Abstract
With the ongoing ‘decolonization’ actions of Christopher Columbus’s legacy in the United States, Italian Americans have been challenged to contend with their historical affiliation with and championing of this historical figure. This chapter focuses on two contemporary cases involving calls to remove memorializations of Columbus—Manhattan’s large-scale Columbus Circle monument and the smaller Columbus statue in San Jose City Hall in California—so as to consider the roles collective memory and ideology play with civic monuments and public art. Building on Pierre Nora’s notion of rememoration the authors position Columbian material culture as sites of memory whereby contemporary Italian Americans use rhetorical strategies to defend or decry monuments originally gifted primarily by Italian immigrants to U.S. municipalities, in light of mounting criticism against them in the present. Scrutinizing various histories and debates, the chapter sheds light on the dynamic experiences and actions of Italian Americans, a white ethnic group often misguidedly defined in limiting terms.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
A full-page letter in the New York Times from Angelo Vivolo, president of the Columbus Citizen Foundation, stated ‘As all nations do, we must continue to reevaluate our history as Americans, and whom we choose to honor …. we will state for the record that we will not allow that reflection to come at the expense of a monument that has come to represent the many achievements that Italian Americans have accomplished’ (Vivolo 2017, A21).
- 3.
See Caron’s (2018) New York Times article depicting Italian Americans as a monolithic group categorically supporting Columbus and in opposition to Native Americans.
- 4.
Klain’s 2011 documentary film, Columbus Day Legacy explores the often conflicting positions of Native Americans and Italian Americans.
- 5.
- 6.
On 12 April 2019, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell formally apologized for the lynching (Williams 2019).
- 7.
Italian immigrant anarchists in the newspaper Il Grido degli Oppressi adamantly condemned Columbus, characterizing him in 1892 as a ‘pirate and adventurer … indifferent to massacre’ and one who ‘set the stage for “racial prejudices and hatreds” in America and “the martyrdom of the negroes in the South”’ (Zimmer 2015, p. 74).
- 8.
Noce also used print media to construct his own heroism with respect to Columbus by disseminating his work in supporting Columbus, sometimes in opposition to those communities who Columbus was supposed to symbolize. Noce claimed in a self-published account that Italian immigrant labourers striking in Nevada in 1879 had distracted his efforts of confirming Columbus Day as a state holiday (Noce 1910, p. 24).
- 9.
See van der Krogt for a listing of Columbus statues globally.
- 10.
Technically, a federal holiday is a paid day off for federal employees; Congress lacks authority to oblige individual states or local municipalities to celebrate a federal holiday.
- 11.
Harney suggests that an ‘ethnic inferiority complex’ is at play for those Italian North Americans looking to find Italian heroes associated with settler histories and which ‘led to aggressive, ethnocentric assertions and to recitals of the group’s past glories that in fact flirted with racism’ (1993, p. 11).
- 12.
See van der Krogt’s (undated) ‘Columbus Monuments Pages’ for information of statues donated by Italian Americans.
- 13.
A watershed marker of this national, ideological shift came when Berkeley became the first city to celebrate officially Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day. Italian Americans voiced concern that removing Columbus Day was a slight to Italian Americans, a position that ‘Berkeley leaders’ denied (see Arnold 1992).
- 14.
See Fachin (2012, pp. 135–139) on the group.
- 15.
Barsotti publicly opposed labour unions and workers aid.
- 16.
Barsotti ‘was charged with pocketing part of the nearly $7,600’ for the Verdi statue that cost approximately $8600 in 1906 (Luconi 2016, p. 48).
- 17.
Pope would go on to co-found the Columbus Citizen’s Foundation which today organizes New York City’s annual Columbus Day parade.
- 18.
Throughout World War II, the federal government also used Columbus Day to influence Italian Americans (Pozzetta and Mormino 1998, pp. 8–11). On Columbus Day in 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that the government was lifting restrictions for Italian ‘enemy aliens’, the approximately 600,000 Italian nationals living in the country at the time.
- 19.
- 20.
The commission was made up of 18 scholars, architects, museum professionals, and visual artists. At the Manhattan meeting, Sciorra read a portion from our blog (Ruberto and Sciorra 2017b).
- 21.
Italian American Studies scholars fall across the spectrum of opinions when it comes to Columbus: some hold an anti-Columbus position (see our discussion on No Columbus Day), others have sometimes responded defensively to attacks on Columbus (ostensibly defending the established Columbus paradigm). See The Italian American Review (1.2, 1992) and the symposium proceedings Columbus: Meetings of Cultures (Mignone 1993).
- 22.
In addition to the cited sources, this history of San Jose’s Columbus statue is also based on uncited sources listed in the bibliography’s ‘Archival Material’.
- 23.
Borelli is referencing a bust of inventor Guglielmo Marconi Italian American organizations gifted in 1939.
- 24.
The Columbus Monument Committee included: ‘the Sons of Italy lodges, the Italian Catholic Federation, the Civic Club, the Italian Benevolent Society, the Tricarico Club, La Camerata, the Trabia Social Club, the Italo-American Citizens Club, the Piemonte Club, the Favalesi Club and numerous private citizens and industrial concerns’ (‘San Jose, City Hall, Columbus Statue’ 23 March 1958).
- 25.
‘The statue was created by a student who never did another sculpture’, said Jon Cicirelli, acting director of Public Works, ‘and is not particularly valuable as a work of art’ (DeRuy 2018).
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Archival Material
San Jose, City Hall, Columbus Statue, San Jose Mercury News Clipping File, California Room, San Jose Public Library.
23 March 1958.
27 March 1958.
30 September 1958.
9 March 2001.
10 March 2001.
23 December 2001.
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Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Yiorgos Anagnostou, Siân Gibby, and Dell Upton for their suggestions on earlier versions of this article. We also received feedback from Marta Gutman and others as part of the Columbia University Seminar in Modern Italian Studies, as well as from participants of the 2019 Memory Studies Association conference. We are grateful to Melinda Riddle and Lucinda Norman of the city of San Jose for arranging an interview with the mayor and gathering some of the city’s archived materials for us.
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Ruberto, L.E., Sciorra, J. (2020). ‘Columbus Might Be Dwarfed to Obscurity’: Italian Americans’ Engagement with Columbus Monuments in a Time of Decolonization. In: Marschall, S. (eds) Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41329-3_3
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