Photo by Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar | CC BY 2.0
Last week, two incidents of vandalism targeted monuments of the Spanish colonial legacy in North America. On Tuesday, a statue of Christopher Columbus in New York’s Central Park was discovered with red paint on its hands and the words “Hate will not be tolerated” spraypainted on its base. The same day, residents and workers at the Old Mission Santa Barbara awoke to find that a statue of Junípero Serra—an eighteenth-century Spanish friar canonized by Pope Francis in 2015—had been beheaded and covered in blood-red paint as well. These events join the numerous other recent controversies surrounding public monuments in the U.S., most notably those that emerged from Charlottesville, Virginia last month, when a young woman was killed and numerous people were injured while protesting white supremacists’ attempts to paralyze the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
The overnight fates of the Columbus and Serra statues extend these debates from the context of the American Civil War and white supremacy to another chapter of oppression on this continent: that of indigenous peoples. Despite what continues to be the celebratory tone of textbook teachings and the triumphal observation of Columbus Day, the atrocities committed by Columbus and other European ‘explorers’ since 1492 are well documented. In Serra’s case, his status as a saint neglects the indigenous communities whose cultural legacies were effaced…