Monumental Conflict in Santa Fe

The wounds ache the most is when the stories are papered over the first. Or mistold or lied about, or buried. This is my own A podcast series produced by PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford. That voice you just heard is Elizabeth Alexander. The Melon Foundation. Monuments are an argument for who is important, for what is important, for who gets to decide. And some of those arguments are more straightforward than others. Like when we take in

man sitting on a horse. We're prompted to either revere to him or judge him unworthy of our attention. The history might be confused. But it's clear enough who we're fighting about. But other monuments are less straightforward. They conceal, they hide the hurt and the sting of certain histories. They muddy the past without admitting as much. There's a monument that has stood in the center of Santa Fe, New Mexico for 150 years. The Confederacy. And it's also a proud tree. That's the same.

More complicated still. to a four hundred year old identity crisis. In Santa Fe. of slavery, colonialism, I have a lot of love for Santa Fe. and the native crafts. But this story kicks open a door to history in a way that I've never heard before. You haven't either. Producer Ben Montoya takes the story from it.

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I've always struggled to describe my home to outsiders because it often feels like there's actually two Santa Fe's: the mythical version and the reality. Every September that mythology is front and center. It's basically like our Fourth of July. It's called Fiestas de Santa Fe. And over several days there's a ton of parades and dances. People even dress up as conquistadors and princessas as they hand out candy and dance to mariachis.

But fiestas is actually a celebration of how the Spanish conquered New Mexico's indigenous tribes over 400 years ago. As a Hispanic person, it also made me feel really uncomfortable. My family told me I was Spanish, even though no one spoke Spanish. And I was confused about why we celebrated the conquering of native people at all. When I eventually moved away from Santa Fe, and then New Mexico altogether, I started to better understand how this mythology had eclipsed my reality.

and given me a really warped sense of identity. But people back home love fiestas. They love to party and feel pride for their community. Ground zero for all this revelry is Santa Fe's Town Square, a network of sidewalks across a grassy lawn with benches and huge trees, known as the plaza.

It was where I'd go with my family for concerts on the bandstand, where I'd meet up with my high school friends to loiter and be obnoxious teens. And for over 150 years, there was a monument at the center of the plaza. It was a 30 foot obelisk that looked like a shrunken down Washington monument. Growing up, I didn't really think it had anything to do with fiestas. It felt unremarkable and yet ancient.

Like it had always been there. I sat under it countless times, and only once or twice did I ever read the plaques on the base of the monument, purely out of boredom. But now that obelisk is gone. It's been replaced with a big brown box. Three years ago, the movement to remove racist monuments came to my hometown. And when that obelisk I'd known my whole life finally came down, I had no idea that centuries worth of mythology and history.

Would be coming to a head. It sent me on a messy and complicated journey to make sense of it.

The obelisk, officially named the Soldier's Monument, was constructed in 1868. It was built to honor the New Mexico Volunteers, local militias who fought in three Civil War battles. But here's the twist. Unlike the many Confederate monuments that have been challenged in recent years, this one honors Union forces. So these were Hispanics conscripts, volunteers, and they stopped the westward expansion of the Confederate States.

Daniel Ortiz is an author and member of Union Protectiva de Santa Fe, a Hispanic cultural organization. The monument is basically to honor soldiers, mostly Hispanic, who fought against the Confederacy against slavery. Three of the plaques around the base of the obelisk were dedicated to the soldiers who died in those battles. So why is the monument so controversial?

Well, there was also a fourth plaque with this inscription, quote, To the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with the savage Indians of the territory of New Mexico. The obelisk also honors forces that terrorized indigenous people across the Southwest. And it's this plaque about quote savage Indians that has caused so much pain to native people.

So how did we get here? How did fighting slavery and oppressing indigenous people get tied up together in one monument? And why are members of the Hispanic community its most ardent defenders?

Activists started criticizing the offensive plaque around the mid-20th century. In the 1970s, someone had even chiseled the slur in the dead of night. But in June of 2020, a few weeks after George Floyd's murder set off global protests for racial justice, indigenous activists organized a huge rally on the plaza to protest the monument. I remember hearing about it later, because at that rally, in the middle of solemn prayers and passionate speeches, the mayor, Alan Weber, made his own speech.

The monuments are not really what's important. What's important is the space that is created by removing the monuments so we can have the conversation we need to have about our shared future. He talked about being on the right side of history and reconciling past injustices against Santa Fe's diverse indigenous communities. Like many other cities, the national conversation about race, history, and power was inspiring people to act.

Immediately, however, there were some Hispanic community members who pushed back on the mayor, and they accused him of targeting their culture. Caught in the crosshairs, the mayor froze. For months, he postponed action on the soldier's monument while tensions in Santa Fe simmered. It was as if the groups that had organized over the summer had been ghosting. Despite the promises to remove it, the soldiers monument remains. Then, in October 2020, things started to heat up.

Protesters lined the plaza again. Some even hopped on top of the monument and chained themselves to it. What are you doing up there, I told him? You know what are you gonna do? This is Virgil V. Hill, president of Union Protectiva. And he was there on the plaza that weekend. You gotta get off. He says, no, he told me. The mayor promised to take it down. He hasn't done it, so we're gonna take it down.

It was all over the local news for a few days, until finally. On Indigenous People's Day, they decided to take matters into their own hands in honor of Native communities. Demonstrators in Santa Fe Plaza erupting in cheers as the eighteen sixty-six Obelisk comes crashing down. I remember the day it happened so vividly. After I saw the video of it coming down on social media, I drove down to the plaza just to prove to myself it really was gone.

It seemed immovable, as ancient as the mountains, and yet Took less than an hour for the protesters to pull it down with ropes and chains and people power. After the brown box I mentioned earlier appeared over the base of the monument, like a band aid over a festering wound.

It felt to me like the whole city was paralyzed by this. When it came down, it set off longtime tensions between the city's Hispanic and Indigenous communities. This is Vihil, the guy trying to remove protesters from the monument earlier. These soldiers gave their lives during the civil war. Since the monument came down, his organization, Union Protectiva, has been fighting to put it back up. Members of our organization, their great grandfathers, fight in those battles.

Unión Protectiva was first founded in 1915 to help struggling Hispano families. Back then, the lifespan of a male was not very long. So males normally died early. And this organization was basically built to help them with their burial. Over time, Union has become an influential group among local Hispanic-led organizations.

And when it comes to the monument, they've been leading the charge to defend it. They even sued the mayor over it. We're trying to protect our culture and our traditions and our history with the soldiers monument. Daniel Ortiz, the Unión Protectiva member we heard from earlier, talks about the obelisk's removal as a cultural issue. It's I think uh prejudicial against Hispanics, Hispanophobia.

At this point, you're probably wondering what Hispano means. Well, many self-identifying Hispanos in New Mexico take great pride in being Spanish, not Mexican. They proudly trace their ancestry to settlers who came up from Mexico centuries ago. And I should be clear here, Ortiz's accusation of Hispanophobia doesn't represent all Hispanos. But you do hear this sentiment in public forums these days, and I think it reflects this part of the community's increasing perceptions of erasure.

Santa Fe's cost of living and housing prices have skyrocketed in recent years, and families that have lived here for generations are being priced out. Outsiders who come in, they conquer us not with the sword, but with the dollar. Now I feel like an outsider in my own city.

For over three years, people have been putting pressure on the city to deal with the obelisk issue, either by rebuilding it or replacing it with something else. In twenty twenty three, the City Council announced a resolution to deal with the situation. The resolution was essentially a proof of Council, for the council to consider and eventually vote on. Councillors propose to take the damaged pieces of the old obelisk. make a new one. artistically rebuilt to show the fractures in the community.

They also proposed an office of equity and inclusion. They would draft new plaques to include more context about the controversial monument, and they would take a vote on the resolution in a month. This proposal shook the community. These fracture lines were on full display at public comment sessions. You can glorify colonizers as people of Spanish descent, but you have to understand that these same colonizers were tried in Spain for atrocities against Pueblo and indigenous people.

That was Dr. Christina Castro, an artist from Taos and Jemez Pueblos. She's a co-founder of Three Sisters Collective, a group dedicated to creating more inclusive spaces for Indigenous women through art and activism. They were at the forefront of organizing against the monument in 2020. In the weeks before the vote, Dr. Castro worked to appeal to the council to reject the resolution. I picked up a bunch of copies of the petition.

A couple days ago. We interviewed Dr. Castro days before the city council was scheduled to vote. I went over to the plaza. I kind of just sat there in the space. The energy of the plaza feels frenetic. For lack of a better term, it's an unsettled energy there. It's hard to describe how racism against indigenous people is so pervasive in Santa Fe.

The plaque about savage Indians on the monument was just one of many reminders of injustices committed against native people. As Dr. Castro told me, this monument holds trauma and makes local indigenous people feel unsafe. One day while out collecting signatures, she approached someone near the plaza.

So I said, Hello, would you be interested in in signing our um petition to halt the rebuilding of the obelisk on the plaza? And she's like, Absolutely not. And then she said something to me like, Oh, you know Don't play the victim. You playing the victim. You're stop being victims, alright? Oh I'm not the victim. No. I have no victims resting. Walter and stop trying to bite us. It's not right shell. My Karen.

Honestly, that's like the biggest needle you could like poke at me is to call me a victim. Are you kidding? Like, do you have any idea of how much I've overcome in this world? Like Wow. And I I just think it really comes down to the just complete erasure of indigenous people as um viable contributors or having intellectual capacity. Native art and culture drives the tourism economy in Santa Fe. Still, a majority of Native people live here in poverty and are underrepresented in government.

There's never been an indigenous city council member. So, you know, w we're disenfranchised from the system here, but we contribute so much economically. Since the monument came down in 2020, Dr. Castro has become public enemy number one in the eyes of the obelisk defenders.

She's been doxxed, harassed, and singled out as being responsible for the obelisk's removal in many people's minds. And um every day that I'm here continues to wear down on my Health and well-being as an indigenous person who is an advocate for my community.

It's the day for the city council to vote. The opposition to the proposed rebuilding of the monument has only grown. Quiet down, please. And a wide cross section of the community showed up. I'm a Northenia. Chicana I am six years old and I am a Navajo person. I am mixed blood and I will stand here and tell you this is a bunch. There was a raw emotional power in the room that A huge outpouring that revealed a deep sense of hurt.

Do I look like a savage? Does my children look like savages? We don't. The word savage and that Obelisk are one and the same to me and my family and to the indigenous community. Mayor, for some reason you've made the Hispanic community out to be the bad guy. And uh it never was like this. And occasionally the hurt spilled out into anger.

You erect anything in that spot, and I will meet you there with a hundred Indians and our allies to tear it down. And I hear from all of these people. It wasn't native people that took that down. It surely Excuse me. After two hours of passionate public comment, it was time for the counselors who sponsored the resolution to say their piece. This whole process has been horrible. Here's Counselor Renee Villarreal. I've lost friends.

I have family members that don't agree with me. They think the soldiers monument should be exactly put up the way it was before, and that I'm wrong about even this proposal. Then it was Councillor Michael Garcia's turn. We need to do everything we can to acknowledge people's hurt, but also acknowledge that there is a hope and vision for a greater future. And so that's where I believe that.

an office of equity and inclusion, if stood up properly, could begin that process. But with that being said, I cannot support the proposal in front of us to rebuild the monument as prepared for this. I am gonna ask you to please be quiet. After all that chaos, the meeting ended with the council kicking the vote down the road a couple weeks later.

It seemed like the city was back at square one. You don't hear stories about other controversial monuments being put back up. So what is it about this one that makes it so hard to figure out?

Well, to fully understand why this fight is so messy, we've gotta go back before 2020, even before the obelisk was built. It goes all the way back to before the US was even a country and deep within the roots of New Mexican identity. The obelisk debate is simply the latest battle in a 400-year-old culture. When we Ben Montoya explains how the history behind the soldiers monument and Santa Fe itself is about to get a lot. That's next on Monumental from Pierre. Back in a moment!

The controversy over the soldier's monument is the latest jolt from Santa Fe's turbulent history. It's a story full of twists and turns. Starting with one of the city's most pervasive origin stories. The main founder of Santa Fe is Diego de Vargas, right? That's Daniel Ortiz, who we heard from earlier in the episode. He's a member of Union. A Hispanic fraternal organization that's been fighting to reinstall the Soldier's Monument in its original form.

Ortiz just mentioned someone named Diego de Vargas. In 1692, DeVargas took over as governor general and solidified Spain's hold on New Mexico. Over time, he's been molded into Spanish Catholic founding father. His mythology is a huge source of pride for the Hispano community. They see him as the one who united Spanish settlers with Pueblo people through, quote, bloodless reconquest. We all lived in peace for over 400 years with the natives.

I remember being taught that story in school, and it gets retold every year during the Fiestas de Santa Fe. That's the big celebration centered in the plaza that I described earlier, which draws huge crowds of locals. We are descendants of people that created a whole new DNA strat in us. That's how special we are. For traditional Hispanos like Ortiz and V. The fiestas are a time to honor their ancestors, including people like DeVargas.

These days, Vihil says it feels like his Hispano heritage is being defamed. And those natives are putting lies out there on Hispanics. The Hispanic people are being attacked. Similar to the obelisk, DeVargus's infamous legacy was in the spotlight in the summer of twenty twenty. Because actually, DeVargas's conquest was brutal. His methods were violent and included executing opposing Pueblo leaders and forcing Catholic conversions.

So but anyway his name has been thrown into this woke mentality that he was an evil man. The statue of DeVargus downtown was also taken down by the city in twenty twenty. It's not just the obelisk, it's the it's Spanish symbols. When Ortiz and V. Hill talk of defending their cultural symbols against quote wokeness.

It echoes national discussions about race and identity. And it might appear that there are only two sides to the story. Hispanos who want everything to be how it was, and indigenous activists who want things to change.

But when it comes to this story and the soldier's monument, it's actually a lot more complicated. There are many sides to this story. The Spanish settlers and the Puebloans eventually had to ally against a common enemy. Nomadic tribes like the Navajo and Apache were raiding villages across the valley. Relying on each other for survival, the Spanish and Puebloan communities blended over generations. Then in the 1800s, another conqueror enters the picture.

Trade route called the Santa Fe Trail, and suddenly Americans are pouring in. They want trade, but soon they want more. They want all of New Mexico, and they'd fight a war with Mexico for it. The Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight. This is Valerie Rangell, city historian for Santa Fe.

After the war, New Mexico and all of the Southwest were now U.S. territories. The U.S. Army in Santa Fe assembled a militia of Hispano and Pueblo men. They called themselves the New Mexico Volunteers. And they were the ones who begged the United States to please help them protect their property and to stop the raiding. Then the Civil War broke out.

The New Mexico Volunteers fought for the Union, and this fight against the Confederacy is where defenders of the obelisk believe this story starts and ends. In the middle of the war, there was this really important battle. It was considered the Gettysburg of the West. The Confederate forces were moving west from Texas, and these New Mexico volunteers stopped them by cutting off their supplies. The obelisk celebrates this history. End of story, right? Not by a long shot.

Because contrary to the claim that these soldiers were fighting alongside the Union to end slavery, Rangell says they actually joined the Union because of land. It will help you. To protect your property and keep your land. Because we're showing that we're siding with the union, we're also going to ask them for protection from raiding. Two tribes were deemed the hostile Indians, the savages. Those two were Navajos and Apaches.

The infamous Colonel Kit Carson led the first New Mexico Volunteer Infantry Regiment against them. And he was also entrusted to use these militias. which were seventy percent Pueblo and the rest Hispanos to terrorize. To burn homes and orchards and corn stalks of Navajos and Apaches. In other words, scorched earth policies. Those two tribes were punitively removed from their homelands and led on the long walk, and they were incarcerated at Fort Sumner.

Fort Sumner was a military base south of Santa Fe. Between eighteen sixty three and eighteen sixty six, eight thousand Navajos and hundreds of Apache were rounded up and marched across northern New Mexico. Some of them even came through Santa Fe, right through the plaza. The Kit Carson Scorch Earth policy had starved them into submission, had terrorized them. They also didn't have heat. to cook or to

keep themselves warm and they had very little clothing because their homes were burned. They were just upped and moved. and marched three hundred miles away. Their moccasins fell apart over time. The government didn't provide what was sufficient for human life. It was horrific. Hundreds of people died on what's known as the long walk. Those who survived ended up in a site near Fort Sumner called Bosque Redondo.

This assault on Navajo identity and community was forced assimilation to turn the nomadic raiders into agrarian citizens like the Pueblos. The Union had established what they hoped to be the first reservation of the West to pacify the Navajos and Apaches. It was not. A reservation, like some people think. This was an internment camp. The experiment in assimilating these tribes failed.

And finally, after years of displacement, the Navajo were allowed to return to their homelands. They signed a treaty that established the sovereign Navajo nation as we know it today. That same year, 1868, the Soldiers Monument in Santa Fe was finally built. The word savage on the plaque came from this time period and was specifically about the Navajo and Apache.

Bosque Redondo and Kit Carson's scorched earth policies are the true historical origins behind that savage Indian plaque on the obelisk.

That's where I really started to get clarity on the kind of multiple dimensions of that monument. Alicia Inez Guzmán is a writer from northern New Mexico, who began researching the obelisk over the summer of 2020. She was really interested in understanding how the soldiers monument got here in the first place.

I did tons of archival research at the State Records Center. So I have hundreds of pages of historical documents. You know, I found out some kind of funny things like there's a time capsule underneath the obelisk that holds Masonic relics. I felt like I was like in some Santa Fe version of national treasure. In the 1860s, New Mexico wasn't a state. It was a territory with federally appointed governors.

But there was also a territorial legislature, mostly wealthy Hispanos and Americans, who were elected to manage local issues. It was these legislators who were making decisions about putting up the soldiers' monuments. And as Guzman was embracing her inner Nicholas cage, she found the part about the quote savages. You see this correspondence going back and forth between people in the territorial legislature trying to come up with the language.

for the obelisk itself and they go back and forth and then at one point, you know, the language about fighting savage Indians gets shoehorned in there as well. Legislation led to add another element to the monument that was actually never intended to be there in the first place. This is Esteban Rael Gavez, a scholar of New Mexico history. He was interested in who these legislators were and why they wanted this language.

And as he was researching these men responsible for the infamous plaque, one question kept coming up. Were they themselves slaveholders of not maybe African enslaved people? But indigenous enslaved people. Rael Galvez specializes in documenting and studying indigenous slavery. So after consulting a huge database that he spent the last 30 years creating, he had an answer. Nearly half of the 36 legislators.

people in the assembly held up to forty one enslaved people. Two of those individuals were some of the biggest slaveholders at the time. Think about that. At the time that they were coming up with the idea to add the word savage and to change the legislation and to erect this monument. They were themselves at the very time holding enslaved people in their own households. And when I learned that, I realized something.

This monument was never really about ending slavery. It was about American imperialism. It's sort of like a flag that gets planted in a place, right? Claiming ownership of its place and its people. We have to remember that the U.S. went In an illegal aggressive war and conquered northern Mexico, taking its property and its people. These legislators, white Americans and local Hispanos, were able to agree on a shared ideology, the subjugation of people they deemed savage.

Shared interest in white supremacy and manifest destiny seemed like New Mexico's ticket to statehood. They had sacrificed for the Union, and they wanted to carve out their own place in the new power structure.

Here's historian Valerie Rangel. The United States government, don't go away. We're the civilized folks. It was like the obelisk was a contract. It was a reminder to the Hispanos and to the Northern Puebles about their participation in the Union. And if they wanted to prove themselves, they had to abide by these new rules.

The name of the game was Assimilation. These outsiders, tourists and anthropologists and politicians, wanted to tame New Mexico's culture to make incoming American entrepreneurs more comfortable. American settlers saw the adobe buildings and dirt-covered plaza and the threat of continued raiding as signs that we were unable to successfully self-govern.

But assimilation is a moving goalpost, and despite the sacrifices New Mexicans had made in the Civil War, we didn't become a state until 1912. We could not prove ourselves, we didn't have a wide enough population. Here's Alicia Inez Guzman. New Mexico hadn't been allowed to be a state for so long because there were too many people of mixed descent. In fact, Congress

considered New Mexico to be mongrel. They were a complex makeup of all of these different convergence of cultures. Colonialism left no one pure in this landscape. No one. Granting New Mexico statehood was not popular. Remember, New Mexico at this time was full of Spanish speaking, Catholic, brown people. Not the ideal citizen for the white, Protestant politicians in DC at the time. There were fears of disloyalty, lawlessness, and racial mixing.

But there was money to be made, and a few outsiders believed that they could reshape the community's identity. And so there were these attempts to create a new version of New Mexico that was more palatable. And that version was really too whitewash. people from being kind of like mixed descent to being pure Spanish.

What made us white enough for Congress was a cultural shift around the turn of the century. Hispanic people explicitly identifying themselves with Spanish settlers in ways that they hadn't before. And it worked. Americans became obsessed with New Mexico's mythic European influences. And I discovered that that Hispanicness that I had struggled with for so long was in reality an artificial history that could be branded and sold to tourists.

That unique pride for pure Spanish culture that fueled the fiestas and propped up figures like Diego de Vargas was actually just a rebrand in pursuit of statehood. And it was a rebrand that generations of New Mexicans now consider their heritage. I believed it for a long time because I was miseducated. People have internalized it and to me that's a form of white supremacy that, you know, was really born out of that era. To get statehood.

The obelisk was just the first step of that rebrand that started 150 years ago. The plaza transformed from a dusty town square to a manicured park with sidewalks radiating out from the monument. Suddenly, Santa Fe looked unrecognizable. At the center of that change was the thirty-foot obelisk, the word savage, engraved on the side. to remind the people of who was now in charge and who they were supposed to be.

The Spanish-American identity was something that all me feel uncomfortable. Growing up in Santa Fe, I felt like it was crammed down my throat at every turn. My family believed it. My community believed it. But I never felt Spanish or American. I felt New Mexican. Deep down, I knew that claiming to be just Spanish meant denying all the other parts of my family tree that made my New Mexican family so beautiful. And yet I never knew where I fit.

So we come to full circle with what we're going to do now moving forward. That was historian Valerie Rangell. We're now back in March of 2023. The community is still waiting for the vote to decide if the obelisk will be rebuilt. Remember, the city council proposed to address the controversy by taking the damaged pieces and artfully reconstructing the soldiers' monument. And if the city council were to move forward, I would hope that they would understand the history first.

We have a lot of Navajos and Apaches that live in Santa Fe. We live, we work, we worship, and we're part of this community. But the day before the new vote, the local paper broke the story that the sponsors of the resolution had withdrawn it. The plan to rebuild the monument was shelved. I was surprised to see the news. This is Dr. Christina Castro again from Three Sisters Collective, one of the lead organizations against the monument.

I was like small victories, small victories, but then I'm like, Is it a small victory? It's kind of a big victory. They can't just say no. It's a small group of disgruntled Indians or, you know, like this is actually a bigger representation now of community saying, no, we don't want this in the center of our city. But for Union Protectiva, one of the main groups pushing to reinstall the monument, this isn't the end.

In fact, at this year's 2023 Santa Fe Fiestas, one of the parade floats was a giant obelisk with the message, rebuild our monument, don't change our history. Virgil V. Hill was there representing Union Protectiva. We'll accept anybody. But don't forget, don't bring your your culture from St. Louis or San Francisco or whatever and try to change us. Just assimilate with us. We are who we are.

When people talk about the obelisk, they're not really talking about the obelisk. I think it's really in a way about law. Here's writer Alicia Inez Guzmán again. A lot of people do feel like tourism has commodified this place. to the point that there isn't actually room for the real people who make up the culture. It's like everything's been staged and the real people are gone. As I've been working on this story, it's been hard to really grasp all of the complicated threads that I had unraveled.

And sometimes the mythology of Santa Fe was so ever-present that I would lose track of what made Santa Fe real in the first place. But for me, the thing that always grounds me in my home is traditional New Mexican food. Food like stuffs up. that combine ingredients from Spain like pork, lard and flour with indigenous ingredients like beans, corn, and chili. The red chili is really dark. This blending of flavors and traditions is our true heritage, not Spanish tapas.

And at local staples like Cafe Castro, this food can bring community. Alma Castro, no relation to Christina Castro, owns the restaurant. I think I was very frustrated at feeling that I didn't have a place. She's also an organizer who channeled her energy into getting elected to city council this year. I spoke with her a few months before that win. And one thing that this campaign has sort of helped do is remind me that I do have a community. As tired as we are, we are still here.

She's a Santa Fecina, born and raised, and she's proud of where she comes from. With the monument issue at an impasse, Castro feels like something needs to be done to help move the city forward. I think a community collective piece of art would be great. Someone said we should have a big wound that could be sewed together with different Elements of the community representing different materials. And that's wonderful. With her campaign, she tried to reach people like her.

Folks who see themselves as more than Spanish, that aren't satisfied with the same old mythologies anymore. When a community has been so thoroughly indoctrinated and colonized to where it doesn't even recognize its own community or history. You have to suss out the truth. For Castro, the obelisk muddles that truth. It shows how we've been molded by outsiders to fit a certain box.

She saw her campaign as a way to assert our complex identity. There is a lot of pain surrounding colonization, the history of this city. People being pushed out and not being able to live here anymore. They feel a sense of loss, of language, of spaces, of the ability to live here. Here's a Stevan Rayel Govitz. And so when you get these tension points, it feels like even for the people who I don't agree with, we have to recognize that it feels for them like they're losing one more thing.

The problem with that, however, is that the monument actually doesn't represent a true history. It's a mythologized surface history. So we have to find a way to actually talk about the complexity in the entire community. I thought this was extremely profound. It's not just that Hispanic people want to put up a racist monument. It's that it feels like putting this monument back up.

is all they have left. The problem is that right now, this mythologized history of the monument, fiestas, and Spanish identity in general, is getting in the way of actually fixing the reality for the community. We cannot allow mythology to determine our future. There will be no simple answers.

Some are already making peace with that messy troop. They say they're, you know, the chindy's there, uh the the devil's there, and y you shouldn't be going over there. But I went ahead anyway. David Henderson is a retired vet and film student. Earlier this year, he spent six weeks at the Bosque Redondo Memorial as an artist in residence.

Remember, Bosque Redondo was the internment camp, where Union soldiers incarcerated thousands of Navajos and Apache in the eighteen sixties. He went with his daughter, Desba. I was sleeping on the floor on my little blow-up bed and I was just I cried myself to sleep. Because I wanted to go home so bad. And then I realized that that's exactly the probably in the sense how my ancestors felt that they wanted to go home so bad. And they couldn't, they had walked for weeks.

To this place, naked, cold, starving to death, seeing their grandparents, their kids, anyone else, their relatives dying shot along the way, and they couldn't go back home, and they were stuck in this place. The Bosque Redondo Memorial was established by the state of New Mexico in 2005 on the grounds of the abandoned internment camp. The state refurbished the buildings and built exhibits around the stories of the people incarcerated there. It had effect on me.

It was painful for them to live and work there, but it was a way for Henderson to learn more about his Navajo identity. It just kind of lit a fire, I guess, about learning my heritage. It was a heritage he only fully understood as an adult. Henderson grew up in a white family north of Santa Fe, and he knew he was Navajo, but he didn't really know what that meant to him until he started exploring his family's history. And that's what started off this project that we went on.

is I was trying to uh identify myself, my Anglo heritage versus my Navajo heritage. After learning more about his family, the trauma of the long walk, and this internment camp, Henderson started to think differently about the Civil War. They sit there and they went through the Civil War freeing the slaves, and yet they would not address that particular item when it came to the Namajos. This was the breakdown of our cultures.

And our heritage and our stories and outside of the mountains, this is what it did to us. How do we heal from that brokenness? The time they spent there, absorbing the stories and feelings, took a toll on both of them. They had to take breaks and drive back to Santa Fe sometimes to help clear their heads and hearts. By the end of their stay, Desba couldn't wait to go. But when it was actually time to go home, something stopped her.

I was like, I now I can't leave. My answer is there's need to be honored more than that. And I'll spend the night one more night with him. And I'll and then I'll leave in the morning after I've said goodbye. And I felt more at peace that way. When I asked Henderson what he thought about the soldiers monument in Santa Fe, he said that he hadn't really thought about it all that much.

But he reminded me of another monument. It's actually part of the Bosque Redondo Memorial, and it was erected in 1971. It's a collection of stones, all different shapes and sizes, and there's a plaque that reads, quote, in commemoration of the Navajos. who lived here in exile. People from all over brought cherished items, rocks from different parts of the Navajo land. made of rock pollar. This is also sacred.

This monument, the way it looks, how it was made, who made it, is so starkly different from the obelisk in Santa Fe. It's a symbol of survival and the living, not death and destruction. It means that the Danay survived. Danay is what they call themselves, not Navajo, which is what the Spanish named them.

Why do we call ourselves Deneh, the people? Because that's who we are. Others say that we're raiders or whatever. And really what happens is just finding that own peace within ourselves of who we really are and what we believe. rather than what someone else is telling us who we are. I think everyone I interviewed for this story can relate to that idea, regardless of where they stand on the specifics of the soldier's monument. We all want to belong and identify with a community.

But we need to truly know ourselves and our history before we know where we belong, even if the truth hurts. We can't continue to let others define us. We need to define ourselves.

Desba and her dad created a film during their residency at Bosque Redondo that builds on this theme. It's called Through My Eyes, and the film ends with a poem written by Henderson. What do you know, Treeno? What can you tell was my Grandmother here, was my grandfather here? Do they play under your shade? Did he take candy from the soldiers? And it ends with, Oh, I see your children here. They're growing up along the Asaquia. These are your grandchildren. I have grandchildren.

Grandchildren too. And uh It that right there is the inspiration. We have a chance to learn about these things. We have a chance to learn how to Do right and we know that wrong has been done here, but we don't have to continue in this story. A new page, a new story. Listening to this episode. I kept thinking about how it stayed just a little outside the boxes I might have had in my head. For instance,

I had this clear divide in my mind about northern versus southern states. And to me, none of that included New Mexico. So, what does it mean to honor Union? Which is probably not the first place you think of. comes to the Civil War. And how did Western expansion by the U.S. government corrupt So many of the relationships Native Americans and everyone else. It might be because places like Santa Fe escape easy narratives that mythology. energy can become so potent.

But those mythologies aren't just fascinating stories. They have real consequences, and things are still happening. For instance, as we were wrapping production on this episode, a Kit Carson obelisk was vandalized in Santa Fe. And a few weeks later, an indigenous activist was shot while protesting another statue to a Spanish conquistador. We must face the painful truths at the time. the root of these conflicts if we hope to discover the real New Mexico.

This episode of Monumental was written and produced by Ben Montoya and Warren Langford. Additional audio was recorded with help from Ryan Thompson and Georgina Hahn. This episode was produced on the ancestral lands of the and Kumiay People. The senior editor for Monumental is Rosalind Tordesilius, and our senior producer is Nancy Rosenbaum.

Jamie York is our writer and our associate producer is Lauren Francis. The show is recorded by Bryce Bowman and Ben Erickson at Earshot Audio Post and mixed by Tommy Vazarian. With support from Emmanuel Desarme, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Morgan Flannery, and Sandra Lopez Mansalve. Fact-checking by Christina Ribello. Our theme was composed and produced by Gelani Bowman, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager.

Our executive producer is Jocelyn Gonzalez. Monumental is produced by PRX Productions. possible by a Foundation. For more on the show, visit us at rx.org slash monumental. Coming up on the next episode of How a new monument in Boston is trying to lift up not just one momentous occasion or one notable person, but the wider lecture. We need a narrative plenitude. We need a multiplicity of narratives to show the whole range of our humanity. From PRX