The Irish and Community

This blog is a little outside the current topic for the first week of our discussion on Irish folk tales. However, I wanted to add some personal insights I gained from reading "Bringing It All Back Home" by Nuala O'Connor.

I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I was raised Catholic and spent 13 years in Catholic school. My maternal grandparents were first generation Lebanese and my paternal grandparents were generic American. We believe that side of the family ultimately hailed from Britain, but nobody has done a family tree. For all I know, I could be a descendant of someone on the Mayflower. My grade school and high school and Jacksonville, in general, had little cultural or ethnic identity. I say had, but the present tense is also applicable.
Jacksonville is an interesting place. The westside is typically Southern. This is the part of town that earned us the nickname "South Georgia." (I realize I am speaking in significant generalizations, but I've lived here 31 of my 45 years and I'm trying to make a point so please indulge me.) The rest of Jacksonville, however, is more difficult to classify. It is not really Southern and it's not typically Floridian, except for the beaches. Mostly, I consider it "white bread" - and not the good crusty on the outside, soft on the inside with a slight yeasty flavor white bread. It's Sunbeam white bread - no air pockets, smooth, tasteless white bread. (Please don't assume I don't love my home town. I just acknowledge its limitations. The proximity to all kinds of waterways and to Disney more than make up for the lack of good ethnic restaurants.)
Jacksonville is also a Navy town which makes it very transient. It always amazes me how comparatively few natives live here. I once attended a story-telling event and was the only one in the crowd who had been born here. Because of it's transient nature, no significant cultural communities have developed.
All that said, there is a fairly large Arabic community in Jacksonville, but we are scattered all over the city and our lives didn't center around our identity or that community.
Now, to the point of this blog (thanks for bearing with me). In 1989 I moved to Cleveland and was introduced to what remained of cultural neighborhoods. They were beginning to splinter as first-generation moved to second-generation moved to third-generation. There still remained plenty of Catholic schools and churches identified by their ethnic connection - Irish, German, Slovak, Polish, etc. I always thought this was unusual - less of a melting pot and more of a pot-luck with all the appetizers, entrees, vegetables and desserts on their own tables. After reading "Bringing It All Back Home," I realized the Irish communities were less a banding together and more a continuation of a cultural norm.

This way of life was based on continuity and tradition and was communal rather than individualistic. In such a context emigration was a huge wrench; it was a kind of death and was mourned as such.
(p. 32)

So, forming these communities in Cleveland and elsewhere was not only a natural process but also one that allowed the newly-arrived to more easily assimilate to a new country and, eventually, a new way of life.