Guests: Rennie Scott-Childress, Devin Flores, Kevin Padilla, Jessica Jackson, Laura Ruberto, Brad Bowers, Thomas Andrews, Kathleen Cummings, Stephen Leonard

Resources:

• Why mediation didn’t resolve what to do with Pueblo’s Columbus monument by Shanna Lewis (2022)
• Interrogating Our Monument Landscape by Monument Lab (2021)
• National Monument Audit by Monument Lab

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Columbus?

Speaker 1 [00:00:01] Lost Highways from History Colorado is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor, and by the Sturm Family Foundation, proud supporters of the humanities and the power of storytelling for more than 20 years. 

Noel Black [00:00:16] Hey, it's Noel. I want to reintroduce you to producer Blake Pfeil. He did the American Gothic episode earlier in season five, which you may have heard. He's also the producer of the amazing podcast All American Ruins, in which he visits abandoned spaces and creates soundscapes as he investigates the histories of those places. I highly encourage you to check it out, and I want to thank Blake for all his great work for Lost Highways this season. It's been a pleasure. And once again, Blake, take it away. 

Blake Pfeil [00:00:46] Since 2019, the City of Pueblo, Colorado, which has a large Italian-American community, has been wrestling with what to do with its statue of Christopher Columbus. The monument that sits in the middle of Christopher Columbus Piazza in Pueblo, Colorado, isn't even that tall. In fact, you might miss it if you don't know where to look. So it says here, Columbus Monument. In 2011, the monument was placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the Department of Interior. That's me, walking around the controversial bust of Columbus back on October 2nd, 2023. Columbus Day is celebrated the second week of October. But in Colorado, Cabrini Day was added as a state holiday after the Colorado legislature passed Frances Xavier Cabrini House Bill 20-1031 on March 10th, 2020. We'll get to that later in the episode. In 2013, donor walls were erected. In 2014, the monument was cleaned, restored and preserved with a matching grant to the City of Pueblo from the State Historical Fund. A new flagpole was installed and the original flagpole was restored, so both now the American and Italian flags can be flown, and the area was designated by the City of Pueblo as Christopher Columbus Piazza. Christopher Columbus Piazza sits across the street from the main branch of the Pueblo Library. For a few months, I tried to set up an interview with a couple of library employees. I didn't hear back, one of the many, many signals I got from the community that possibly hinted, we don't want to talk about this statue. All these projects were made possible only through the generosity of the donors listed on the walls and the flagpoles in the efforts of the Southern Colorado chapter of the Sons of Italian Lodge Number 2738. I gazed up at this rock, this bust of Christopher Columbus, and wondered, why are people so upset at the idea of taking down this statue of the guy who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and moving it to a different, less public location?  And then below it, to protect and preserve the integrity of the Columbus Monument. And for many people, the integrity of Columbus, never mind a Columbus monument, is a contradiction in terms. 

Speaker 1 [00:03:03] It represents hate. It represents racism. It represents classism. It represents misogyny. 

Blake Pfeil [00:03:10] Clearly, the monument has caused a lot of harm to many people in the community, as you can hear from this unidentified activist in a Rocky Mountain PBS video from a protest on April 5th, 2021. But to many other Pueblo residents, the monument represents a hero. 

Speaker 1 [00:03:26] I am here because I want to protect history. People are not understanding history of the world. Not all his actions were bad. 

Blake Pfeil [00:03:36] But how did we get here? How come nobody wanted to talk about the monument, much less the man?What is a statue to an Italian navigator, who sailed for the King and Queen of Spain, doing in the middle of Pueblo, a small town half a continent away from where Columbus first landed in the Americas? From History Colorado, this is Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains. I'm Blake Pfeil. On this episode, we look at the legacy of Christopher Columbus and his role as a hero in Italian and Italian-American communities, and the way his image gave those communities a sense of pride and belonging as they sought to assimilate and gain power in America. But we'll also look at the dark legacy of Christopher Columbus, the irreparable decimation of indigenous populations his conquests ultimately caused, and the way his voyages also planted the seeds of the transatlantic slave trade. While Columbus has been celebrated for navigational prowess and for initiating the colonization of the Western Hemisphere from a European vantage, can or should such a figure ever be considered a hero? Finally, we'll consider what happens when whole community identities are formed around such supposed historical heroes, and what happens to those communities when those heroes fall. 

Speaker 3 [00:05:05] Each year on October 12th, we celebrate Columbus Day, the anniversary of that day in 1492, when Columbus first sighted the land of the New World, America. 

Blake Pfeil [00:05:21] To understand how we got from 1492 to this Mellotunes educational cartoon from 1960, we have to go all the way back to 1892, four hundred years after Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean. 

Devin Flores [00:05:34] Hector Chiariglione was the one who organized the very first civic celebration of Columbus Day in Colorado, and that was hosted in Pueblo, Colorado, at the Mineral Palace, which, at the time was just north of downtown Pueblo. That was in 1892. 

Blake Pfeil [00:05:52] This is Devin Flores, assistant editor for History Colorado's publication Colorado Magazine, as well as managing editor for the Colorado Encyclopedia. He lives in Pueblo. 

Devin Flores [00:06:01] Hector Chiariglione was a big organizer of the Italian-American community, both in Pueblo and nationally. He opened an Italian language newspaper here in town called L'Unione, The Union. It's right across the street from the Union Depot, is the L'Unione building. Now it's, nowadays it's a restaurant. but it still says L'Unione at the top of the building. And this newspaper originally just served southern Colorado, and southern Colorado Italian speakers, but eventually became a national publication. 

Blake Pfeil [00:06:33] Hector Chiariglione was no joke either. He spoke with presidents, state governors, and he was even offered an ambassadorship at one point, which he turned down. 

Devin Flores [00:06:43] He got really involved in some of the, the labor movement of that time period in southern Colorado, because there was, of course, a lot of labor strikes at that time period, especially with the mining industry, and a lot of the people who were laboring in some of those mines were Italian-Americans. And so he would come in either to help organize them or to help try to negotiate something between the workers and the mine owners. 

Blake Pfeil [00:07:05] For Hector Chiariglione, organizing the first ever civic celebration of Columbus Day in 1892 was in part due to his Italian heritage. But the context of the story is so much bigger. 

Devin Flores [00:07:18] And that very first civic celebration of Columbus Day in Colorado, that was in 1892, and that was, of course, also right ahead of the world's Columbian Exposition, often also referred to as the Chicago World's Fair. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:07:31] One of the largest cultural events ever in the history of the country was in Chicago in 1893. Entrepreneurs, the federal Congress, government elites, cultural elites, all wanted to celebrate his supposed discovery of America as a way of competing with European powers by holding a huge World's Fair. 

Blake Pfeil [00:07:51] This is Rennie Scott-Childress, a professor of history at State University of New York at New Paltz. His academic focus looks at the history of race and class in the late 19th century United States. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:08:03] Columbus was very much in the thoughts, the minds of Americans at this World's Fair, at a time when the population of the US was around 80 million. They sold 20 million tickets. That doesn't mean 20 million people went to the fair. A lot of people went numerous days, but, you know, a huge portion of the population went and even huger portion of the population read about it in novels, stories, blogs, all kind of materials. A lot of Americans that we would now call middle class were wrestling with a contradiction. On the one hand, they were liberals, in old sense, they believed in equality, individualism, the idea, you know, you work hard, you make your way up, and that was a form of equality for them.  At the same time, because they were middle class, because they were becoming wealthy, they were beginning to extend their interest in cultural pursuits that would demonstrate their high status. 

Blake Pfeil [00:08:59] One way to demonstrate class status, says Childress, especially during the Gilded Age, when racism against Italians and anti-Catholic sentiment among Protestants was high, was labor exploitation. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:09:12] They wanted to exploit the labor of other people. They wanted to exploit the labor of, you know, foreign immigrants, exploit the labor of them both in the factories but also in their homes. So they experimented for a while with having Irish women as their live-in maids. When that didn't work, there was a whole huge project to create a vision of an idealized Black female labor force in the home. This is where we get the current stereotype of the Black plantation mammy. 

Blake Pfeil [00:09:41] Rennie says that the social climbers of the time were also trying to find ways to create racial distinctions that would allow them to exploit the labor of groups who, Rennie says, quote, could not, did not have the capacity for liberal culture, didn't have the capacity to understand opera. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:09:58] You can understand the irony here, since Italians were the basic progenitors of opera. You get into these weird places where some people are like, you know, these immigrants don't appreciate opera, so we can't allow them in. 

Blake Pfeil [00:10:10] Despite these rising class and racial tensions, there were still a number of immigrants who had become well-established, even in the eastern cities. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:10:18] There's an important article by a woman named Charlotte Adams in the early 1880s, where she's talking about how a number of Italian immigrants had established various businesses growing and selling flowers, making different food products, and she actually talks about how great they are as an addition to the American population, to American peop, to the, you know, the general sense of American, immigrant groups. And she compares them favorably to the Irish. She says, Teresa from Liguria makes a much better immigrant than Diana from Cork. 

Blake Pfeil [00:10:52] In order to counter the negative stereotypes being created by white Anglo-Protestant upper class Americans, Italians began to establish newspapers and clubs. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:11:02] Because of their association with these, newer immigrants, the ones who were, illiterate, the ones who were coming from peasant backgrounds, they began to worry, of course, that this was going to pull them down. And they then wanted to counter those Americans who were creating negative stereotypes of Italian immigrants, who were trying to racialize Italian immigrants as not having the capacity for, culture. And so that's why, in this context, they're looking around and they're saying, who's a great Italian that Americans accept, (breath intake) Columbus!  The statue that's there in Colorado, being erected in the early 20th century, is clearly building on this love of Columbus that was very widespread because of the Columbian Exposition. 

Blake Pfeil [00:11:52] There had also been strong anti-Italian sentiments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Colorado as well. Here's Thomas Andrews, professor of history at the University of Colorado in Boulder. 

Thomas Andrews [00:12:02] I think there's a fair amount of discrimination against Italians, and maybe one of the most infamous episodes of this would be the, the lynching of several Italians in, in Walsenburg in 1896. 

Blake Pfeil [00:12:14] Andrews says that, by that time in the 1890s, there's a sense that Italians specifically were associated with criminality, a perception that continued well into the 20th century. 

Thomas Andrews [00:12:25] You know, the sort of, the idea that Italians were, were members of, what people in the late 19th and early 20th century often referred to as, like, Black Hand organizations, this is sort of, like an underworld, almost a kind of mafioso type of, type of stereotype of Italians, you know, that's quite widespread. 

Blake Pfeil [00:12:42] Here's Jessica Jackson, professor of history at Colorado State University. She specializes in immigration history, late 19th, early 20th centuries U.S. history, southern Louisiana history, race and citizenship studies, and social studies education. 

Jessica Jackson [00:12:57] So there's some isolated incidents in, you know, 1860 in Georgetown, Colorado, 1870s in Gunnison, but in the 1890s alone, there's five different, five Italians across three different events are lynched in Colorado: Pepino Tologrino in Denver in May of 1891; Daniel Arata in Denver in July of 1893. And that's, that's a spectacle style lynching, mob level spectacle style machine. And then three Italian miners, technically Sicilian, Stanislaus Bittone, Francesco Roccetto and Lorenzo Antonio in Walsenburg in 1895. 

John Bradford Bowers [00:13:41] In 1902, the Pueblo Chieftain reported Hector Chiariglione would petition Congress to set aside October 12th as a legal holiday. 

Blake Pfeil [00:13:51] And this is John Bradford Bowers, also known as Brad, a history professor at Pueblo Community College. He also serves as vice chair for the Department of Social Sciences, Education and Criminal Justice. 

John Bradford Bowers [00:14:02] And this was a, coordinated effort across the United States. 

Blake Pfeil [00:14:08] According to Brad, the Columbus statue in downtown Pueblo was first announced in October of 1903. 

John Bradford Bowers [00:14:13] The, Italian societies of the United States said they're going to donate a statue of Columbus to Pueblo because of the strength of the Italian community here, especially in pushing for Congress to, you know, give them, to give the nation, a holiday in Columbus Day. 

Blake Pfeil [00:14:32] However, the statue itself wasn't completed until October 12th, 1905. 

John Bradford Bowers [00:14:37] And they had a big, celebration unveiling it, provided for a huge turnout of citizens of all classes, as the, the Chieftain noted. So they said there were a half dozen bands in the large parade, there were 50 flags, split up between American flags and Italian flags. The Italian consul for Colorado was present. And then, you know, they noted that this, $10,000 statue was a gift to Pueblo and a credit to the enterprise and progressiveness of the Italian community. 

Blake Pfeil [00:15:11] According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, $10,000 in 1903 is approximately the equivalent to over $350,000 today. That's a lot of money for a hunk of bronze on a stone pedestal in a town square, one hint that Columbus has a really special place in the hearts of many Italians in Pueblo, a central figure of their heritage. 

Thomas Andrews [00:15:35] By 1905, it was a state holiday in Colorado. It happened pretty quickly, and most of that was because of Hector Chiariglione. And he pushed for basically the rest of his life, he was pushing for it to be a national holiday. 

Blake Pfeil [00:15:50] But why Columbus? Why did he get a holiday? 

Jessica Jackson [00:15:56] The effort to celebrate Christopher Columbus has very little to do with the origin story of how we got Columbus as a hero. And, and for that, we have to go back to sort of 18th, 19th century America post-revolution. 

Blake Pfeil [00:16:13] Again, this is Dr. Jessica Jackson. 

Jessica Jackson [00:16:15] The United States as a nation is looking for heroes that are not related to England. The United States needed a hero. They needed to distance themselves from, from England. They needed an origin story that wasn't tied to England as this fledgling nation. And there's some sort of versions of the story that identified Columbus as an enlightenment figure coming out of the revolution. 

Blake Pfeil [00:16:39] In other words, Christopher Columbus wasn't English. In fact, he was spurned by the British monarchy. 

Jessica Jackson [00:16:47] And so he sort of fit the bill as a useful symbol. 

Blake Pfeil [00:16:51] Then, after the lynching of the 11 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in March 1891, President Benjamin Harrison saw Columbus as the perfect symbol, both to quell anti-immigrant sentiments and to settle geopolitical tensions with the Italian government over the killings. 

Jessica Jackson [00:17:06] So we have an ensuing diplomatic crisis, so much so that in the midst of post-March of 1891, the Italian ambassador is recalled from, from the United States back to Italy, the American ambassador returns from Italy back to the United States, Italy is threatening to send warships to New Orleans. 

Blake Pfeil [00:17:26] Here's actor Paul Thomas recreating President Harrison's December 9th, 1891 state of the Union address for LibriVox's archives. 

Paul Thomas [00:17:34] The lynching at New Orleans in March last of 11 men of Italian nativity by a mob of citizens was a most deplorable and discreditable incident. It did not, however, have its origin in any general animosity to the Italian people, nor in any disrespect to the government of Italy, with which our relations were of the most friendly character. The fury of the mob was directed against these men as the supposed participants or accessories in the murder of a city officer. I do not allude to this as mitigating in any degree this offense against. 

Blake Pfeil [00:18:16] Note how Harrison insists that this was not an act of discrimination or white supremacy. Almost one year later, Benjamin Harrison created Columbus Day. Now, therefore, I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States of America, in pursuance of the aforesaid joint resolution, do hereby appoint Friday, October 21st, 1892, the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, as a general holiday for the people of the United States. 

Blake Pfeil [00:18:52] While the U.S. never took responsibility for the wrongful deaths of the 1891 lynchings in New Orleans, it did end up making indemnity payments to the Italian government. 

Jessica Jackson [00:19:02] This proclamation in 1892 has a pre-history that is absolutely unrelated to its post-history. There's sort of a baseline that we should keep in mind that a creation of a holiday does not necessarily match up with who currently celebrates it. So the, sort of the current moment and the effort to celebrate Christopher Columbus has very little to do with the origin story of how we got Columbus as a hero. And Benjamin Harrison's reason for issuing this proclamation, is as a kind of reparations for the lynchings and killings of Italians in 1891. This holiday gives them access to participating in nation building, sort of a, a part of the belonging. 

Blake Pfeil [00:19:48] It was only a matter of time until this increasingly heroic figure of Columbus evolved into a pop culture sensation. And to get there, all it took was a little bit of re-imagining history, creatively, from celebrated American literary giant Washington Irving. 

Jessica Jackson [00:20:07] There's a, an early 19th century biography of Columbus that comes out by Washington Irving, which is a very whitewashed version of who this person is, creates him as a historical symbol, albeit inaccurate historical symbol. That's sort of the Columbus origin story of how we got him in the first place. 

Thomas Andrews [00:20:27] It's bound up with this, this concept of the American West as well, you know, which we've built up this mythology about, and a lot of that is due to mass media, whether it's, you know, the dime novels of the 19th century or, motion pictures, the early 20th century or television, you know, from the 1950s onward, that mass media helps define the culture. 

Blake Pfeil [00:20:51] All the scholars I spoke with said that the typical American after World War II was given a watered down version of Columbus's brutal campaigns. A snowball effect occurred, and the real story of Columbus started to give way to legend. But even Washington Irving admitted upfront. 

Thomas Andrews [00:21:07] This was meant for a general readership. He wanted all Americans to be able to read this. This was not, you know, an academic monograph that a historian worked on. This is a popular author who wrote this, and he wrote it to tell the kind of story he wanted to tell, you know, kind of a feel-good story, that was his intention. And when you get that as the basis of, of the story, it's no surprise then that, you know, Americans will not worry about the facts, you know, the facts aren't going to get in the way of a good story. The type of history that we do today is really a product of, the 20th century. 

Blake Pfeil [00:21:52] To more fully understand Columbus as the purely mythical 20th century icon he would become, as a statue on top of pedestals like the one in Pueblo, you have to go back to 1792. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:22:03] So Columbus discovered America, quote unquote, in 1492. There were almost no commemorations in 1592, right?  There might have been something, some evidence that in Spain they kind of marked that. 1692, nothing. 

Blake Pfeil [00:22:19] This is Kathleen Cummings, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Notre Dame. She focuses on both religion and women in American history. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:22:28] 1792. Interesting. You start to see Columbus mentioned and, in fact, the personification of America as Columbia, so like Britannia, kind of the personification of Great Britain. 

Blake Pfeil [00:22:42] Britannia was the Roman personification of Britain as a female warrior holding a trident and shield. Columbia, then, is the female personification of America, often draped in an American flag. And according to Kathleen, this makes total sense. We had, after all, just had a revolution. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:23:02] We were trying to define ourselves apart from England. So therefore, Columbus became, in Columbia, the feminine personification that became a kind of convenient way to do that. Uncle Sam is kind of a personification but before that, it would have been this female figure, Columbia, that became a kind of convenient way to do that. Throughout the 19th century, Columbianism, the idea of Columbus as a discoverer, was used to justify expansion and, in fact, takeover concepts like Manifest Destiny, that it was the, the God-given right to the United States to expand to the Pacific Ocean. 

Blake Pfeil [00:23:40] Kathleen says that, by the late 19th century, Columbus was poised to become a wildly popular figure. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:23:47] If you look at all the names, the place names in the United States, including the District of Columbia, but Columbus, Columbia, they're all over .  Between 1792 and 1892 is when we see him ascending. Columbia Pictures. You know how when you see a movie and it's the woman holding up, she looks like the Statue of Liberty, that's Columbia Pictures. But when the President of the United States comes in, you play Hail to the  Chief. But when the vice president comes in, it's a song called Hail, Columbia, and Hail, Columbia was considered the unofficial national anthem of the United States until 1931. 

Blake Pfeil [00:24:21] However, none of this explains the larger story behind the sensationalization of Columbus in the late 19th and early 20th century. His rise to popularity isn't just attributed to a presidential proclamation of a holiday, or a book by a great American author, or a song that we play when the vice president enters a room. A huge part of this narrative comes from the explosion of Italian culture within the American heritage patchwork quilt. 

Laura Roberto [00:24:47] The conventional historical narrative, the conventional kind of cultural narrative around Italian-Americans that a lot of, like, popular culture, for instance, feeds off of, has the, the story, the so-called story beginning in the late 19th century, we have something like 5 million Italians coming to the United States. 

Blake Pfeil [00:25:07] This is Laura Roberto, a humanities professor at Berkeley City College. Her work focuses on topics related to film, material culture, oral histories and vernacular culture within Italian diaspora and transnational contexts. 

Laura Roberto [00:25:21] But migration ends in the 19, early 1920s, and that everything that happens after that with respect to Italian-Americans was built off of that 20 to 30 year period, when in fact we actually know that Italian migration almost never, really never ended. It had moments during the 30s and during World War II where it pretty much came to a stop, but then it started again after World War II and is still going on today, the kind of new waves of Italian migration and this kind of rebooting of Italian-American culture that has happened since every new wave has come to the United States, and that often we, we collectively in popular culture and kind of the standard narratives around Italian-American identity, forget that. 

Blake Pfeil [00:26:17] After World War II, during the influx of Italian immigration to the United States, Italian culture became hip in a sense. 

Laura Roberto [00:26:24] Look at something like, as simple as balsamic vinegar. 30, 40 years ago, you would never have found balsamic vinegar in the United States except if you happen to be in an Italian, family that was from near Modena, where balsamic vinegar kind of came from.  That kind of vinegar immigrates, so to speak, as part of kind of large, swaths of consumer culture that came from Italy, that brought a kind of shiny fashion forward and hip kind of Italian identity to the United States. 

Blake Pfeil [00:27:03] Despite Italian culture and heritage being far more complicated and regional, this mass migration of all different kinds of culture from Italy suddenly became ubiquitous. 

Laura Roberto [00:27:13] There have been and are a lot of changes in how we think about Italian identity and Italian-American identity, and it, until we really pull back a little bit and think about, again, this kind of transnational movement of people and goods and consumer goods, I think it's hard to, to unravel it. 

Blake Pfeil [00:27:36] I asked Dr. Roberto why it was that, generally speaking, Americans know so little about the diversity of Italian-American identities. 

Laura Roberto [00:27:45] I don't want to blame popular culture because I love popular culture, but we all know that it's very limiting in what it can share with the consumer, and of course, the consumer, the audience, has, has a responsibility there, too. But for various reasons, certain narratives around Italian-American identity, most prominently around food, around family, around organized crime, has been really successful with consumers since the early gangster films of the late 1920s and 1930s in Hollywood, and that's really never gone away. And so it's easy to see why they would get repeated and, and reshaped in different directions and sustain themselves so much. 

Blake Pfeil [00:28:41] I remember learning about Christopher Columbus in elementary school. Vivid memories of that famous poem that starts "In 1492". 

Unidentified [00:28:51] Columbus sailed the ocean blue, ocean blue, ocean blue. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. It sailed west to reach the east, reach the east...

Blake Pfeil [00:29:09]  You can't see it, but in the video I found of this group of kids singing this poem, yes, to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb, they're all wearing hats made of blue and red construction paper that resemble that iconic kind of conquistador hat that Americans think of when they envision Columbus. 

Unidentified [00:29:33] In 1492. Instead, a whole new world he found,  world he found, world he found. Instead, a whole new world he found in 1492. 

Blake Pfeil [00:29:51] But none of this explains why Columbus is so important to Italian-American communities across the country, and why so many of those communities, like the Italian-American community in Pueblo, push back so hard on dismantling statues erected in his honor. When Benjamin Harrison issued his Columbus Day proclamation, it wasn't just about offering a reparation, says Jessica Jackson, but also about nation building or, the unifying of a group of people within a governing body or state so that it remains politically stable and viable in the long run. 

Jessica Jackson [00:30:23] I think it's important that those dates, those, those sort of origin moments, offers this greater complexity to the nation building story, and a, it's not overtly about offering Italians whiteness in this moment in 1892, but it's definitely about offering them belonging.  After each of these lynchings, there ends up being a massive diplomatic crisis. There's an existing treaty that says the U.S. is, is responsible for the wrongful death of Italian subjects. 

Blake Pfeil [00:30:53] Dr. Jackson says that this begged the question, as far as the Italians who were lynched, are they Italian subjects or are they American citizens? Though they would have been far more likely to define themselves by their hometown or province, Italians started to arrive in Colorado during the 1850s, says Thomas Andrews. 

Thomas Andrews [00:31:13] There were some Italians involved in the, in Gold Rush in the sort of, you know, late 1850s, 1860s, and those were relatively small populations and typically northerners. In the 1870s, 1880s, even into the 1890s, quite a few Italians were, were drawn west by railroad work in particular. And oftentimes this would have been like the, you know, this is the more manual labor aspects of the railroad industry, building tracks, it's that sort of thing. 

Blake Pfeil [00:31:43] In Thomas Andrews' view, the importance of Italians and railroad building hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. 

Thomas Andrews [00:31:49] You also would have seen growing numbers of Italians coming into, the mining industry, silver mining, gold mining and, you know, again, they would have been relatively diverse. But I think that by the 1880s, you see a fair number of people from kind of the Italian-Austrian borderlands coming to, to parts of the Colorado high country that were really familiar to them, from, from their alpine background. If you go down to, like, Telluride or Aspen, you know, you would have had some Italians in those places. By the 1880s, Italians are also becoming pretty heavily involved in the coal mining industry. 

Blake Pfeil [00:32:25] By the early 20th century, Colorado had a significant Italian population in mostly all of the coal mining regions of the state. 

Thomas Andrews [00:32:33] Whether that's, you know, up in the north in, in, Lewisville, Lafayette, Western Slope coal mining communities and very much true of the southern coalfields and, you know, Las Animas where, you know, Fremont counties.  And, you know, both the railroad industry and coal mining were often, but not always, stepping stones by which Italians would make their way into, in particular, the steel mills in Pueblo. 

Blake Pfeil [00:32:59] According to Thomas, some historians have estimated that, by the early 1920s, about 1 in 5 Coloradans had an Italian background. 

Thomas Andrews [00:33:07] If you compare Colorado to, like, the New York City area, you know, it wouldn't look that impressive. But there were certainly more Italians in Colorado than there were in really any of the adjacent states. 

Blake Pfeil [00:33:19] At first, Columbus wasn't exactly a national hero to many Italian immigrants who found their home out West. 

Thomas Andrews [00:33:26] In 1892, he was a person who was already being celebrated by mainstream American society as this, this point that everybody could point to and say, this is the moment when Europeans arrived and brought civilization to North America, quote unquote. And this is something that had been recognized in American society for a while, but not in a real official capacity and not, not usually in terms of Columbus the man, Columbus the person. He was more just a convenient vessel for the celebration of colonialism. But he was Italian, he was from Genoa. 

Blake Pfeil [00:34:02] When Columbus was alive, Italy didn't exist as a unified nation. Genoa was its own city-state, but this was a figure that mainstream society would respect, who was Italian and who Italian-Americans could all point to and say, that's our guy. 

Thomas Andrews [00:34:18] Columbus was, had been hailed as a hero in,in Genoa in particular. And so I think that for, you know, for Coloradans who had, like, Genoese backgrounds, they were pretty ready to claim Columbus, but I think that, you know, for people from further south or from, you know, other parts of the North, Columbus wasn't necessarily their guy initially. You know, one of the interesting things about Italian-American identities is that they're sort of, they're forming and they're taking root at the same time as people in the Old Country are starting to figure out more about what it even means to be Italian, you know. So, yeah. So these two projects are, like, unfolding at the same time. 

[00:34:56] He's not provincial because he's so far back and was such a major historical figure that no one could, no one group could really claim him. So it was kind of a unifying moment for a lot of these very, provincialized Italian-Americans to say, yes, I might be from Sicily, yes, you might be from Genoa, but we have this figure in common that, even though we don't get this respect from the mainstream American culture, Columbus does. 

Blake Pfeil [00:35:25] By the time Italian immigration had exploded post-World War II, the nation building experiment had really taken hold in 20th century America. This was very true in Colorado, especially for Italians who traveled back and forth between the Old Country and the new. 

Thomas Andrews [00:35:40] Even in the early 20th century, I think the return migration rate for, for Italians was about 50%. And so, you know, there was also, like, constant interchange with, with the Old Country as well. So, that sense of, like, Italianness is, like, developing on, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's interesting to think about the role that, like, immigrants in other parts of the world are playing then and in shaping the meaning of what it, what it, what it meant to be Italian back in Italy. 

Blake Pfeil [00:36:07] But it wasn't easy coming to America or Colorado. And Andrews says that Italians coming into the country weren't often considered, quote unquote, as white as other European immigrants. 

Thomas Andrews [00:36:20] I was looking through documents from, from the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, and the blue was the late 1880s and was a, a run of correspondence from a, from an official who was in charge of construction in the Glenwood Canyon area. And he was writing to a superior, and he was basically talking about a quandary he had about whether he should hire, and these are the terms he used, should he hire, quote unquote, white men, or should he hire Dagos, you know, Dago being, of course, the common epithet for Italians. So, you know, for, for this official, at least, it's pretty clear that he didn't consider Italians white or as white as the other people he was thinking of hiring. 

Blake Pfeil [00:37:02] It's important to focus on Andrews' distinction, "as white as the other people". When Italians began to immigrate to America, their whiteness wasn't ever up for grabs, as Jessica Jackson explains.  It was a concept as coined by Thomas A Guglielmo called White on Arrival. 

Jessica Jackson [00:37:21] White on Arrival is an argument made by Thomas Guglielmo, who is revising an earlier concept of how Southern and Eastern Europeans, Italians included, are being racialized at the turn of the century. The issue with calling, so, so it's easy to say they're, quote unquote, racially in between. The problem, from a scholarly perspective is, in between what?  It presupposes that black and white are discrete, immutable categories, and that's not true. So that's why we need to push beyond this idea, because they're not literally in between anything. 

Blake Pfeil [00:37:55] What Thomas Guglielmo argues is that, regardless of the fact that Italians experienced racial prejudice, they were considered White on Arrival. 

Jessica Jackson [00:38:04] What this means is that their whiteness was not, ever up for grabs, and this has to do with the fact that, race at this time period is understood but yet at the 19th century, it's not constructed the same way that we understand race. It's constructed, in terms of two categories: race and color. Color is actually, is, is what he's talking about when he says White on Arrival, it's the color white which has nothing to do with skin pigmentation, it has nothing to do with complexion, it has nothing to do with how someone is physically being read. It is a legal category that offers them, certain legal privileges, most significantly, the right to citizenship. 

Blake Pfeil [00:38:50] This kind of classification dates back to H.R. Bill 40, the Naturalization Law of 1790, which limited access to U.S. citizenship to white immigrants, aka to people from Western Europe who had resided in the U.S. at least two years and their children under 21 years of age. It also granted citizenship to children born abroad to U.S. citizens. 

Jessica Jackson [00:39:11] It's not in the Constitution who can be a citizen. They add a law in 1790 and then revise it in 1870, you know, with that there's this, there isn't a national concept of what is citizenship, but this idea that you must be a, quote, free white person, and that, that is the whiteness that,  that has 200 years of history behind it, that, that's the legal category of whiteness, so usually voting is associated with that, but most significantly, citizenship and the right to naturalize.  The Italians could usually, could usually vote. They were able to naturalize. They literally were legally white. 

Blake Pfeil [00:39:57] However, it wasn't actually the idea of whiteness that became the underlying reason for Italians feeling the need to assimilate, though that is often the assumption, because whiteness wasn't really a concept back then. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:40:10] The idea of whiteness didn't come into the picture until the 1990s. In the 1990s, a number of scholars began to try to, find a way to make race evident to white Americans, because lots of polls, lots of other, surveys, found that most middle class white Americans didn't believe that race was an issue for them. When they hear the word race, they think it means Black people, and so, you know, racial problems means Black people's problems. So for a lot of white folks who didn't want to be involved or take responsibility, they just pass it off. 

Blake Pfeil [00:40:46] Rennie says that a handful of scholars began to produce work in which they were trying to make whiteness as a racial quality evident to white folks as a way of saying, you can't just slop off racism, you have to take responsibility because you have race, too, right? 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:41:01] And then, in that process, lots of historians and then a wider and wider array of people began to use whiteness as a way of saying, this explains why it was Americans in the 1890s and early 20th century discriminated against Italian immigrants. The problem is that, while I fully concur in the project of whiteness in the sense of trying to make race evident to all Americans as a means of trying to diminish racial oppression, racial discrimination, it doesn't always work as a historical explanation. 

Blake Pfeil [00:41:36] Back in the 1890s, you would be hard pressed to find anyone blatantly refer to Italians as Black people. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:41:43] There's no place where somebody says they're not white or they're not European. You can find places where they might refer to the immigrants' dark skin, they use sometimes the word swarthy, which means kind of dark in color, but there were lots of different ways that Americans thought about Italians who came over. 

Blake Pfeil [00:42:05] And in some cases, Americans even divided Italians into three different races. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:42:11] Italians of the North were thought to be European, sort of. The Italians of the South were thought to be less European, more like the Slavs, perhaps, in their difference and distinction, much more Catholic, you know, in orientation. And then the Sicilians would be a different group altogether. 

Blake Pfeil [00:42:30] In other cases, however, Americans didn't stop to make any distinctions. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:42:34] You know, all Italians are the same. They also, though, because the boundaries weren't clear, you've actually got people from the south of France who could be identified as, as Italian. You've got people from Austria, and some other of those areas that were, could be lumped in with, Italians. 

Blake Pfeil [00:42:52] So if this need to assimilate wasn't about racial hierarchies or skin color, then what was it about? Jessica Jackson already hit the nail on the head earlier. 

Jessica Jackson [00:43:02] And I, it's not overtly about offering Italians whiteness in this moment in 1892, but it's definitely about offering them belonging. This holiday gives them access to participating in nation building, sort of a,a part of the belonging. 

Blake Pfeil [00:43:18] Brad Bowers tightens the scope specifically for Coloradans. 

John Bradford Bowers [00:43:21] If we're here in Pueblo, it's not just Columbus himself, but then the statue itself becomes the physical manifestation of that desire to belong to the people of Pueblo and to the people of the United States. 

Blake Pfeil [00:43:40] The reality is that, for Italians, it wasn't just about belonging. It was a means of survival to feel safe just existing. 

Steven Leonard [00:43:51] Italians tended to be a targeted group, largely because of labor competition, but, Italians were accused of or, were brought in by companies to provide cheap labor. 

Blake Pfeil [00:44:04] That's Steven Leonard, who you may recognize from other episodes of Lost Highways.  As the author of Lynching in Colorado, 1859 to 1919, he knows a thing or two about violence towards marginalized communities during this time period. 

Steven Leonard [00:44:18] There was one very brutal lynching in Denver, in 1894, and that was of an Italian and, sort of, reflected the, hate against Italians at that, that time. And, he was slashed and hanged and shot, brutally treated. And that mob was estimated, and I think it might be an exaggeration, but it was estimated as 50,000 people. 

Blake Pfeil [00:44:42] That lynching happened mere blocks from the History Colorado Center, at the intersection of Colfax and Speer. I can relate to this kind of fear. As a queer man from Colorado Springs who was raised with a fear deep inside of me of the kind of violence that Matthew Shepard suffered, I did anything I could to assimilate while I was growing up. And I suppose that if a group of protesters wanted to tear down the statue of Marsha P. Johnson and Christopher Park in New York City, I'd be pissed, too. Of course, the Marsha P. Johnson statue was ultimately moved out of the public space and into the LGBT center just a few blocks up. Then again, that wasn't because Marsha P. Johnson was accused of genocide, and Christopher Columbus was. And as the United States entered the 1960s and social uprisings began to take place all over the country, among them was the birth of El Movimiento, also known as the Chicano Movement. They raised awareness and laid the foundation for the eventual protests of the Christopher Columbus statue in Pueblo, Colorado. 

Devin Flores [00:45:47] Chicano is, it's a complicated term. It encapsulates both a, like an ethnic and cultural identity and also a political identity. 

Blake Pfeil [00:45:58] Devin says that, while a national movement features famous figures like Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Rosalio Muñoz, it has roots heavily in the South, West and Southwest. 

Devin Flores [00:46:10] It really has its roots in the people of Spanish-speaking heritage, who are descendants of both the colonizers and the colonized, the Spaniards and, the indigenous peoples of Mexico in the Southwest who have been inhabiting, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas, Colorado since long before the Mexican-American War. And that change of that border between the United States and Mexico left so many people who had already been living here, this was their home, strangers in their own country, functionally, because now, they were no longer the, the majority cultural group. They were a minority now. 

Blake Pfeil [00:46:56] They were seen as strange outsiders who spoke a different language, had a different skin color, and worshiped in a different way because they were Catholic in a predominantly Protestant country. And that complicated kind of identity is personal to Devin. 

Devin Flores [00:47:11] My grandfather's generation, he was born, he was born 20 or 30 years before that El Movimiento really happened, and he was never part of it. And part of that is because his family emphasized their whiteness. His, some of his ancestors were native, but they identified completely as Spanish. And my great grandmother is still alive. She's over 100 years old. And I had the opportunity, I'm very lucky to have had this opportunity, I spoke with her last year on her birthday, about our family's heritage and ancestry, and I told her that I had done research into it and that some of her ancestors had entered the United States from Mexico. And she was very upset about that, because a big part of, of these older communities is, we're not Mexican, we are Hispanos. 

Blake Pfeil [00:48:02] For many who got involved, the Chicano movement focused on identity reclamation and wearing that identity proudly. 

Devin Flores [00:48:10] And saying, I am Chicano, this is my history, this is my heritage, this is my culture. I can be American how I want to be American, this is stolen land, this,  the border crossed me, I did not cross the border. That's a big part of it. And that identity, it's, it's a very strong one, it's a very strong one, and people who identify as Chicano typically feel very strongly about these issues. 

Blake Pfeil [00:48:33] So in effect, Devin has ancestors who were both the colonizer and the colonized. 

Devin Flores [00:48:39] Some of my ancestors were Navajo and Paiute, and some of them were the Spanish who were oppressing them, who were enslaving them. I have ancestors who, like on my mother's side, is not Spanish speaking, but I see a lot of parallels because her direct ancestors were Irish immigrants who ended up dirt poor, living in, like, stamped earth cabins in the Ozarks. One of my great grandmothers was literally sold to her, her husband. This history, it's, it's a very complicated one, and I do believe that, and this is, this is not to call anybody out because it's just a simple fact of life. It is still important to recognize that I share the ancestry of the colonizers and the colonized. And this dual identity is there. 

Blake Pfeil [00:49:31] For people of Indigenous and Chicano descent, Columbus was, quite simply, the harbinger of the enslavement and genocide of their ancestors. As such, it was only a matter of time before the backlash against Columbus found its way to Pueblo, where Chicano and Italian-American culture live side by side. 

[00:49:53] When it comes to Columbus and the actual recorded history of, of what happened with Columbus in the New World, versus, you know, this mythology, that doesn't really get started till the last half of the 20th century. So, this is kind of fighting an uphill battle for historians to overcome. 

Blake Pfeil [00:50:13] Protests of the Columbus statue in Pueblo, which is part of that mythology, began in the 1960s, when Chicanismo was beginning to emerge as an identity and a cultural awareness. 

Kevin Padilla [00:50:24] The natives in the town really don't like it. 

Blake Pfeil [00:50:27] This is Kevin Padilla, owner of Feast or Famine, a tattoo parlor that sits directly across the street from the Columbus statue in Pueblo. 

Kevin Padilla [00:50:35] You know, and Colorado is, a native town. It's, we were part of Mexico at one time, it's not like we were part of even the East Coast. We were part of Mexico and became part of America. 

Blake Pfeil [00:50:48] But despite decades of protests, the statue remained. By 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage, the Chicano movement had been instrumental in reframing Columbus historically as a violent colonizer. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the movement to remove the statue seemed to gain real momentum, but, the Italian-American countermovement behind the scenes remains strong and the statue is still there. Here's Laura Roberto again. 

Laura Roberto [00:51:18] The pro-Columbus Italian-American side is very well funded. Last year, the Italian government, which is currently a very conservative government that's in power, passed legislation to support the memory of Columbus internationally. There's a lot of money and power behind Italians and Italian-Americans supporting Columbus. 

Kevin Padilla [00:51:45] On the protest part, it's powwows, they come out and they do speeches and they tell you, you know, some of them are a little aggressive on, you know, Christopher Columbus was a rapist and he, he took our country. Some of it that he never existed. And there's a lot of natives that, that come out and they just, they show their pride of the, who the land used to belong to. 

Blake Pfeil [00:52:10] Kevin grew up in Pueblo, and he's seen a lot of the controversy surrounding the statue happen up close and personal. But he says that any actual violence or fighting is rare. If anything, he sees far more inter-community camaraderie than inter-community fighting. 

Kevin Padilla [00:52:25] I have not seen a lot of counterprotests when, they just let the natives do what they do, and then everybody moves on from there, unless, like, they try to destroy it. There was a elected official last year, the year before last, that tried to take the bricks down, and he got in a lot of trouble for that. We all go to the chili fest. We all, when you put on a festival in town and there is no, you're Italian, you're Black, you're white, you're, you're Mexican. Everybody's there. Yeah. Everybody's there. Everybody's spending money. Everybody's doing this. There's no protests outside of those things. 

Blake Pfeil [00:53:04] Obviously, the controversy over monuments celebrating figures like Columbus doesn't begin and end in Pueblo. Kathleen Cummings. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:53:12] This is a part of a, a multi-layered conversation we're having. The Andrew Mellon Foundation is literally devoting millions of dollars to remaking our public landscape, and in one of their projects that they sponsored that I find absolute fascinating was a National Monument Audit, and it was sponsored by Philadelphia's Monument Lab. And trying to figure out who exactly are our monuments in the United States dedicated to. 

Blake Pfeil [00:53:38] The National Monument Audit has a goal: to better understand the dynamics and trends that have shaped the monument landscape in the United States, to pose questions about common knowledge about monuments, and to debunk falsehoods and misperceptions within public memory. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:53:54] Top finding, shocker. The public landscape in the United States is overwhelmingly white and male. So, yeah, there are only, in fact, we have to go all the way to number 18 in their monument to find a woman, and when we do, it's a Catholic saint, Saint Joan of Arc. There are only two other women in that, it's Sacagawea and Harriet Tubman. 

Blake Pfeil [00:54:17] Ultimately, they used the research to help inform Mellon's landmark Monuments Project, a $250 million investment designed to, quote, transform the way our country's histories are told in public spaces and ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:54:40] The conversation's over our, our, our national landscape and who's included and who's not. They really started to reach a heated and urgent level with debates over the removal of Confederate monuments. Race continues to be at the forefront, but gender has also emerged as a consideration. Women are not seeing themselves represented in public landscapes. One of the interesting findings is there are more monuments in the United States to mermaids than there are to U.S. Congresswomen. Women are saying, where are our female heroes? 

Blake Pfeil [00:55:14] Colorado has already taken a major step in that direction. Just as Colorado was the first state in the nation to celebrate Columbus Day in 1905, the state also became the first to recognize Cabrini Day, along with Columbus Day. In October 2020, Governor Jared Polis signed HB 20-1031, an act that, quote, establishes Frances Xavier Cabrini Day as a state legal holiday on the first Monday in October and repeals Columbus Day. Cabrini was born outside of Milan in 1850. When she was young, she knew she wanted to live a religious life and wanted to serve as a missionary in China, but she had a hard time joining a convent. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:55:55] She was always quite frail. She was a tiny little woman and was not in great health. 

Blake Pfeil [00:56:00] She was finally accepted by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, and after some persistence, the church sent Cabrini to New York, where she immediately started raising money. She founded a hospital named Columbus Hospital and two other facilities, one in Seattle, the Columbus Sanitarium, and the other in Colorado, the Queen of Heaven Orphanage. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:56:20] After Cabrini died in 1917, those hospitals were renamed Cabrini Hospital. 

Blake Pfeil [00:56:26] And though Colorado was the first, it's not the only place to have recognized Cabrini Day, and to erect monuments to her where Columbus once stood. 

Kathleen Cummings [00:56:36] The New York City announced an initiative called She Built NYC, which was designed to put more statues of women up. And so, also in 2020, a statue of Frances Cabrini was dedicated in Battery Park, which is really fitting because she was the, known as the mother of immigrants, and so Battery Park is right there where immigrants would disembark after coming from Ellis Island. 

Blake Pfeil [00:57:02] Though many have embraced Cabrini Day, the move wasn't met without pushback from the Italian-American community. 

[00:57:08] Scary and a bummer that, that people don't want this guy up here.  Worried about pride of, of where our ancestors came from. This is just a celebration of all the diversity and stuff that, that makes Pueblo. It's not about the statue. They, they want to take this statue. They don't need to take the statue. 

Blake Pfeil [00:57:30] Laura Roberto says that some Italian-Americans, especially younger people, would be happy to do away with Columbus Day and the statues that celebrate him. But for those who are still attached to his symbolic presence in the community, she says the story is far more about Italian-American pride and the emotional sense of belonging than it is about Columbus as a historical figure. 

Laura Roberto [00:57:51] For some Italian-Americans, they have a real feeling of hurt around it, and, and so it's hard to, to balance that, how to, how to, how to kind of respect that, and at the same time, respect the larger problems that someone, a figure like Columbus, represents. But, there's, there's not an easy way to, to handle it. 

Blake Pfeil [00:58:17] Reconciling with past histories that are unflattering or steeped in violence can be challenging for communities, especially communities like Italian-Americans who fought hard for well over a century to become a crucial part of the American story. And, when it comes down to it, any kind of nuanced story that dissects community identity will be especially challenging, says Rennie. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:58:43] One of the things that I think is so valuable about the United States is that we tend to, at least in the past, we've recognized that great people have had some pretty serious flaws, terrible flaws, some of them have done terrible, terrible things. At the same time, they've done some great things. When we put up statues or name buildings, it's really important to talk about a person in their fullness, you know? So we're not like North Korea, where we think of our leaders as, as sainted, as godlike, as infallible. 

Blake Pfeil [00:59:17] Rennie also points out that there's a strong political tradition in America, going all the way back to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, for out groups at any given time to form their identity around a sense of victimhood. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [00:59:32] One of the things that we have in the United States that, that can be very important for people sometimes is to, be able to proclaim themselves a victim. We have a very strong sense in America of what we would have called in the 19th century sentimental culture. 

Blake Pfeil [00:59:50] This kind of sentimental connection, and the victimhood it creates, further compounds the dilemma of public symbols, like the Columbus statue in Pueblo, which is one of the last remaining statues of Columbus in the country. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [01:00:02] If you start to create cultural symbols, if you start to teach that kind of, that sort of sensibility, we are who we are because we've been discriminated against, we are who we are because other people have seen us in a certain way, you end up adopting as an aspect of who you are, that negative sensibility. And so, you can see this in lots of, in lots of different cultures, lots of different instances in the United States. 

Blake Pfeil [01:00:30] Rennie goes so far as to draw a parallel between the Columbus statue and the 9/11 Memorial in New York, where the Twin Towers once stood, among others. 

Rennie Scott-Childress [01:00:41] We were attacked on 9/11, by terrorists and so we built a monument to having been victimized. Right? If you go to Pearl Harbor, we have a huge monument to being surprise attacked. We have now the Vietnam, Veterans Memorial, which to some degree is about, you know, the, our victims of the war, all the, all the men who were killed and with the imputation that this was somehow, a misguided war, as opposed to, you know, like a huge celebration of victory. 

Blake Pfeil [01:01:20] As far as Christopher Columbus and his statue in Pueblo goes, what is the solution? Jessica Jackson says that we have to ask ourselves, what is the work of history? 

Jessica Jackson [01:01:30] History is, stories that we tell about ourselves. They're, they're origin stories, creation stories, and those are the kinds of stories that contribute to how we construct our, our personal identities, our community identities, our state histories, our, our state identities. 

Blake Pfeil [01:01:49] One possible solution, says Kathleen Cummings, is how Notre Dame University handled a mural that features Columbus. 

Kathleen Cummings [01:01:56] At Notre Dame, where, in the 1880s, there were, actually an Italian artist, painted murals of Columbus's, activities in the Americas from his arrival all the way through to his death. And calls for removal of those began in the 1970s, when there were people, the first, indigenous students, starting to enroll, and by the 1990s, and in particular in connection with the 1992 anniversary, those calls for removal had reached a fever pitch. They are, painted directly onto the walls, so it's not a question of them being moved somewhere else. They would need to be destroyed. There had, were increasingly movements to, remove the murals, but it wasn't until 2019 that the university president decided that they would be covered up. So the murals are now covered all but two weeks of the year when the covers are removed for instructional purposes, because a lot of faculty members, like me, use them to teach about why Columbus was a hero and why this mattered so much in the 1880s. 

Blake Pfeil [01:03:03] But this is the compromise. And still, there are many populations on campus who say that covering them up isn't enough, that they should be destroyed, or, that it's covering up Catholicism, it's covering up Notre Dame's Catholic identity. 

Kathleen Cummings [01:03:18] Which is simply not true. But these, if, if statues have the power to inspire, they also have the power to oversimplify. And statues never tell a whole story. So I think in the case of Columbus, we're, looking to tell a story that's far more complex. And he's, he's no longer a hero that fits the kind of America we aspire to be today. 

Blake Pfeil [01:03:48] The question then becomes, does that mean that Italian-Americans should forget about him? And should the Italian-American community and Pueblo publicly disavow and disown him? 

Kathleen Cummings [01:03:59] Absolutely not. I'm not saying he didn't exist. We're not writing him out of the historical narrative. There's a sense that monuments are history. That is just absolutely not true. We study history not by staring at a statue, we study history by adding as many sources as we can, and we're constantly uncovering new sources. So, with what we know about Columbus in the 1890s, in the early 20th century, sure, he made sense as a hero. Given what we know now, it's, it's unconscionable. He's not a viable. 

Noell Black [01:04:53] Lost Highways is a production of History Colorado and History Colorado Studios. It's made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor, and by a founding grant from the Sturm Family Foundation, with particular thanks to Stephen Sturm and Emily Sturm. You can find links to other episodes of Lost Highways at HistoryColorado.org/LostHighways. Many thanks to Tyler Hill, who produced this episode. Special thanks also to Susan Schulten, our history advisor; to chief creative officer Jason Hanson; to publications director Sam Bock; to Ann Sneesby-Coch for her newspaper and periodical research; to Kim Kennedy-White for her voice work; and to History Colorado's editorial team, Lori Bailey and Devin Flores. If you'd like to see a transcript of any of our episodes, either as a matter of accessibility or because you'd like to use Lost Highways in your classroom, you can find them at HistoryColorado.org/LostHighways. The Merry Olivers composed the music for this episode and our theme is by Conor Bourgal. Many thanks to our editorial advisors, Sean Boyd, Eric Carpio, Terry Gentry, Chris Jurgens, Aaron Marcus, and Anne Sneesby-Coch; and to our advisory group, Susan Schulten, Thomas Andrews, Tom Romero and Kara Duguette.  Finally, a huge thanks to the entire staff at History Colorado. And thanks for listening. I'm Noel Black.