In 1492, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue

The Woolley Portrait (Mother Jones 1991: 25)

Hooray.

While I can understand that in the U.S. and other Anglo-type civilizations the arrival of Christopher Columbus or Cristobal Colon (so what really was his name anyway?) would be celebrated, since it marked the beginning of the end for American civilizations and a new beginning for Europe's dissatisfied emigrants, it's a little harder to find justification for such celebration in a land that is still largely indigenous; where the arrival of that diseased party headed by Mr. Colon only meant death, starvation and slavery for all those here before he arrived.

Dia de la Raza is celebrated here in sunny Mexico on October 12th, the day the Genoan sailor first set his sights on what is now Haiti. Now this Dia de la Raza literally means Day of the Race; so we are supposedly celebrating some sort of racial thing? Is it the racial superiority of the white Spanish over the brown Indian cultures? It certainly can't be the indigenous people celebrating something that happened on that fateful day, since for them nothing positive has ever come of the so-called 'discovery'.

The Lotto Portrait (Berenson 1956: pl. 78)

This whole glorification of Colon and his 'discovery' is, in my humble opinion, a crock. While regarded in many places as some kind of hero, Cristobal Colon or whatever his name was, was an opportunistic, greedy businessman and a character totally unworthy of the term 'hero'. Did he save anyone or anything from some disaster? Did he invent some miracle cure for a deadly disease? Did he perform some other miraculous feat that would inspire humankind for generations to come? No, he did not. Christopher Columbus opened the gates that brought diseases that would kill millions; he exterminated, hunted and enslaved other human beings for profit; he stole and destroyed art and property  - again - for profit. Hardly hero material, I would think.

So why 'celebrate' the day that all this tragedy began? How does the fact that Mexico is celebrating the beginning of the end of the ancient Mexican civilizations, affect the descendants of those very civilizations that Columbus/Colon helped to kill off? What does the celebration mean in terms of white superiority vs. brown inferiority? Does the fact that we celebrate in Mexico the arrival of the white foreigner help to explain the attitudes of people today? Is this part of the reason why it's considered perfectly normal (by all parties concerned, including the abused) to have white (or almost white) 'patrones' employing and abusing their indigenous muchachas, mozos, etc.?  Why are we celebrating the dawn of a new racism in America?

I suggest that the Mexican history books do a little background investigation on the famous arrival in America and effects of that arrival on the population, instead of blindly and subserviently following the severely flawed gringo history book version of events that they are presenting to Mexico's youth now. Maybe it would be a little more enlightening and culturally correct to present the arrival of the Genoan from a native American viewpoint, with an analysis of the results of that fateful 'discovery'.

No one knows what Columbus really looked like. All existing portraits were painted after Colon's death. The portraits in this article come from the following website:

The story of Columbus has become a great fairy tale. A lot of myths are exploded at this page: