Some Puerto Rican activists are trying to erase Spain’s legacy.

Puerto Rican activists rally against symbols of oppression

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Statues, street names, plazas and even the body of conquistador Juan Ponce de León himself: Spain left a nearly indelible legacy in Puerto Rico that attracts hordes of tourists every year, but some activists are trying to erase it as they join a U.S. movement to eradicate symbols of oppression.

Dozens of activists marched Saturday through the historic part of Puerto Rico’s capital, some wearing traditional Taino clothing as they banged on drums and blew on conch shells to demand that the U.S. territory’s government start by removing statues including those of explorer Christopher Columbus.

“These statues represent all that history of violence, of invasion, of looting, of theft, of murder,” said an activist who goes by the name of Pluma and is a member of Puerto Rico’s Council for the Defense of Indigenous

Rights. “These are crimes against humanity.”

Columbus landed in Puerto Rico in 1493 accompanied by Spaniard Ponce de León, who later became the island’s first governor and quelled an uprising by the native Tainos, a subgroup of the Arawak Indians. Historians and anthropologists believe that up to 60,000 Tainos lived in Puerto Rico at the time, but they were soon forced into labor and succumbed to infectious disease outbreaks.

Centuries later, government officials honored both explorers by erecting statues and naming streets and plazas after them across Puerto Rico. The Columbus Plaza is at the entrance of Old San Juan and bears a statue of Columbus unveiled in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of his arrival. Meanwhile, a nearby statue of Ponce de León stands facing south with his left hand on his hip and right finger pointed toward the first settlement he founded. The ruins still mark the spot of the island’s first Spanish capital and is a U.S. National Historic Landmark. The statue made of melted steel from British cannons also points in the same direction of the nearby San Juan Bautista Cathedral that bears Ponce de León’s remains and is a popular tourist spot.

Activists are demanding both statues be removed as the first step in taking down symbols of oppression across Puerto Rico.

“No, it won’t be easy,” acknowledged activist Francisco Jordán García, who helped organize the march. “It’s going to be a long process.”

But he offered alternatives: “We can melt them and create a different statue of someone who truly deserves it.”

The march comes as Puerto Ricans’ interest in the territory’s indigenous past continues to grow. In the 2010 Census, some 42,000 of the 3.7 million people living on the island at that time identified themselves as at least partially Taino.