Monumental

Hey, dear Latino USA listener. So there's a new series by PRX and we wanted to share it with you. It's called Monumental, and it's well kind of what you'd expect by the title. It's about how monuments reflect the story and the realities of America. Quite a topic, huh.

The whole idea of the drama and imposition of the monumental landscape is that it is meant to feel natural. It is not meant to make you stop and think. It is meant to be ambient, and in the case of so many monuments, it is meant to dwarf you. It is meant to make you feel smaller. It is meant to make you look up and worship.

This is Monumental, a podcast series produced by PRX. I'm your host Ashley Seaford. The voice you heard at the top is Elizabeth Alexander. She's the president of the Mellon Foundation. In twenty twenty one, the Mellon Foundation supported an audit of every last monument across the US. What they found

Arecibo is a small beach town in Puerto Rico that faces the Atlantic Ocean. The waves are pretty rough, but I got in the water anyway. It was warm, pristine and clear. On the shore, there are several large rock formations. The beach is filled with palm trees. Some of the houses are partially destroyed, their walls falling apart, but the general filling is still idyllic and lugar sagro. We are located in a sacred place, says Pluma Barbara Moreno. She's

It was a little bit.

I'm going to tell you the truth, she says. I pass in front of it. It's on a roof that's used by the community. But I don't even like looking at it because every time I look at it, I remember an unpunished crime. Moreno is talking about the birth of the New world. That's a monument of Christopher Columbus that is larger than the Statue of Liberty. It was inaugurated in Arecibo in twenty sixteen. I was surprised by

Part the lictorial entrobais para Obarama.

It is part of our country's history, for the good or the bad, he says. I'm now rid in front of the Birth of the New World on a narrow coastal road in Arecibo. Seeing this massive bronze monument up close hits me even harder than I expected. The gigantic Columbus is on top of a hill facing the beach. Picture a twenty story building. It's taller than that. I'm here with a Puerto Rican historian.

My name is Aura Hiraja Royo, and I am an assistant professor of history at Eastern Illinois University, and I'm originally from Bajamont, Puerto Rico, which is twenty minutes west of San Juan.

auDA hiral studies activism in Puerto Rico. She's wearing two long silver earrings that say in one critica or critic and on the other luchadorra or fighter. I asked her to meet me here, and it's her first time seeing the statue up close.

I just find its esthetically and not pleasing because it dimensions are so messed up, like the boat is so small and the Columbus looks so big. Oh, I'm just very stunned.

The dimensions are a mishmash. Columbus is standing on a small boat behind the ship's helm. He's wearing a hat and a robe, and his right hand is raised awkwardly palm facing up. Behind him. There are three sails. They represent the ships from his journey across the Atlantic in fourteen ninety two. The statue sits on private land and you can't get close to it. It's fenced off. I'm going to tell you why in a minute. I visited the statue several times over a holiday weekend. A lot

Joeywan Pennsylvania, Cata, Pennsylvania, she tells me.

She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and is a pre school teacher. She's of Puerto Rican descent and stops by the statue every time she's in this area. I don't know much about the history. There are people for and against it, but I just keep myself neutral and just enjoy the statue, she says. Historian Ala Hiral says she's never wanted to visit the statue because she believes Columbus is a problematic historical figure.

And Porto Rico specifically, we have a huge problem glorifying great man. Christopher Columbus is the first one we learned to glorify in school. I don't know if you've heard about this, the Columbus song. It's like India, like in a little town in Italy. Naso Cristo Cologne. Cristopher Columbus was born yeah Lard and a Vegas. He enjoyed looking at shifts and speaking about sailing.

In Hira's opinion, the European colonizer's impact here was devastating.

The violence of people like Columbus and his cronies in the early stages of Conquisa was such that our native people got killed like on mass So it's so bizarre to see someone like him be praised as this intelligent person, this innovative person.

It might seem bizarre now, but that is how the artists who created Birth of the New World saw Columbus when he built the statue. His name is Zurabi. He grew up in Georgia when it was part of the Soviet Union.

If you take early nineties eighties, it's a fascination with a person who discs over the world.

This is what upse Telly's grandson, Vasili. He's often his spokesperson because his grandfather lives in Moscow and doesn't speak English.

It's higher than Statue of Liberty because in the idea of my grandfather, first then land was discovered on which the freedom was built.

I met Vasili at his lawyer's office in Midtown Manhattan. He greeted me warmly and even gave me two books about his grandfather. We come.

I just landed yesterday.

Oh my gosh, for you, the books. Oh thank you. Vasili says his grandfather created the statue in the early nineteen nineties to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of columbus arrival to the Americas. He says it was his hardest project.

To Columbus was a difficult monument. It's a very difficult monument to create and to place it.

I ask, Vasili said it Telly. If he thinks his grandfather would have built the monument today, probably not.

It's a different world. At that time, it was five hundred anniversary to celebrate the United States. Whole United States was celebrating, and you have to understand also from where we are coming from. It's an artist Georgian creating a monument in Soviet Union where you could not envision of traveling anywhere. So Columbus, for many of people who were deprived of traveling, deprived of thinking of new ideas, and everything was a symbol of something new.

After he created the statue Zurapse, Telli needed a home for it, and that turned out to be much harder than he anticipated. He envisioned this statue in Roosevelt Island in New York City, but there wasn't enough local support to make that happen. Other cities weren't interested either, including Columbus, Ohio, Myami, and Boston. The governor of Puerto Rico accepted the statue as a gift in nineteen ninety eight. They spent more than two million dollars in public funds to bring it

The way they refer to it was he had a conveyor belt approach to art, just churning it out rather than focusing on meaning, on something to say on quality. His answer was something akin to Goya or Donna, Tello or Michaelangelo. Would you ask the same question to them? So he was equating himself with some of the great artists in history.

Still, his sculptures are displayed in places like the United Nations in New York City and also in London, Rome and Tokyo. Rodriguez says that's because of his wealth and connections.

He early on was able to find friends in high places, in powerful places, and that's how he rose up the ranks. So if people with a lot of power and money like the art that you create, regardless of what the masses think, you're going to go places and your art's going to be paid for and commonly displayed.

In the case of Birth of the New World. Arecibo is not exactly a prominent location, but Julian Go isn't surprised to find a Columbus statue in Puerto Rico.

Everywhere across the colonial world, monuments go up to the colonizers.

He's a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago who studies empires and colonialism. He says, it's unfortunate to have this symbol of imperialism here. Let's consider Puerto Rico's status as an American territory and the history that led up to this. Columbus opened the door. Then, for over four hundred years, Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain, like most of Latin America, but while other countries in

There was a sort of pretext of helping Puerto Ricans and Filipinos learn how to become one day self governing, and so they let them have elections, they let them whole political office. But again the Americans controlled and made all final decisions.

Today, Puerto Rico is a US territory, but Go says that term is misleading.

I do think Puerto Rico has the status of a colony or a quasi colony. There are a whole series of privileges and rights that Puerto Ricans are denied. I mean, officially, if you are a Puerto Rican resident, you can't vote for the president. For the president can send you to war.

Puerto Rico is neither an American state nor an independent country. Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but they don't have representation in Congress. Essentially, it's still under imperial control. According to Go, Congress is once again discussing a new bill to the side Puerto Rico's status, with the debate between statehood and independent swirling. Historian Aura Hirau says Puerto Ricans are seeing their history and people like Columbus in a much more critical way.

People are beginning to like say, like, oh, Christopher Columbus was not a good person. He helped exterminate our indigenous people. So it's very ironic that right when that conversation is shifting, they bring that monument here.

And so a monument to imperialism stands in a small town in Puerto Rico, looming over a de facto American colony.

When we come back, Giselli Reggaetau continues her story on the myth of Columbus.

Columbus could almost be seen as a kind of ancestor figure justifying the American colonization of Puerto Rico in the eighteen nineties, sort of like the story of colonization coming around full circle.

That's next on Monumental from PRX back in a moment.

Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his second trip in fourteen ninety three, but he never set foot on the mainland. So why has he been portrayed in so many statues throughout the country and why are there about five thousand streets, buildings, and schools named after Columbus, including the country's capital, the District of Columbia.

I think Columbus was chosen simply because he was seen as the.

First That's Kirk Savage, a professor of history of art, and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.

That idea that Columbus was the discoverer, I think is what made him the key figure, because the doctrine of discovery was so important both legally and ideologically that it was enshrined in a Supreme Court decision in eighteen twenty three.

That was the Supreme Court ruling determining that Native Americans do not own land.

The doctrine of discovery gave the discoverer the ownership rights, and that the Native peoples who lived there only occupied the land, they didn't own it. You know, the United States saw itself as the inheritor of that right of conquest through discovery, through Columbus's discovery.

Savage says. The first Columbus statue was installed in eighteen forty four. He was commissioned by the US Congress. It featured Columbus with a semi nude woman below him. She represented Native Americans.

Very racist, very problematic, overtly racist statue that depicted Columbus as the kind of white man, you know, striding forward to the globe in his hand, while this representation of the Native people's just cowers below him without any agency. That was on the Capitol steps for over a century.

The statue was in a place of high visibility for more than one hundred years. It was the backdrop for Presidentcinagro addresses. Then one day it was gone.

As far as I know, that was the first up in the first down. It was removed in nineteen fifty eight, ostensibly because they were renovating the Capitol steps. They never put this one back because there had been many complaints about it from the National Congress of American Indians. They complained about it enough that eventually in fifty eight they just decided it wasn't worth putting back up, and it's been in storage ever since. It's literally never been seen publicly since that time.

In nineteen ninety two, as the US celebrated five hundred years of Columbus's arrival on the continent, indigenous groups protested against those celebrations and against Columbus statues. But Catherine Dignisio points out the opposition to Columbus started way before that.

He has been challenged since the very beginning, and in fact even by people on his own boat. Though Bartolome de las Casas is a religious figure who's traveling with Columbus, who ended up detailing his accounts of Columbus's barbarism, and that's how we know about the violence that was actually perpetrated. So even his own people did not revere Columbus and did not universally think he was such a great, awesome founder of anything.

Dignizio is an associate professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT. She also directs their Data plus Feminism Lab. In twenty twenty one, the lab created a zine challenging the greatness of Columbus. It's called we Never Wanted Him Here. But her questioning of the Columbus mystique is personal as well.

I am of Italian American descent. My grandfather was Italian, and so Columbus is a figure I've always had mixed feelings about.

Kirk Savage from the University of Pittsburgh says in the nineteen hundreds, Italian Americans and organizations like the Knights of Columbus played a key role in making statues of Columbus even more popular.

The fact that there are hundreds around the world is almost completely owing to the fact that Italian immigrants took over this symbol and pushed it as a symbol of their own heritage. What I think is important to stress, though, is that they adopted Columbus because he was already an important figure in White American mythology.

In nineteen thirty seven, the Knights of Columbus successfully lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to make Columbus Day a national holiday. Here he's celebrating the day in one of his radio addresses. During World War Two.

Christopher Columbus oo the aid of Spain.

Opened up a new world.

We have freedom, tolerance, and respect for human rights, and dignity provided in asylum for the oppressed.

Of the old world.

Dignesia says, when she was growing up, her grandfather was very proud of Columbus, and she understands the importance of that symbol.

He was very proud of the fact that Italian Americans had some representation in the US kind of canonical history.

When Columbus Day became a national holiday, Italians had become the largest immigrant group in the country with political poll but it had been a hard road to get there.

Italian immigrants were very discriminated against. My own grandfather has his own stories that he would tell us of the times and as such, he wanted to be assimilating into white culture.

And she says that's what the Italian American allyship with Columbus tries to do.

That tries to ally Italian Americans with the dominant white culture with this sort of founder's culture, with a nation building quote unqung discovery oriented culture. And so you know what's the cost of that pride, right, And the cost of that is that we're overlooking both Columbus as the man himself and the horrible genocidal, violent, sexual assault and

Kirk Savage understands why earlier generations of Italian American immigrants rallied around Columbus, but seeing the harm to indigenous people, he himself has picked one side.

What I guess tilts the debate for me in the direction of removal is that this is just really terrible history. You know, the Columbus cult is just wrong in so many ways and reinforces so many myths about our country that need to be changed, and reinforces white supremacy and he just needs to go.

After the killing of Black American George Floyd by police in twenty twenty, massive protests led to the removal of dozens of statues. Columbus became one of the biggest targets moral will him say, We are still here, but he's gone. About forty of his statues have been taken down all over the country, Around one hundred and thirty still remain. As statues of Columbus are coming down, new monuments are coming up. Some of them celebrate those who have been

We are on the corner of sixty ninth Street and Roosevelt Avenue.

Jacqueline Reyes is a cultural organizer with a group called Little Manila Queens by a Nihon Arts, They create art about the Filipino community in New York, like the mural they painted on this corner. On it. The word Mabuhai is written in yellow and orange letters over a blue background. Around it, there are white jasmine flowers and green leaves. Reyes says the word means different things in Filipino.

It has a lot of meanings that doesn't translate an in very cleanly, but it means like welcome, may you live.

The mirror was painted in twenty twenty early COVID times. She says, the mirror was meant to lift the spirits of the people in the neighborhood.

When Queens was the epicenter of the epicenter. At the time, we knew that Filipinos were going to be more impacted by the healthcare crisis because a lot of Filipinos are healthcare workers or work in the healthcare sector.

There's a reason so many Filipino immigrants are in healthcare. After the Philippines became a US colony, Americans created nursing programs in that country. According to Julian Go, the sociologist from the University of Chicago, that was strategic.

Colonial powers have all kinds of interests, economic and political interests. And one of the things besides raw materials that they can get from colonies is labor right, cheap labor.

In the nineteen sixties, the US started allowing foreign professionals to come here. The medical field needed workers, and Filipino nurses helped meet that need. Jacqueline Rayes says, the mural celebrates those nurses, and.

It was also just to kind of show us solidarity to the people living in Queens also to the people who came from outside New York City, like welcoming them.

The mural clearly resonates with a passerby who can't help interrupting our interview.

Iman, who made this one?

This is so beautiful?

Oh, you represent the country.

Yeah, that's what I tried to do.

How do you think represent the country?

Yeah, because that word represents the Filipino Yeah.

So it says long lived.

That's the meaning of it. Yeah.

So when you say I'm abuhai to any person, it seems that just go on, go on to your life.

Keep on.

Yeah. But also Rayes tends to draw people in.

Or what's your name again? Richard Richard Jack.

She's thirty six years old. She has straight brown hair with a blonde highlight streak. She seems at home here, but she actually grew up in Los Angeles. Her parents are Filipino immigrants. She says, when she moved to New York City in twenty ten, she would often come to Woodside.

If I needed to get Filipino groceries. If I wanted to be around Filipinos, I would come here.

The mirror was the first project of what Reyes calls creative place keeping. As part of that effort, in twenty twenty two, they were able to officially co name one street here Little Manila Avenue es on box.

My Boy, I'm Done, by Ann really Pino, by a Veino, by on.

My wohy migrding Bino.

We saw that the streets getting installed as an important part of monument making, because it's like, let's get used to like us taking up space publicly.

The next step will be the creation of a monument about a Filipino woman known as tan Dang Sora.

Tondang Sora is this She's like this revolutionary figure in Philippine history.

Tan Dang Sora is like the anti Columbus. She was in her eighties when she provided support for the revolutionaries fighting Spain in the late eighteen hundreds.

She was there like part of the Philippine Revolution, but she was taking care of people, and so we want to highlight that care labor is just as heroic as any other narrative out there. And we thought that this monument to Tandang Sora would help, I guess, elevate that to increase the visibility of women doing that work.

Ray says, revolutionaries in the Philippines and Puerto Rico were exchanging ideas about how to fight Spain.

If you look at the Puerto Rican flag and the Filipino flag with that triangle, it's because of the solidarity between those different communities. So our struggles are intertwined.

Actually, And like Puerto Rico, the Philippines was ruled by Americans. The US controlled the country for almost fifty years until nineteen forty six. Rai says with her work, she's highlighting voices that were erased by that history.

Maybe a form of decolonizing is just like amplifying women's stories first and just balancing it out the history a bit more. And I think that women would approach monuments differently because I don't think that women would want to impose like huge figures of themselves, right, That's why I like, I'm resistant to like just putting another statue up because I don't think that our freedom should be imitating our oppression. Does that make sense?

The placing of Birth of the New World in Arecibo was quite the saga for cultural organizers like Rais. Building a monument is not a simple process either, but for very different reasons. Her group has been talking to the community and is considering several ideas building a resting place, putting art on the bridge that connects Little Manila to a central plaza, or designing a statue.

It takes a long time to really conceptualize something that could have the resonance that it should have, the hopes and aspirations we want for this message or this figure or all of these women that were trying to speak for we wanted to do it right.

They will present different ideas to the community to get their feedback, and even though they've got a brand from the Melon Foundation, they will probably have to raise more money to build something permanent.

Building a monument is also building consensus around it, building the desire, building the consciousness around it. Even if we had the money, if we were to just put a statue there with no context, it wouldn't mean anything. So it's a slow. To change minds, to change our understanding of history takes a long time.

You know, the process that rey Is and her team are going through is much more inclusive than how monuments have been built in the past. Kirk Savage, the professor from the University of Pittsburgh, says that historically, monuments have said a lot about who we are as people.

The process of building and erecting a monument is a microcosm of all of the social forces and conflicts that go into any kind of political activity and decision making. So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, you know, the finished monument, once it's erected, becomes, as I say, a kind of microcosm of the world that is imagined by those people who have the power and privilege to imagine that world.

Unless they are being built with input from the community, like Rayes is doing in Queens. Savage says, monuments can do more harm than good.

I would say that after you know lifetime studying traditional monuments and say we probably could use a lot less of them, I'm not willing to say that we shouldn't ever erect anymore, because I think that they still have the power to do good. And to change the narrative in ways that are healthy and constructive and good for

I'm trying to imagine what this living landscape would look like. I hope that people of Farcibo in Puerto Rico get to create their own.

This episode of Monumental was written and produced by Giselle Reguetau Special thanks to Wendy Smith and Qike Cubero Garcia. The senior editor from Monumental is Roslyn Tordecilias, and our senior producer is Nancy Rosenbau. Jamie Yorke is our writer and our associate producer is Lauren Francis. The show is recorded by Bryce Bowman and Ben Ericsson at earshot audio posts and mixed by Tommy Bazarian, with support from Emmanuel Disarme, Pedro,

Do I look like a savage?

Does my children look like savages? We don't.

Words savage and that obelisk are one of the same to me and my family and to the indigenous community.

I'm Ashley c Ford. Thanks for listening.