Looking for a way forward on Santa Fe’s monuments
History is moving at lightning speed right now.
After the May 25 killing of African American George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the Black Lives Matter movement has quickly pushed racial issues to the forefront of national debate. Not since the 1960s civil rights movement has race in America drawn such focus.
The debate over racism and treatment of people of color in the present day has spilled over to revitalized criticism of America’s original colonizers, some of whom have been proudly called conquistadors, or conquerors, in the past.
Christopher Columbus statues around the country are being taken down, and one — in Boston — was beheaded.
In our neighborhood, the focus has been on Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oñate, including huge statues of him in Albuquerque and Alcalde.
Oñate’s troops killed 800 people in Acoma Pueblo and ordered his men to cut off the foot of at least 24 native combatants. Spanish authorities years later convicted him on charges of use of excessive force and exiled him from New Mexico.
But Oñate paved the way for European civilization here and the Spanish settlers who are the ancestors of many in the state. He and Don Diego de Vargas, who led the re-occupation of Santa
Fe 12 years after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, became revered icons of Spanish culture, a status possibly enhanced as Anglos and the outside world began to erode the influence of Hispanic tradition.
The Oñate sculptures were controversial before they were ever erected, with Native Americans raising objections to the glorification of a violent conqueror, and debate over them has never stopped. Famously, someone cut off the foot of Alcalde’s Oñate statue in 1998.
Now, less than a month after George Floyd’s death, both Oñate statues suddenly have been removed and placed in storage.
Rio Arriba County Manager Tomas Campos deserves credit for having the Alcalde Oñate statue taken down on Monday, ahead of any confrontational and potentially dangerous protests. Albuquerque waited, and an anti-Oñate protester was shot by a defender of his statue during a melee later Monday. Whether or where the statues will be reinstalled isn’t known.
The speedy currents of change also charged through Santa
Fe City Hall last week. In a just matter of a few days, city government went from taking a non-committal stance on various monuments to the mayor’s strong call for taking down three of them considered offensive to Native Americans. One statue is now gone.
When first asked if there would be any follow-up on former Mayor Javier Gonzales’ inventory of historical monuments in Santa Fe and plans for discussion about what to do about them, Mayor Alan Webber’s administration issued a statement to the Journal North saying the monuments can be a vehicle for dialogue and that “erasure of history without conversation serves no one.”
But, on Wednesday, Webber changed course after the shooting in Albuquerque and plans were announced for a protest on the Santa Fe Plaza. He called for removal of a de Vargas statue in Cathedral Park, and — yes, things really are moving fast — it was gone by early Thursday morning.
He also supported taking out an obelisk honoring Indian fighter Kit Carson in front of the federal courthouse and, probably most significantly, the obelisk at the center of the Plaza. It honors Civil War veterans who fought on the Union side — and therefore against slavery — but who also were soldiers fighting against what the monument originally described as “savage” Indians during the Indian Wars. The word “savage” famously was chiseled out by a righteous vandal in the 1970s and the damage was never repaired.
Like the Oñate statues, the Plaza spire has long been a focus of Native American anger as glorifying genocide. In 1973, the City Council voted to remove it, but that never happened, apparently because of complications over the Plaza’s national and state listings as a historic landmark. Despite that, the city made an unsuccessful effort to remove the obelisk in the wee hours of Thursday morning.
There’s a good argument that removing the de Vargas statue and trying to pull out the Plaza obelisk were efforts to avoid damage to the monuments and dangerous scenes amid protests. Still, Webber went from urging dialogue to action in no time, leaving opponents of monument removal wondering when they get a chance to weigh in on the conversation.
In the case of the de Vargas statue, Webber said it could be stored until a “proper home” for it is found.
That may be a viable way forward for these monuments to the past — not destruction, but preservation somewhere for that “dialogue” the city first promoted. And could the Plaza obelisk be saved with simply a change of text to honor a broader spectrum of New Mexico cultures and history?
Some things are untenable and will simply continue to fester. Native Americans and others aren’t going to give up on their protests about statues and markers about conquest, particularly with the energy generated over the past several weeks.
Webber helped negotiate the end of another long-simmering cultural sore spot, the Entrada pageant on the Plaza that commemorated de Vargas’ retaking of Santa Fe.
Regarding the monuments, he’s right when he said last week that “simply leaving things as they are is not an option.”