Picking up pieces after toppling of monument

Milan Simonich’s column (“Mayor had assist from the governor in wrecking monument,” Ringside Seat, March 1): While I admire Milan’s constant readiness to call out the powerful for their misdeeds, in this case, I believe he unfairly casts Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham as an accomplice to our hapless Mayor Alan Webber. And, of course, neither the governor nor the mayor was responsible for toppling the monument on Indigenous Peoples Day.

On Wednesday, June 17, 2020, on the eve of a planned protest, Mayor Webber appeared on the Plaza with the protesters and called for the Soldiers’ Monument and two other memorials to come down. He said, “It is a moment of moral truth … and it is long overdue.” He also called for the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

While more experienced leaders in neighboring jurisdictions removed statues for safekeeping, they emphasized that their ultimate fates would be a community decision. Here, Webber arbitrarily decreed that the Santa Fe monuments were morally offensive and should be removed permanently. It was a serious mistake.

That same Wednesday evening, he had a phone conversation with the governor. Who initiated the call and exactly what was said are unclear, but a state-contracted crew arrived at the Plaza later that night with a large crane. In attempting to remove the Soldiers’ Monument, the workers dislodged the capstone, the pyramidal top of the column, then left around 3 a.m. when they realized their crane was too small to finish the job.

On Thursday morning, Webber said the botched attempt was “not an undertaking of the city.” A city spokesperson added, “The governor offered state assistance in the inspection of [the Soldiers’ Monument]. The state contractors determined the top of the obelisk was unstable and removed [it and] verified the remaining portions were stable.”

This statement was transparently false. The workers themselves told news outlets they were there to remove the monument, not inspect it, and the “unstable” capstone had been in place for 152 years. The mayor recently repeated this fanciful story in a deposition for the Union Protectiva lawsuit. The governor’s office has, wisely, not commented on the specifics.

Over the summer of 2020, Mayor Webber was criticized by the Native activists for not removing the monuments as promised and by Hispanic critics for not convening the promised Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His inaction contributed to the events of October 12, 2020, when the Soldiers’ Monument was toppled on Indigenous Peoples Day.

Among the commentary printed after the event was one from Ricardo Caté, a cartoonist from Kewa Pueblo whose work appears regularly in The New Mexican. Caté spoke for many when he wrote that for him the Soldiers’ Monument was problematic, but, “I would rather there was dialogue and communication over the matter, but for some reason, too many people who don’t live in Santa Fe needed the obelisk removed immediately.”

Caté’s outsider theme was reinforced when eight people were charged for their part in the incident. One of them, a 33-yearold woman from Pennsylvania, was identified as a principal organizer of the vandalism. She and her accomplices have long ago left the city, and, just as Caté predicted, those of us who live here are left to pick up the pieces.

Mark H. Cross is the author of A Tale of Santa Fe: Betty Stewart in the City Different and the Encyclopedia of Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico.