| Abstract | This post by Matthew Barlow is presented in partnership with Au delà des frontières / Beyond Borders, the blog of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster UniversityWikimedia Commons.Indeed, the Canadian industrial revolution began in Griff in the 1830s.While the population was a heterogeneous combination of Irish-Catholics, Anglo-Protestants, and French-Canadians, the neighbourhood is remembered today for its Irish population.An imagined Ireland has remained part and parcel of the Griffintown experience, as the people of the neighbourhood’s diaspora found ways to represent the old country back to themselves.1859 Map of Sud-Ouest of Montréal (Griffintown, top right).This ambivalence in Irish-Catholic Griffintown was a product of the hybridized, diasporic culture that had developed there by the late ninteenth century, long after emigration from Ireland to Canada had ended.And more, diasporic communities are bound together through a collective memory and through their memory work, forged and reinforced through the quotidian.Wikimedia Commons.This identity, in turn, was based on the extensive memory work carried out by the rank-and-file of the population of Griff, as opposed to it being an elite-driven process as it is in most instances of diasporic culture.Patrick’s Day in the first half of the twentieth century.Walking the streets of Griffintown with former Denis Delaney, as he tells stories to a small crowd on a walking tour, I can see how…
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