Mexico City’s Columbus statue to be replaced by Indigenous female figure
A statue of divisive European explorer Christopher Columbus that was on prominent display in Mexico City will be removed in favor of a female Indigenous figure, the city’s mayor said this weekend, as the country becomes the latest to reckon with the public commemoration of its past.
The looming Columbus figure has stood tall on the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard for over 100 years, but on 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,” Ms. 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 told an event in the capital.
The statue was taken down from the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard last year for restoration work ahead of an annual protest and has not been put back up.
Ms. Sheinbaum is an ally of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has staked a large part of his leftist political claim around championing Mexico’s Indigenous communities.
Last month, Mr. López 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 has been common in the United States too, 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 re-examination of the colonial era.
In June, the House also passed legislation to remove statues of Confederate leaders from the U.S. Capitol and replace the bust of Roger Taney, a U.S. chief justice who wrote the 1857 Supreme Court decision that said people
of African descent were not U.S. citizens. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the legislation was an “opportunity to right the wrongs of history, starting here ... in the U.S. Capitol.”
A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va., is set to come down on Wednesday, more than 130 years after it was built as a tribute to a Civil War hero who is now widely seen as a symbol of racial injustice, state officials said Monday.
The 19th-century bronze of Columbus in Mexico City, however, will not be taken down all together, Ms. Sheinbaum, the city’s mayor, said. Instead, it will be relocated to an unspecified “worthy” place.