There Must Be a Better Way to Make a Monument
As controversial statues are toppled across the U.S., artists and activists are pushing cities to rethink the memorialization process.
A statue of Christopher Columbus stood in L.A.’s Grand Park until 2018, when the city removed it.
Photographer: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
As a teenager living in Los Angeles, Joel Garcia passed by the city’s Christopher Columbus memorial almost every day. Garcia, a Huichol artist and cofounder of the Indigenous cultural collaborative Meztli Projects, was born and raised in East L.A. and still lives and works there today. On his way to school he switched buses at Grand Park, where a statue of Columbus stood for 45 years.
The monument served as a daily reminder of the things that radicalized Brown kids like Garcia in high school, he says — forces such as Proposition 187, a ballot measure that made undocumented immigrants ineligible for public benefits in California in 1994, or California Governor Pete Wilson’s whole career. For years, Natives and their allies organized in Grand Park to protest the presence of the Columbus statue.