Columbus, the statues and the forgotten emigrants

In the summer of 2020, Christopher Columbus had a rough few weeks in America. In Richmond, Virginia, his statue was dragged into a lake; in Boston's North End, the Italian neighbourhood par excellence, it was beheaded; in Saint Paul and Baltimore it was pulled down, and in Chicago the mayor chose to have it removed at night before somebody else got there first. Half the Western world was reckoning with the symbols of its colonial past, and Columbus, inevitably, ended up in the middle of it.

The case against him is not made up. Columbus was not only the stubborn navigator we all learned about at school: as governor of Hispaniola he bore direct responsibility for the exploitation of and violence against the Taíno, so much so that in 1500 the Spanish Crown itself had him arrested and shipped back to Spain in chains. Those who ask for that part of the story to be told as well are right, and a paper written for Italians around the world has no interest in hiding it.

The thing is, a statue is not a biography. It is a record of the moment it was put up, and that summer almost nobody asked who had raised Columbus onto those pedestals, or why.

To understand that, you have to go back to New Orleans in March 1891, when a mob dragged eleven Italians, most of them Sicilian, out of jail, where they were held over the murder of the police chief, and lynched them. Some had already been acquitted; others were still awaiting trial. It was one of the worst mass lynchings in American history, and several newspapers of the day greeted it with satisfaction. Italians back then were poor, Catholic, often illiterate, and in late nineteenth-century America they were not considered fully white. The following year, for the four-hundredth anniversary of the voyage, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed a national celebration of Columbus, partly as a gesture of amends towards that community.

The thing is, a statue is not a biography.

From then on Columbus became, for Italian Americans, more than an explorer: he was proof that they too belonged to American history, that in fact they had started it. That is how the statues came about, through collections in the Italian neighbourhoods, emigrant committees, and Italian-language newspapers rallying their readers. They were a way of saying: we are here too.

Those who tore them down thought they were striking at the Spanish empire, and instead they hit the monument that a discriminated-against minority had built in order to be accepted. That is the limit of every iconoclastic fury: it divides the past into good guys and bad guys and throws away precisely the layers that make history interesting. New York, tellingly, took another road. The statue in Columbus Circle stayed where it was, and the city chose to add explanations rather than take things away.

Italy, through all of this, was almost silent. Partly out of embarrassment, I think, and partly because we feel Columbus is Genoese but also a bit Spanish, a schoolbook hero and an awkward figure at the same time. One passage also went largely unnoticed back home. In June 2020 Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, drew a clear line: statues of Confederate leaders belonged in museums, he said, while those of Washington and Jefferson, slave owners though they were, should be protected, and Columbus's along with them. A few months later Trump also defended Columbus in an official proclamation. In words, everyone stood up for him. And yet, while that distinction somehow held for the Founding Fathers, it did not hold for Columbus: his statues kept falling, or vanishing from their pedestals overnight, one city after another, and in 2021 Biden, by then president, paired Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day for the first time. From Italy, nothing. Yet Columbus, all things considered, is the symbol of every European who crossed that ocean, and he deserved to be defended for that.

That silence was a mistake. Italian Americans defended themselves on their own, with the feeling, not entirely wrong, that the old country did not care much about their story.

The right position, in my view, lies somewhere other than either diehard defence or surrender: tell the whole story. Columbus with his shadows, the Taíno with their tragedy, and the Italian emigrants with their long struggle to be accepted. A statue can stay standing next to a plaque that explains. For anyone who lives between two cultures this should come naturally, because they experience it every day: the truth is almost never all on one side.