At least 33 Christopher Columbus statues have been taken down or in the process of being removed since the renewed Black Lives Matter protests began in late spring, according to a count of local reports. Seeing them come down has been meaningful for Jorge Baracutei Estevez, the cacike, or chief, of the Higuayagua Taíno, a cultural group dedicated to the rescue of Taino culture and language.
Estevez, who is now a curator for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, said the memorials to Columbus are a painful reminder of that. After George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25, protests flooded the country and forced America to reckon with its past. Many protesters across the country flocked to local statues, demanding their removal and in some cases taking them down themselves. Almost 60 Confederate monuments have been removed, relocated and renamed since Floyd's death, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"Hispaniola happened to have the largest gold deposits anywhere in the Caribbean region and so, the Native population was put to work," said Reséndez, a professor at the University of California, Davis. "It was not the Spanish crown's intention to cause wholesale genocide in the Caribbean, for example, which was the outcome, but that was not the intention," Reséndez said."They rather wanted to extract value from them, exploit them."
Among the most prominent monuments dedicated to Columbus sits in Manhattan's Columbus Circle. In June, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is Italian American himself, said he intends to keep it there.
They are just making room for new statues of President Trump
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