Fitting into a New Place: Irish Immigrant Experiences in Shaping a Canadian Landscape

Escaping one heritage of British colonialism for another, Irish immigrants to Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth century helped to shape the image of Canada and Canadian nationalism. In this paper, I compare the diversity of Irish immigrant experiences in Canadas urban and wilderness landscapes. The Irish immigrant experience in major urban centers is well documented. Community neighborhoods, Church activities and domestic and manual labor constitute just part of the stories of urban Irish Canadians in cities such as Toronto. The popular conception of the Irish as strictly city people is strengthened by the lack of discussion of the Irish immigrant role in taming (and ideologically shaping) the wilderness of Western Canada. It is argued that this has to do with the colonial image of the Irish from which British imperialist Canada sought to distinguish itself.     

Estimating the Number of Combatants during the Mixtón War in the Peñol de Nochistlán

Abstract

The objective of this article is to determine the number of combatants in the Mixtón War (1541–42), one of the most important military confrontations of the early years of the vice-royalty in Western Mexico, by analysing the Peñol de Nochistlán. To this end, information provided by historians has been compared with the population estimates established from the density of settlements known from archaeological evidence in order to define the area occupied by the armies involved in the conflict. This exercise resulted in a shifting array of spaces that could have been used by the combatants during confrontations. However, it will enable more intense archaeological prospecting in the area around the site of El Tuiche — the place identified as the Peñol of Nochistlán — revealing new evidence of the events that occurred on this battlefield.