It’s Time to Take Down Statues of Conquistadors
Wikimedia Creative Commons
It was a matter of time before this was suggested. What do you think?
In 2006, the city of El Paso financed the construction of a 36-foot statue of the infamous Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oñate riding his horse into battle. For some reason, this bustling city on the US-Mexico border with an 80 percent Mexican American demographic was intent on erecting a conquistador statue, a monument to a European who attempted to conquer, Christianize, and loot the Americas.
As a 16-year-old, I largely missed the statue’s political implications. I was more taken aback by the horse’s jarring anatomically correct under-parts. But my mother—the daughter of an exiled Spanish flamenco dancer—was quite outraged when they placed the monument at the entrance of the El Paso International Airport.
At the time, my mother was tuned into the loud opposition presented by Acoma Pueblo like Maurus Chino and local Chicanx activists, who were pointing to the gruesome truth of Juan de Oñate’s life. In the days that Oñate marched into what is now northern New Mexico, it would have been hard to consider him anything less than a butcher. He is responsible for the unprecedented massacre of the Acoma Pueblo in 1599, for cutting off the feet of male survivors, and for selling the Acoma Pueblo’s remaining women and children into slavery. The guy was so bad, he was even put on trial for excessive cruelty by the Spanish colonial government—an institution with fairly low standards in the 16th century.
Yet El Paso’s statue of Don Juan de Oñate is not an isolated problem.
