Columbus, a symbol uncomfortable ‘made in Italy’

the leader of The PP, Paul Married, starred in a viral video last month when claiming the feat of the Spanish caravels commanded by Christopher Columbus arrived to the american continent in 1492, and boast of “ancient town that has done a lot for humanity.” “What other country can say that a new world was discovered by them?” raised in an act subsequent to October 12, Columbus Day. But on those same dates, in the “new world”, it was palpable the growing rejection towards the sea. Increasingly cities have stopped celebrating Columbus Day (Columbus Day) for redenominarlo Day of the Indigenous People (more than 50, from Austin to San Francisco, through Denver, or Cincinnati). The largest city in the U.S. with your name, Columbus, Ohio, has even stopped to consider it a holiday from this year. And a week ago, The Angels withdrew the statue of the explorer tachándolo of genocidal. New York ended up saving the located in Columbus Circle, but in 2017 he studied cataloging it as a “symbol of hate”, and in Baltimore vandals destroyed a monument to the genoese of more than 200 years.

MORE INFORMATION Los Angeles removed a statue of Columbus: “there is that to celebrate the responsible of a genocide,” what Was Columbus a genocidal?

Columbus and the conquest, in summary, are sold increasingly worse in the U.S., but if the focus is put on the Spanish pride, the first thing to know is that for many americans this is a problem of italians. In the public statements and the analysis of the last few years about all of this controversy premium the italianness of the marine and barely contained references to the Catholic Kings or the Kingdom of Castile.

at the outbreak of the battle by the statue of New York, paid for by employers italoamericanos, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, ascending italians, he stopped being invited to the parade of Columbus Day in the Bronx because they blamed her for Betbaba his estrangement from the figure, as if it deneme bonusu were a small betrayal. A "false Italian", we came to call a few of the organizers.

Because, for a start, the Columbus Day was always a celebration of Italian in the united STATES. Declared party federal in 1937, it served as recognition to the community italoamericana, a victim for years of crimes xenophobic, and the criminalization on the part of many politicians. The entities of Italian come out every year to defend the holiday, which began on the 12 of October but since the seventies it went to the second Tuesday of that month. “The festival provided a sense of dignity, bearing in mind the hostility and discrimination that many Italian immigrants, citizens italoamericanos and catholics, faced. Less than 50 years before the proclamation of this feast, 11 italians were in New Orleans the largest lynching in U.S. history,” he said last month the National Foundation Italoamericana.

“That Columbus Day is a celebration of Italian is an example of the bad business that made the Spanish imperial adventure: they paid a high cost internal economic ruin, financial and political, but its effects in America are often sentenced or, as in the united STATES, they are not even recognized,” says the professor of the Georgetown University Josep M. Colomer, author of the book Spain: the history of a frustration.

made in Italy dominates the idea of Columbus and the discovery in the imagination of a significant part of the americans. To Daniel Ureña, president of the Hispanic Council, “is an image that has been consolidated with the passage of time in some areas to a large extent by the few efforts that Spain has made to defend his legacy and his story is taken into account”. There is still time, " adds Ureña, to “correct this injustice with reality and with history. Spain should look with concern towards this current of opinion which seeks to undermine your legacy.” The thread of a resurgence of the “black legend” of Columbus, the consuls Spanish in the united STATES will intensify its work, “pedagogic” on the meaning of the Spanish heritage.

The battle for the figure of Columbus is not easy in EE UU, as it coexists with the review of all those symbols of America confederate who remember and honour the past of slavery in the country. Roberto Borrero, president United Confederation of People, Taibo, is expressed resounding: “For me, Columbus is a symbol of genocide. Do not judge with today's standards, as Bartolomé de las Casas and others protested in his time by those cruelties”. And he adds: “The italians, who were also very discriminated against, they took it as a symbol of an achievement, but they have many other heroes to hold on to, do not need to Columbus”. See, also, a matter of italians.