Columbus statue in Mexico to be replaced
A statue of European explorer Christopher Columbus that was on prominent display in Mexico City has been toppled in favor of a female Indigenous figure, the mayor said over the weekend, as the country becomes the latest to reckon with the public commemoration of its past.
The looming Columbus figure had stood tall on the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard for more than 100 years, but Sunday the mayor of the capital city, Claudia Sheinbaum, said it was time for a change of landscape and to make way for a monument that delivers “social justice.”
“We are announcing that the Columbus roundabout will very soon, in October, become a great recognition of the 500 years of resistance of the Indigenous women of our country,” Sheinbaum said. “We owe it to them.”
Although the country recognizes Columbus, “there are two visions,” one native and the other a European vision of the “discovery of America,” she said at an event in the capital.
The statue was taken down from the boulevard last year for restoration work ahead of an annual protest and has not been put back up.
Sheinbaum is an ally of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has staked a large part of his leftist political claim around championing Mexico’s Indigenous communities.
Last month, Lopez Obrador asked the country’s Indigenous peoples for forgiveness for the abuses inflicted on them during the bloody 1521 Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. He has previously called on Spain’s royal family and Pope Francis to formally apologize for atrocities committed during the Spanish conquest at the beginning of the 16th century.
The replacement of Columbus figures — and Confederate leaders — has been common in the United States, where several statues of the Italian navigator have been removed or defaced in places such as Richmond, Va., Boston and St. Paul, Minn., since the Black Lives Matter protests prompted a worldwide reexamination of the colonial era.
Similar reckonings have taken place elsewhere, including Britain and France.
For Monica Moreno Figueroa, a Mexican academic in the United Kingdom and co-founder of the Collective to Eliminate Racism in Mexico, the removal of the Columbus statue is “symbolically important.”
Figueroa said Monday that she welcomed the public debate that the decision spawned over “what kind of images we want in the public space.” However, simply replacing Columbus with a possibly anonymous Indigenous woman, in a country that is home to at least 50 Indigenous groups, lacked nuance, she said.
“It’s good to have this debate and to think about what to do with these things, but I think a replacement in itself needs to be carefully thought about,” Figueroa said.
The statue’s replacement has also been welcomed by the nonprofit Survival International, which champions the rights of tribal peoples around the world.
“The days when governments thought it right to celebrate figures like Columbus should be long gone,” said Jonathan Mazower, Survival’s communications director. “But statues and other symbols, while important, must never be a substitute for real action, and it’s much easier to replace a statue than it is to take real, meaningful action to redress the historic crimes against Indigenous peoples.”