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Abstract
John Finerty: An
Irish-American in Mexico
Cowan, Mimi (Boston College,
USA)
John Finerty was born in Galway in 1846, the
son of a Republican newspaper editor. Under threat of arrest
after making nationalist speeches, Finerty emigrated to the
United States at age 18 and eventually settled in Chicago,
where he became a respected journalist and a vocal supporter
of Irish nationalism. In 1877 and 1879, Finerty travelled to
Mexico, first as part of a delegation of American
businessmen seeking to improve industrial relations between
the two countries, and, on his subsequent trip, as a solo
traveler, all the while wiring articles back to the Chicago
Times. These articles contained his observances of and
experiences in the southern neighbor of his adopted country
and in 1904 Finerty used these articles and his personal
notes on the two trips to create Mexican Flash Lights – A
Narrative of Travel, Adventure, and Observation in Mexico,
Old and New. Although Finerty was known as an Irishman when
he was in Chicago, his travels to Mexico allowed him to
assert his identity as an American. His writings on Mexico
reveal an Irishman who thoroughly accepted American notions
of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, key ideologies
that defined the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico
throughout the nineteenth century. It is through Finerty’s
discussion of the Mexican “other” that he was able to
construct his identity as an American. Furthermore,
Finerty’s life and writings suggest a complication to the
standard historiographical view of the Irish in the United
States. Like many other American Irish, he settled in an
urban centre, but immigration was not a one-way street for
Finerty. He was accustomed to mobility and travel and had
long since shed any provincialism he may have once had. He
was keenly aware of and consciously promoted the Americas as
a place constituted of many different kinds of peoples, an
ideological precursor to multiculturalism. This paper
suggests that by studying Irish immigrants who travelled and
lived throughout the Americas, we can gain a better
understanding of the ways in which they viewed themselves,
Ireland, and their adopted homes and how they were able to
use available ideologies to assert their chosen identities.
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