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MEXICO CITY — Statues of Columbus are being toppled throughout the Americas, amid fierce debates over the area’s legacy of European conquest and colonialism.
Few have been extra contentious than the alternative of a monument on the coronary heart of Mexico’s capital, relating a few of the most intense disputes within the nation’s present politics, together with not simply race and historical past, but in addition intercourse.
After extended debate, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum introduced Tuesday that the Columbus statue that when gazed down on Mexico Metropolis’s important boulevard can be changed with a pre-colonial Indigenous determine — notably, a girl.
Introduced forward of Ms. Sheinbaum’s anticipated run for president in 2024, the brand new statue is broadly seen as an try by the mayor, who’s the primary lady elected to steer North America’s largest metropolis, to deal with — or exploit — the cultural tensions gripping the nation, together with the rising resistance by girls to a male-dominated tradition.
The brand new statue “represents the struggle of ladies, significantly the Indigenous ones, in Mexican historical past,” she stated in a information convention saying the choice on the anniversary of Columbus’ first arrival within the Americas. “It’s a historical past of classism, of racism that comes from the colony.”
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has gone farther than his predecessors in denouncing the historical past of colonialism, celebrating Indigenous tradition and presenting himself because the defender of the poor towards the nation’s conservative opposition and principally European-descended elite.
He staged elaborate commemorations this 12 months to mark the five hundred years for the reason that fall of Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, situated in at present’s Mexico Metropolis, to Spanish invaders. He toured the nation in latest months to apologize to Indigenous communities for colonial atrocities, and has demanded comparable atonement from the Spanish authorities.
However Mr. López Obrador has proven considerably much less sensitivity to Mexico’s rising feminist motion.
In recent times, Mexican girls have more and more taken to the streets to demand authorities motion towards considered one of Latin America’s highest charges of home violence. At the very least 10 girls and women have been murdered in Mexico on common day-after-day final 12 months, in response to official authorities figures, and a lot of the crimes go unpunished.
Earlier this 12 months, hundreds of ladies turned out to protest in Mexico Metropolis, attacking ramparts exterior the presidential residence with bats and blowtorches. Feminist protesters have additionally attacked colonial statues, seeing them as symbols of Mexico’s male hegemony.
Mr. López Obrador has minimized these protests, going as far as to name them an opposition ploy to destabilize his authorities. Final month, he claimed the feminist motion in Mexico was solely created after he took workplace in 2018.
“They’d grow to be conservative feminists solely to have an effect on us, just for this objective,” he stated, making use of to the feminists a phrase he usually makes use of to deride his political opponents.
His disparaging remarks have introduced a political problem to his protégé and potential successor, Ms. Sheinbaum, who has tried to place herself because the chief of a extra progressive, youthful wing of the president’s left-leaning Morena occasion.
She has additionally drawn criticism from the feminist organizations by condemning violent assaults on public buildings in 2019.
“Violence is just not fought with violence,” she stated on the time.
The bronze statue of Columbus, erected in 1877 atop a pedestal in a visitors island, had been defaced by protesters previously, and officers took it down final 12 months, amid threats of additional injury.
As a replacement can be a duplicate of a stone carving named “the Younger Girl of Amajac,” which was found in January within the japanese state of Veracruz and dates to across the time of Columbus’s voyages, greater than 550 years in the past. The brand new determine will stand about 20 ft tall, thrice the peak of the unique, now housed within the Nationwide Museum of Archaeology in Mexico Metropolis.
The selection of a statue of a girl to exchange Columbus might enchantment to feminists, whereas on the identical time supporting the Indigenous rhetoric of Mr. López Obrador, stated Valeria Moy, director of Middle of Public Coverage Analysis, a Mexican assume tank.
“She is making an attempt to fulfill everybody, particularly her president,” stated Ms. Moy. “From a political standpoint, the statue alternative looks like choice.”
However not everybody was happy, on both aspect of the cultural divide.
“They’re specializing in the statue, with out specializing in the rights of ladies who’re alive,” stated Fatima Gamboa, an activist with the Indigenous Lawyer Community, a Mexican advocacy group.
Ms. Gamboa, a member of the Maya Indigenous folks, stated a gesture celebrating Mexico’s Indigenous heritage does little to enhance the precarious socio-economic circumstances and discrimination nonetheless suffered by many Indigenous girls.
A conservative former president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, stated the monument to Columbus was a useful piece of Mexico’s inventive and historic heritage, and disagreed with its substitution.
“To take away it, to mutilate it, is a criminal offense,” he wrote on Twitter final month, when Mexico Metropolis’s authorities first introduced plans to exchange it with an Indigenous image. “They’re robbing it from Mexico Metropolis, its residents, and all Mexicans.”
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