Countering Columbus: "La Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan"—Antimonuments and Artistic Interventions on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City.

In October 2020, the Columbus monument on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma was removed from its pedestal. This removal took place in the context of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, which were directed against monuments in public spaces symbolizing racial injustice, the era of colonial expansion, or the transatlantic slave trade. During and since these protests, the figure of Christopher Columbus in particular has become the focus of attention. Columbus monuments in several cities worldwide were destroyed, replaced, or moved to different locations, or alternatively reframed through various forms of artistic intervention. The analysis of the Mexican case is particularly interesting because several different options of how to proceed with this type of "difficult heritage" were proposed and publicly debated. This essay first discusses the original monument and its proposed replacement with the representation of an Indigenous woman as a form of decolonization of public space, particularly in the context of a similar exchange of monuments carried out in Buenos Aires years earlier. I then analyze the subsequent unofficial intervention by a feminist collective on and around the pedestal and place it in the larger context of various artistic counterstrategies on the Paseo de la Reforma. The Mexican debate around the Columbus monument can help to parse the complexities of cultures of remembrance and present possible solutions that preserve the traces of a "difficult heritage" while at the same time developing an antimonumental language that is not formally continuous with the visual language of imperial domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]