The Displaced Statue

Last May I reported that the statue of Christopher Columbus which stood along the Paseo de la Reforma had been removed.  It had been taken from its pedestal shortly before Columbus Day of 2020... supposedly for restoration work.

On Columbus Day of this year the governor of Mexico City announced that Chris would not be returning, that he would be replaced with a statue of an indigenous woman.  (The statue of Columbus will be moved to a park in another part of the city.  So they say.)

The new statue will be a 20 foot high replica of a pre-Hispanic sculpture that was just discovered last January by farmers tilling their field in the state of Veracruz.  The original statue is now in the National Museum of Anthropology and has been nicknamed "The Young Woman of Amajac" after the town where it was found.  The museum will be in charge of creating the replica.

(image taken from the web)

The original is estimated to date from between 1450 and 1520, and is from the Huasteca civilization.  It may represent a fertility goddess or perhaps a noblewoman.

A couple days ago I walked over to the "glorieta" (traffic circle) where Columbus used to stand.  Feminist groups have placed a temporary, two dimensional figure of a woman with a clenched fist atop the pedestal.

 

The feminists have rechristened the traffic circle as "the Glorieta of Women who Fight".  They have used the barricade that was placed around the pedestal as a billboard to honor women and to protest violence and abuse against women and indigenous peoples.

A list of names of mothers of the victims of femicide

A list of famous women in Mexican history

The mothers of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa who were murdered in 2014

Women who have been attacked with acid

143 families who were displaced in Tierra Blanca, Oaxaca

1800 people displaced in the state of Guerrero

The government's gesture to honor indigenous women with the new monument seem rather hollow in a country where women continue to be raped and murdered with perpetrators rarely prosecuted and where indigenous peoples still suffer injustices.

Just a few blocks away from the "glorieta", a street has been occupied by members of the Otomí tribe who have been evicted from their lands in the state of Querétaro.

A monument does nothing to right the continuing abuses.