundreds of thousands that emigrated from Ireland and headed to America. We came to American as indentured servants to reimburse our fare, and our destination was in Pennsylvania. My father's brother and his family went on to Maryland. Times were tough for us, especially since we were of the Catholic faith and we found ourselves to be the minority and targets of discrimination in a Protestant nation.

When we reached America, it was difficult for us to coalesce with the mainstream. We were stereotyped as drunken, semi-savages and depicted as small ugly creatures armed with liquor and a shillelagh (a wooden walking stick or club, typically made from a stout knotty piece of wood). We are considered to be less cultured and have less intellect than our American counterparts. We faced segregation because of how the Americans portrayed us, and we had to work as indentured servants to pay back our fare to the America's. My mother and I found employment as domestic servants, while my father and brothers had to take physical labor jobs working in public work projects. It took us six years to pay off our debt and we decided to move to Chicago, Illinois in search of a better way of life. We found that most of our Irish immigrant friends favored the larger cities because they could create their own communities for support and protection in this new environment and Chicago was an industrial town that had already

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