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    More Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces
    More Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces
    More Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces
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    More Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces

    By Thomas C. Wright

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    The remarkable economic growth of Las Vegas between 1980 and 2007 created a population boom and a major increase in the ethnic and religious diversity of the city. Today, over 21 percent of the city’s population is foreign born, and over 30 percent speak a language other than English at home. The local court system offers interpreters in 82 languages, and in 2005/2006, for example, more than 11,000 people, originating from 138 countries, were naturalized there as American citizens.More Peoples of Las Vegas extends the survey of this city’s cosmopolitan population begun in The Peoples of Las Vegas (University of Nevada Press, 2005). As in the previous book, this volume includes well-established groups like the Irish and Germans, and recently arrived groups like the Ethiopians and Guatemalans. Essays describe the history of each group in Las Vegas and the roles they play in the life and economy of the city. The essays also explore the influence of modern telecommunications and accessible air travel, showing how these factors allow newcomers to create transnational identities and maintain ties with families and culture back home. They also examine the role of local institutions—including clubs, religious organizations, shops, restaurants, and newspapers and other media—in helping immigrants maintain their ethnic and religious identities and in disseminating national and even regional cultures of origin.More Peoples of Las Vegas adds to our awareness of the rich and varied ethnic and religious character of Las Vegans. In a broader context, it offers thoughtful perspectives on the impact of globalization on a major American city and on the realities of immigrant life in the twenty-first century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Nevada Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2010
    ISBN9780874178180
    More Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces

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      More Peoples of Las Vegas - Jerry L Simich

      guerrillas

      PREFACE

      The University of Nevada Press published the first book on ethnicity of Las Vegas, The Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces, in the city’s centennial year, 2005. As long-term Las Vegans, we had observed the process of ethnic diversification for over three decades. As early as the 1970s, we noted new groups when they became visible in the Las Vegas Valley and sought out the ethnic restaurants and markets that they established. In 1976, we attended the first International Food Festival (today’s International Food and Folklife Festival), and in the mid-1980s contemplated researching local ethnic groups in a more systematic way. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Las Vegas’s ethnicity had evolved to the point that it begged for a study.

      In the first book, we examined thirteen different ethnic groups: Southern Paiutes; African Americans; Jews; Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Chileans; Chinese, Filipinos, and peoples from the Indian subcontinent; and Greeks, Italians, Croats, and Poles. Some of those groups are prominent and long established, while others are virtually unknown and recently arrived.

      Our purpose in this book is to build upon the findings of the first publication by examining thirteen additional ethnic groups that call Las Vegas home. We again follow the approach of probing both large and small, long-established and newly transplanted ethnic groups. From Asia, we include the Japanese, Koreans, and Thais; from Latin America, the Cubans, Guatemalans, Colombians, and Argentines; from Europe, the Irish, Germans, Armenians, and Scandinavians; from Africa, the Ethiopians; and we include a religiously rather than geographically defined group, the Muslims.

      In the first book, we included a substantial amount of historical background to the contemporary scene in order to provide context for the case studies. To avoid duplication, that historical overview is not included in the present volume. Nonetheless, we believe that readers of this book would be well served to consult those historical sections—the introduction and chapters 1 and 2—in order to better appreciate the long-term transformation of a small railroad town into an ethnically diverse and vibrant metropolis.

      We wish to thank the authors of the chapters that follow. Clearly, this book could not have been done without them. Most authors are members of the ethnic groups they researched, while some are not, but all donned ethnographers’ hats and brought their subjects into the bright light of day. We especially salute the knowledge, energy, and versatility of Michael Green, who wrote about the Jews in the first book and the Irish in this one and cheerfully lent his extensive knowledge of Las Vegas history to both works.

      We appreciate the University of Nevada Press for its interest in our topic and encouragement for us to undertake the current study. We are especially indebted to Press director Joanne O’Hare and to Charlotte Dihoff, Matt Becker, and Sara Vélez Mallea for their support along the way. We also value the copyediting performed by Sarah Nestor. Thanks go to Don Mirjanian for his skillful work with census data. And Mary Wammack again applied the admirable editorial and organizational talents that made the completion of the first volume possible.

      INTRODUCTION

      Historically, Las Vegas has not been known as an ethnic city. It is no New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles—cities whose identities are wrapped up in ethnic neighborhoods, churches, markets, restaurants, organizations, and festivals. Except for the traditional African American Westside, the Southern Paiute reservation, and the relatively recent Hispanic barrio in the northeast, Las Vegas lacks the ethnic neighborhoods that define the traditional American ethnic city. While Las Vegas hosts a plethora of ethnic restaurants, markets, clubs, and places of worship, these are not primarily organized within ethnic spatial boundaries; rather, they are scattered across the Las Vegas Valley, often housed in the omnipresent strip malls, where they are largely invisible to passersby. There are large numbers of ethnic festivals and other events throughout the year, but, perhaps because Las Vegas offers a great variety of competing entertainments, they do not seem to be widely known outside of the ethnic communities.

      The present diversity of the peoples of Las Vegas is based on internal growth, migration, and immigration. From its founding through the 1970s, Las Vegas was essentially a community of European Americans; blacks; smaller minorities of Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese; a small number of Southern Paiutes; and a sprinkling of other peoples. The most notable demographic change before the 1980s was the beginning of the growth of the Hispanic, primarily Mexican, population in the 1960s.¹ Then beginning in the 1980s, a sustained local economic boom created an almost insatiable demand for labor and opportunities for managers and entrepreneurs. That boom and the rise of Las Vegas as a retirement community quickened the pace of migration from within the United States. Las Vegas attracted increasing numbers of European Americans as well as African Americans and Native Americans from around the country, Mexican Americans from the Southwest, and Pacific Islanders.²

      In 1980 Las Vegas’s population was 82.5 percent white, 9.8 percent black, and 7.4 percent Hispanic; a few thousand Asians and American Indians rounded out the local demography. The ethnic diversification that became noticeable in the 1980s exploded in the 1990s. Las Vegas grew by 83.5 percent between 1990 and 2000—to 1,563,282 census-counted persons—led by increases of 260.6 percent among Asians and 262.0 percent among Hispanics. In 2000 Las Vegas was approximately 63.1 percent white, 20.6 percent Hispanic, 8.4 percent non-Hispanic black, 6.2 percent Asian, 0.7 percent American Indian, 0.2 percent North African, and 0.2 percent black African. Census Bureau estimates for 2006, the most recent available when the writing was finished, are not as detailed as decennial census data, but they reveal a continuation of previous trends. Las Vegas in 2006 was 53.0 percent white, 27.1 percent Hispanic, 9.4 percent non-Hispanic black, 6.9 percent Asian, and 0.6 percent American Indian, with the remaining 3 percent categorized as other. ³

      These broad census categories merely scratch the surface of the changes in Las Vegas’s ethnic makeup. People tend to think of the nearly one-quarter of Las Vegans who are classified as Hispanic as Mexicans or Mexican Americans, ignoring the growing presence of peoples from all the Latin American countries, most of which, in turn, are rich in ethnic diversity. Likewise, the Asian category tends, in the common sensibility, to homogenize peoples with profoundly different ethnicities and cultures. Similarly, if we did not probe beyond the category American Indian, we would not discover that in addition to the native Southern Paiutes, Las Vegas is home to members of virtually every one of the dozens of tribes found in the United States and Canada as well as Indians from Latin America. And recent immigration from the Caribbean and Africa has greatly diversified Las Vegas’s black population. Moreover, identifying immigrants by country of origin further blurs ethnic distinctions, as many countries—Mexico, the Philippines, India, and Nigeria, for example—host dozens or even hundreds of different ethnic groups within their borders.

      It is immigration, above all, that has driven the ethnic diversification of Las Vegas in recent years. After declining under the impact of restrictive immigration laws, the Great Depression, and World War II, immigration to the United States has increased in each decade since the 1950s. To the traditional sources of immigrants—Europe, a few Asian countries, Mexico, and Canada—have been added virtually all the world’s countries. In the 1990s, the greatest decade of immigration in American history, over thirteen million immigrants came to the United States. In 2000 over thirty-one million people, representing 11.1 percent of the U.S. population, were foreign born.⁴

      Recent immigration has altered Las Vegas’s demography even more profoundly than that of the country as a whole. The 2000 U.S. census indicated that 18.0 percent of Las Vegas’s population was foreign born—over 50 percent above the national figure. Of the city’s foreign born, 61.1 percent were from Latin America, 23.6 percent from Asia, 9.9 percent from Europe, 3.1 percent from Northern America, 1.7 percent from Africa, and 0.4 percent from Oceania. Reflecting the impact of immigration, 26.0 percent of the population over five years of age spoke a language other than English at home, compared to the national figure of 17.9 percent. In 1990 Las Vegas ranked 44th among the 331 U.S. metropolitan regions for the proportion of its population comprised of new immigrants—those who had arrived in the last decade; in 2000, Las Vegas had risen to 26th. Estimates for 2006 confirm the presence of a growing immigrant population: 21.8 percent of Las Vegas’s population was foreign born, compared with 12.5 percent nationally; 30.7 percent spoke a language other than English at home, compared with 19.7 percent nationally.⁵

      Some immigrants have come directly to Las Vegas from their homelands around the globe, attracted by abundant jobs that do not require preexisting skills or proficiency in English: construction, landscaping and lawn maintenance, back of the house jobs in the casino resorts and restaurants, and other low-end occupations. Others came to southern Nevada after initially settling elsewhere in the United States, drawn by the prospect of jobs, cheaper living costs than in many metropolitan areas, or the opportunity for family reunification; the Los Angeles area has been a major source of secondary immigration to Las Vegas. Still others have arrived through refugee resettlement, a U.S. government program that places persons officially classified as refugees, and sometimes their families, in communities that can absorb them. While refugees have comprised a small fraction of Las Vegas’s immigrants, some of them were undoubtedly the first person from their country to make the Las Vegas Valley their home. The first refugee from Uzbekistan, Togo, or Kosovo who resettled in Las Vegas normally started a stream of family members, fellow refugees from other U.S. locales, and in some cases undocumented compatriots. Thus refugee resettlement has had a multiplier effect in the process of ethnic diversification.⁶

      There are many indications that ethnic diversification continues. In the first volume, two of our contributing authors identified restaurants serving forty-one ethnic communities, from the common Thai and Mexican to the more rare Honduran and Romanian, and markets catering to twenty-two ethnic groups in addition to numerous hybrid ethnic establishments.⁷ Now we can add Malaysian, Indonesian, Serbian, Mongolian, Jamaican, and Himalayan (Tibetan, Nepalese, and Indian) to the list of restaurants and Laotian and Bulgarian to the markets; and since many of these ethnic institutions do not advertise in the Yellow Pages, we are confident that there are more to be discovered. There are more ethnic media and more, and more diverse, places of organized worship than existed just a few years ago, and one observes a growing number of languages on the commercial signs that dot the Valley.

      There are other quantitative measures of the continuing diversification of Las Vegas’s population. As recently as the 1970–71 school year, the student body of the Clark County School District was 82.6 percent white, 12.6 percent black, 3.4 percent Hispanic, 0.5 percent Asian, and 0.4 percent American Indian. By 2000–2001, whites, while still the largest group, had become a minority at 49.9 percent, while Hispanics had reached 28.8 percent, blacks 13.8 percent, Asians 6.6 percent, and American Indians 0.9 percent. Statistics for 2007–2008 reveal impressive growth of both the Hispanic (39.9 percent) and Asian (9.3 percent) populations, stability of the black (13.9 percent) and American Indian (0.8 percent) populations, and a significant decline of the white student body (36.1 percent); the Hispanic public-school population thus has passed the white. While there were 108 private schools in Clark County in 2007–2008, that number had not grown since 2003–2004 and the number of home-schooled students in 2007–2008 had dropped from the number in 2000–2001. Therefore, it appears that the Clark County School District enrollment figures are a reasonably accurate snapshot of the racial makeup of the Valley’s youth.⁸

      Data from the Clark County Court Interpreters Office shed further light on the growth of an immigrant population in the Valley. Six years after its establishment, during a twelve-month period in 1981–82, the office handled 1,655 court cases, or 138 per month, in 25 languages. In 1994 the load was 1,026 per month. By 2002 the monthly case load reached 2,953, and the office was charged with providing certified interpreters for 82 languages, 79 of which had been employed between 1994 and 2000. In 2007 the staff were providing service in 4,781 cases per month—a growth of 466 percent since 1994 and 162 percent in the 2002–2007 period. Even these impressive statistics fail to plumb the depth of Las Vegas’s diversification. They do not reveal the number of Latin American countries whose natives were serviced, for example; and inversely, the growth of English-speaking populations from the Caribbean and parts of Africa is, of course, absent from these figures.⁹

      Naturalization, or the granting of U.S. citizenship, provides yet another window on immigration. There were 3,578 immigrants naturalized in the 1970s in Nevada, a large majority of those in Las Vegas; in the 1990s, the number had risen to 24,736. During 2005–2006, 11,819 persons were naturalized in Las Vegas alone. A snapshot of naturalizations in Las Vegas in three recent periods reinforces our other observations. In 1985–87, people naturalized came from 79 countries; in 1999–2000, from 131 countries; in 2005–2006, from 138 countries. After constituting a majority in earlier years, persons from western Europe represented 8.9 percent of Las Vegas’s new citizens in 1985–87, 2.9 percent in 1999–2000, and had rebounded to 3.1 percent in 2005–2006. The greatest suppliers of new citizens in 2005–2006 were, in order, Mexico, the Philippines, Cuba, El Salvador, and the People’s Republic of China.¹⁰

      A number of the book’s chapters refer to Las Vegas’s economic boom as a major, if not the major, pull factor fueling the Valley’s rapid population growth and increasing its ethnic diversity. In several cases the authors refer to the boom as continuing, although it ended in 2008. That is because the boom collapsed shortly after the chapters were written. Since 2008, population growth in Las Vegas has slowed substantially. The number of immigrants arriving in Las Vegas also appears to have declined. The national press has reported that some Mexican and Central American immigrants have been returning home, despite bleak prospects there. Locally, a telling sign of the reduction of immigrant newcomers is enrollment in the Clark County School District’s English-language learners program. After growing by 132 percent between 1998 and 2008, enrollment fell by nearly 2 percent between September 2008 and February 2009.¹¹ We cannot project the short-term effect of the economic recession on Las Vegas ethnicity, but we are confident that when prosperity returns, Las Vegas will once again be a magnet for both migrants and immigrants.

      The findings of our initial study of Las Vegas ethnicity confirmed the notion that many local immigrants, particularly recent ones, live transnationally. Transnationalism is a complex phenomenon that derives from the recent surge in immigration, the revolution in telecommunications, globalization, and a host of other factors. At its most basic, transnationalism may be defined as sustained ties of persons, networks, and organizations across nation-state borders.¹² Many immigrants today do not need to give up their identification with their home country, particularly those who comprise large communities. They have the ability to continue living their native cultures as fully as they choose and are able to do so, while simultaneously integrating, to varying degrees, into U.S. society and culture. They may even have more than two locales that they call home. These dual or multiple ties are at the root of the concern expressed by those who argue that recent immigrants do not assimilate. This argument ignores the fact that, compared with the Europeans who arrived during the great wave of transatlantic immigration (1880–1914), today’s immigrants possess far greater means of retaining their native cultures and ties to their home countries.¹³

      The manifestations of transnationalism are readily visible in Las Vegas. Immigrants communicate with family and friends via the Internet, telephone, and fax. They receive news from the home country over the Internet and watch sports and entertainment on satellite television. Many can afford travel to the home country, where they have family and may retain a home, thanks to discounted air tickets or, in the case of Mexicans and Central Americans, to bus connections (Las Vegas has two companies offering direct service from Las Vegas to the Mexican border at El Paso). All these available tools make communication between Las Vegas and the rest of the world easier and faster than it was from coast to coast in the United States a generation ago.

      Transnational living is not only facilitated by the ease of communication and travel. Local institutions play a fundamental role in sustaining ties with the home country. Ethnic restaurants reinforce identities through food and sometimes serve as the sites for weddings and other important life-cycle events. Ethnic markets are multipurpose institutions: they supply foods from home, both imported nonperishables and perishables grown in California for specific ethnic tastes. Markets also supply music, movies, and publications from the home country and often feature money-remitting services. They carry the locally published ethnic newspapers in the case of the larger groups, with the Los Angeles-published newspapers reaching out to the smaller groups still incapable of supporting a local publication. Local radio and television stations play an important role in reinforcing home cultures. Entertainers from the home country tour the United States and stop with increasing frequency in Las Vegas. Clubs, folkloric groups, and religious organizations work to preserve and disseminate national and even regional cultures of origin.¹⁴

      Several of the groups examined in our first volume demonstrated transnationalism, the small colony of around one thousand Chileans providing a good example. Some Chileans came to the United States to escape the state terrorism of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), and more have come for economic opportunity. In Las Vegas Chileans have a very active organization, the Chilean-American Association of Las Vegas. Their folkloric music and dance group, Ecos de Chile, performs locally and regionally. Too small to sustain a market, the Chilean community has had a restaurant off and on. Many local Chileans retain dual citizenship. Las Vegas Chileans have been active in the international Encounters of Chileans Abroad, an organization dedicated to strengthening ties between the diaspora and the Chilean homeland. It lobbies for easing restrictions on the granting of Chilean nationality to immigrants’ children and for the right to vote in national elections. In an interesting case of the country of origin’s promoting transnationalism, the Chilean government in 2000 created the Directorate for Chilean Communities Abroad and officially designated the expatriates around the globe as Region XIV—an addition to the thirteen administrative regions into which the country is divided.¹⁵

      A few words about definitions are in order. First, the concept of ethnicity, write the editors of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, is an immensely complex phenomenon.¹⁶ Rather than adopt a strict definition, they list a series of components of ethnicity, some or all of which may describe any particular ethnic group. These are: common geographic origin; migratory status; race; language or dialect; religious faith or faiths; ties that transcend kinship, neighborhood, and community boundaries; shared traditions, values, and symbols; literature, folklore, and music; food preferences; settlement and employment patterns; special interests in regard to politics in the homeland and in the United States; institutions that serve specifically to maintain the group; an internal sense of distinctiveness; and an external perception of distinctiveness. The weight given to any of these characteristics depends, of course, on a cluster of factors, such as the size of the group, the length of its time in the United States, and its degree of assimilation.¹⁷

      Second, we need to define the geographic parameters of our study. To most people, Las Vegas means the Las Vegas Valley, which includes the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, and the contiguous urban core of unincorporated Clark County. The 2000 U.S. census defines Las Vegas as the city of Las Vegas, which includes only a portion of the urban area and excludes the Strip. Therefore, the statistics for 2000 found throughout the book refer either to Clark County or to the Las Vegas, Nevada-Arizona Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA).

      The urban core of the Las Vegas Valley contained 96.4 percent of Clark County’s population in 2000; it contained 84.9 percent of the MSA, which adds Nye County, Nevada, and Mohave County, Arizona, to Clark County. Chapter authors cite both Clark County and MSA figures. Given the concentration of most non-European ethnic groups in the urban core, the figures for Clark County, and even more for the MSA, probably underreport the percentage of Las Vegas Valley residents who belong to Latin American, Asian, and African groups.¹⁸ Ethnic diversity in the Las Vegas Valley, then, may be even more pronounced than our statistics suggest.

      Third, since this book appears well after the 2000 census and prior to the release of the findings of the 2010 census, the chapter authors, where feasible, have incorporated some population estimates for 2006 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. These data are based on samples of the population rather than on the population as a whole. While they may be less reliable than regular census information, one must take into account the difficulties that census takers have in tracking down immigrants, in part because some of the newly arrived may be undocumented and others may view government officials with suspicion. This means that neither body of data should be treated as definitive, particularly in the case of immigrant populations. The Census Bureau maintains, however, that comparisons between the 2006 American Community Survey and the 2000 census in matters such as race and claimed ancestry are valid.¹⁹

      The chapters that follow, we believe, strengthen the argument we made in the first volume that Las Vegas over the past three decades has become a city whose ethnicity is rich, varied, and worthy of study.

      Notes

      1. See Eugene P. Moehring, Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Rise of Las Vegas, in The Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces, ed. Jerry L. Simich and Thomas C. Wright (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2005), 1–17.

      2. Studies of old immigration include Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Immigration That Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990) covers both the traditional European and the beginnings of the new global immigration.

      3. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Las Vegas, Nev. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983), P-28; http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DDTable?ts=77728578655; http://factfinder.census.gov.servlet/QTTable?tx=77724691468; http://mumfordidyndns.org/cen2000/BlackWhite/DiversityBWDataPages/412msaBWCt.htm; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates—Las Vegas-Paradise, V=NV Metro Area, 2006; http://factfinder.census.gov/.

      4. Studies of the newer currents of immigration include Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Sanford J. Ungar, Fresh Blood: The New American Immigrants (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); David W. Haines and Carol A. Mortland, eds., Manifest Destinies: Americanizing Immigrants and Internationalizing Americans (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001).

      5. http://factfinder.census.gov/servletQTTable?_ts=78316446843 (accessed April 6, 2007); http://mumforddidyndns.org/cen2000/NewAme3ricans/NewAmerData/4120msaNuAmer.htm (accessed April 6, 2007); U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, ACS Selected Social Characteristics in the United States—Las Vegas-Paradise, NV Metro Area 2006, http://factfinder.census.gov/.

      6. See Dina Titus and Thomas C. Wright, The Ethnic Diversification of Las Vegas, in Simich and Wright, Peoples of Las Vegas, 28–31.

      7. Ibid., 19–29.

      8. Ibid., 22. Clark County School District data are courtesy of Tom Rodriguez, Executive Manager, Diversity and Affirmative Action Programs. On private schools and home-schooled students, see Nevada Department of Education, Nevada Private Elementary and Secondary Non-Public Schools, at http://nde.doe.nv.gov/SDPrivateSchools.htm; Nevada Department of Education, Research Bulletin, Student Enrollment and Licensed Personnel Information, at http://www.doe.nv.gov/Resources.htm#Bulletins.

      9. Titus and Wright, Ethnic Diversification, 22–23. Data are courtesy of former program administrator Mariteresa Rivera-Rogers and current (2008) program administrator Leland Page. Note that despite the large number of tourists who visit Las Vegas, both Rivera-Rogers and Page emphasize that the overwhelming proportion of cases they serve involve locals, not tourists.

      10. http://www.dhs.gov/ximgtn/statistics/publications/YrBk05Na.shtm and http://www.dhs.gov/ximgtn/statistics/publications/YrBk06Na.shtm, courtesy of Marie Thérèse Sebrechts, Regional Media Manager—Southwest, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

      11. Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 1, 2009.

      12. Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13.

      13. There are dozens of books on transnationalism and related themes, among them: Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism (Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, Mass.: E. Elgar, 1999); Peter Hitchcock, Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Nyala Ali Khan, The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 2005). A well-known criticism of immigrants’ retention of their native cultures is Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2006).

      14. Mexicans have established several clubs of immigrants from specific Mexican states, and Filipinos have several organizations of persons from specific islands.

      15. Bernardo Arriaza, The Chileans, in Simich and Wright, Peoples of Las Vegas, 289–302; Thomas C. Wright, Chilean Diaspora, in Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004), 57–65.

      16. Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin, eds., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), iv.

      17. William Petersen, Concepts of Ethnicity, Harvard Encyclopedia, 234–42.

      18. See Simich and Wright, Peoples of Las Vegas, xvi, n. 8.

      19. For further clarification, see http://www.census.gov/acs/www/UseData/compACS.htm.

      CHAPTER 1

      The Irish

      MICHAEL GREEN

      The Irish have been integral to Nevada history, starting with the miners in the state’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century mining booms. But as Nevada’s population shifted south and turned to gaming and federal projects in the mid- and late twentieth century, Irish influence declined. That trend was especially evident in Las Vegas, where they have been less prominent than Italians and Jews, who dominated gaming; African Americans, whose struggle for civil rights helped shape the postwar era; and the burgeoning Latino population. Yet the Irish have played a significant role in Las Vegas from its beginnings, maintaining their heritage while blending into southern Nevada life and in larger numbers than many might suspect. According to the 2000 census, of 1,998,257 Nevadans, 220,488, or 11 percent, reported Irish or Celtic ancestry and 1.4 percent, or 28,962, were Scots-Irish, with more than 100,000 Irish among Clark County’s 1.2 million-plus residents.¹

      But who is Irish? For some, the line runs through the mother; others accept any Irish ancestry. Last names make some obvious—but not all. Shifting borders have mingled English, Scottish, and Welsh with the Irish. Using the St. Patrick’s Day motto—There’s a little bit of Irish in all of us—makes the process no easier. As several Irish Las Vegans have said, those who are not Irish want to be. A pub owner said, I don’t know how many people have come to me and said, ‘I’m Irish on my father’s side or on my mother’s side.’ Irish is synonymous with fun and frivolity and we like to have fun. We cannot be accused of being staid—nor of lacking influence. The Irish impact on Las Vegas has often been subtle, but never minor.²

      Early History

      The Irish made their presence felt from Las Vegas’s beginnings. In 1855 the thirty Mormon missionaries sent to the area included Irish-born John Steele, designer of their fort, which later became the Las Vegas Ranch. Octavius Decatur Gass, its owner from 1865 to 1881, was Scotch-Irish, as was Senator William A. Clark, a Montana copper magnate who bought the ranch for the water rights he needed for a division point for his railroad and planned a townsite east of Main and Fremont that was auctioned off on May 15, 1905. Surveyor and engineer John T. McWilliams, an Ulster immigrant’s son, platted a townsite west of the railroad tracks, but Clark overwhelmed him, and McWilliams’s land became West Las Vegas, long a segregated area where blacks and some whites and Latinos lived.³

      In Las Vegas’s early years, most of the attention the Irish received consisted of St. Patrick’s Day programs, but two businessmen showed their group’s varied pursuits. In 1905 J. O. McIntosh, who also ran a wholesale liquor business, opened the Arizona Club in Block 16—First Street between Stewart and Ogden, where the railroad permitted liquor sales. With McIntosh moving to Utah and Al James in charge, the Arizona Club added prostitution, which lasted until 1942, when city officials closed Block 16 under pressure from federal officials. By contrast, Searchlight merchant James Cashman moved to Las Vegas in 1924 to run a garage and car dealership. He led the Elks Lodge in building the aptly named Cashman Field and starting the Helldorado parade and rodeo, pulled wires in the Democratic party, and persuaded Thomas Hull to build the El Rancho Vegas, which started the Las Vegas Strip. His family remained active in local affairs into the 2000s. James Jr. served in the legislature; he and sister Tona Cashman Siefert expanded their father’s businesses; James III was active in the Chamber of Commerce until his death in 1995, and his brother Tim has held key posts in the Nevada Development Authority.⁴

      The Irish made their presence felt early in the area’s development in other ways. When legislators created Clark County in 1909, the first officials included sheriff Charles Corkhill, surveyor Charles McCarthy, assessor W. J. McBurney, and public administrator Charles Ireland. All four lost election bids in 1910, but McCarthy later became surveyor and assessor, Dan O’Leary recorder, and Ireland mayor. The Irish also belonged to key families. Active in mining and journalism in Goodsprings and Searchlight, recorder and auditor Frank Doherty wed longtime Las Vegas Age editor and local Republican leader Charles P. Squires’s daughter, Florence. Leona McGovern, the daughter of C. N. McGovern, one of Las Vegas’s first city commissioners in 1911, married Harley Harmon, later district attorney; their son Harley became a leading insurance executive and county commissioner, with his sons following him into business and politics.⁵

      As with most local groups, the Irish populace mushroomed with Hoover Dam construction in the 1930s. The thousands of dam workers included Patrick McFadden. One son, John, began an insurance agency. Another, Leo, became a priest, rising to monsignor after a long tenure in Las Vegas that included starting the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s (UNLV’s) Newman Club. As Las Vegas grew during and after World War II, those in the military and involved in gambling seemed to wield the most influence: while wartime projects suggested a future in federal largesse, casino operators turned gaming into the engine that drove the Las Vegas economy. But opportunities existed, too, for the Irish, and they made the most of them, making contributions in a wide spectrum of occupations and endeavors. In Las Vegas they have been most visible in politics, gaming, the media, and

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