An Albuquerque memorial highlights why we should stop building statues, and what types of monuments will stand the test of time
Long before gunshots were fired there last June, the Cuarto Centenario Memorial, in Albuquerque’s Old Town neighborhood, was envisioned as an ode to multicultural unity in New Mexico. What emerged instead were two sharply contrasting pieces of public art.
One of the installations, Numbe Whageh, is an earthwork piece by Nora Naranjo Morse, a member of the Kha’p’o, or Santa Clara Pueblo. Numbe Whageh — which translates to “the center place” — is a participatory work; from street level, the viewer descends along a spiraling path, flanked by berms of native vegetation: sagebrush, yucca, chamisa. Rocks and boulders, some sourced from pueblos and engraved by other Native artists, flank the path. At the center, about six feet below sidewalk level, is a trickle of water; the solar-powered fountain is the only facet of Numbe Whageh that couldn’t be collected in New Mexico’s outdoors.
“There’s no monument, no tribute to a man. It’s a tribute to the worldview we had, to our surroundings, to our environment,” Naranjo Morse told me recently. “And when you come out of that center place, of the actual numbe whageh, you see that monument of Oñate — or, you did see that monument of Oñate.”
Morse was referring to a bronze statue of Juan de Oñate, the conquistador who claimed present-day New Mexico for Spain in 1598, and she was using the past tense because that monument isn’t there anymore. Last June, after George Floyd was killed, Albuquerque protesters called for the removal of Oñate from La Jornada, the other Cuarto Centenario artwork, a collection of statues depicting Spanish settlers. Oñate brutalized Native American tribes, and his bust, the protesters felt, was an unacceptable glorification of racist colonialism. Some, with a pickaxe and chain, tried to pull the statue down themselves. Counter-demonstrators, including members of an armed militia, showed up to protect the Oñate statue, and violence ensued. One fired four shots during an altercation and wounded a protester. A day later, the city removed Oñate from La Jornada.
Over the past few years, Americans have been rethinking monuments to soldiers and explorers, pioneers and politicians and priests. As I’ve watched these debates unfold, one thing seems clear: we need to stop making monuments to people.
The two Cuarto Centenario pieces epitomize why. To my knowledge, nobody present on that June evening was protesting the message of Numbe Whageh, nor has Naranjo Morse’s artwork ever moved anybody to take up arms or commit violence. You’d be hard-pressed to find somebody offended by Numbe Whageh’s piñon pines. Perhaps all of this is why Numbe Whageh remains, while La Jornada’s central character sits in storage. Embedded in that dichotomy is a lesson for all the West about who and what we choose to memorialize.
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In advance of New Mexico’s Cuarto Centenario celebration, in 1998, members of the Hispanic Culture Preservation League petitioned for an Oñate statue to be erected in Old Town. As the University of Oklahoma art historian Alison Fields detailed in a 2011 journal article, their goal was to position Oñate as the true usher of European culture to the Americas. “It was not the pilgrims, it did not happen at Jamestown or at Plymouth Rock,” Millie Santillanes, an initial proponent of the Oñate statue, told the Albuquerque Journal that year. “The first permanent European settlement flew the Spanish flag, here in New Mexico. They were our forefathers, and we are proud of them.”
This drive to honor European settlers is an old one in the West. University of North Dakota historian Cynthia Prescott is an expert in pioneer monuments around the region. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she told me, Western society was primed for a certain kind of remembrance. The myths of unsettled frontiers and manifest destiny were alive and well, and monuments to pioneer settlers simultaneously celebrated those concepts and justified the removal of Native Americans from the land.
So, all around the West, statues started popping up: of missionaries, of miners, of soldiers, and of numerous pioneer families and figureheads. The fact that those being memorialized often subjugated others — usually Native people — or benefited from said subjugation was ignored.
“People were very anxious in Western states about solidifying white settlement and authority,” Prescott said. “Honoring the ‘founding fathers’ in Oregon or California or wherever is one piece of it, but there’s the need to justify the taking of lands from Native people … . These monuments became a way of enshrining a sort of racial politics in the West, just as [Confederate monuments] did in the South.”
Cuarto Centenario was to be a memorial in this vein, a statue honoring the man who “founded” New Mexico. But after plans for the Oñate monument became public, its path diverged from other pioneer monuments, which were rarely controversial, in a fundamental way: racial unrest was thrust into the public debate.
After Oñate arrived in present-day New Mexico in 1598, Acoma Pueblo fighters killed 12 of his men in a battle. In response, Oñate’s soldiers killed hundreds of Acoma people — warriors and civilians alike — and enslaved many more. Twenty-four men survived Oñate’s retaliation, and he ordered their right feet to be cut off. Even at a time when atrocities against Native people were de rigueur, Oñate’s actions were a step too far for the crown. Spain tried him as a war criminal, and banished him from New Mexico.
Four hundred years later, members of Albuquerque’s Hispanic community felt Oñate was getting a bad rap. Members of the Hispanic Cultural Preservation League, Fields wrote, were trying to correct the “black legend” that painted Spanish settlers as brutal and greedy, stereotypes that persisted. They felt a bust of Oñate at the city’s Cuarto Centenario Memorial would rightly honor him as a key historical figure in New Mexico.
As the idea of an Oñate monument advanced, details of his treatment of Pueblo people were thrust into the limelight. Prominent Native Americans, including Acoma Pueblo journalist Conroy Chino, started an opposition campaign. In response, the city established a Cuarto Centenario commission to determine what, exactly, the monument should depict. They settled on a multicultural approach, and chose three artists — Latino sculptor Reynaldo “Sonny” Rivera; Betty Sabo, who was white (she died in 2016); and Naranjo Morse — to team up on the memorial.
“As the artists tried to reach a shared vision, the tri-cultural project quickly fractured,” Fields wrote. For one, it was an impossible task to begin with: the various ethnicities of New Mexicans cannot be sheared into three neat categories, yet each artist was tasked with representing such groups. Further, Naranjo Morse was invited late in the process; Sabo and Rivera had already drawn up a design by the time she joined the project. The struggle for a shared vision was so great that the city sent the artists to mediation.
All the while, public hearings revealed that Oñate’s legacy was a sort of cultural sledgehammer, smashing the facade of unity to bits. Many Hispanos equated the criticism of Oñate with an overarching anti-Hispanic sentiment. “If your family is of Spanish descent, this [the threat to remove Oñate from the memorial] is a personal attack on you, your family, and your heritage,” John Lucero told the city council. The idea that Native folks should forgive and forget was often broached.
Meanwhile, some Native Americans were outraged. “By honoring this man, you give him back his eyes, his spirit, his heartbeat. It is a spirit not worthy of being memorialized,” Lloyd Joe, a Navajo man, told the council.
It was finally decided that Sabo and Rivera would sculpt Oñate and other settlers, and Naranjo Morse would craft her own adjacent project. It was an unintended result; a project designed to unify residents had, instead, exposed rifts between New Mexico’s various cultures.
“Colonization was what Native people experienced a long time ago,” Naranjo Morse told me. “Basically, I was seeing it happen again with this project.”
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During his infamous “both sides” address after the 2017 alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a woman was killed, then-President Donald Trump floated a hypothetical to defend Confederate statues. “George Washington was a slave owner,” Trump told members of the press. “So will George Washington now lose his status? … Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? … Are we going to take down his statue? Because he was a major slave owner.”
Implicit in Trump’s questions was the assumption of impossibility — surely, nobody would entertain the notion of removing monuments to Washington or Jefferson. But why not? Is it impossible for us to acknowledge that Washington and Jefferson — and Oñate — fundamentally shaped our nation while also holding them accountable for human rights violations?
“If you’re going to put up a tribute to someone, you do that because you want to celebrate a certain set of values or accomplishments of that person,” Prescott told me. “But as soon as you name a building after, or build a statue of, this person, that starts to imply that you’re celebrating the totality of that person, as opposed to the thing that they accomplished.”
All of us are flawed, and it’s quite easy to poke holes in the implied righteousness that accompanies a regal statue. As such, figures once deemed unimpeachable heroes are being toppled. Californians removed various statues of Father Junipero Serra, the canonized Catholic missionary who brought Christianity to Alta California, but conducted forced baptisms and enslaved American Indians in the process. Denver protesters removed the city’s Union soldier statue, given the fact that Colorado’s antislavery fighters massacred Cheyenne and Arapaho people. A statue of John Sutter, who kicked off the California gold rush, is gone in Sacramento: he enslaved local Indians. Even the once-innocuous pioneer monuments are falling as their connection with white colonization is better understood.
Another symptom of memorializing people is that, over time, the individual tends to overwhelm the concepts they represent. Consider the lionized founding fathers: “A plaque or depiction of the U.S. Constitution as a foundational document … reads very different from a statue of the person who created it, who is a slave owner,” Prescott said. Another example that comes to mind is Abraham Lincoln, memorialized as a 28-foot-tall marble giant in D.C. Republicans often call their group the “party of Lincoln,” but I’ve never heard them proclaim the GOP is the party of emancipation.
Washington and Jefferson enslaved people. Martin Luther King, Jr., was an adulterer. Lincoln felt the best place for freed Black people was Africa. Po’pay led the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that briefly drove Spaniards out of New Mexico, but his fighters killed civilians in the process. Every historical figure is complicated, and some of their flaws compel people to topple monuments to them. If we stop honoring individuals, we can save ourselves such consternation. We should memorialize the principles we cherish, not the people we think we do.
But what to do with existing statues? Prescott likes when those removed are preserved in museums; the objects, as well as the motivations behind both their construction and removal, are certainly part of our history. But she’s also a fan of counter-monuments that contextualize controversial statues. She gave me two examples of effective ones: Fearless Girl, the bronze child staring down the famous sculpture of a bull on Wall Street, and Numbe Whageh.
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After the violence at Cuarto Centenario last June, the city started the Race, History, and Healing Project, a series of public hearings and interviews that, much like the Cuarto Centenario commission that preceded it two decades ago, tried to figure out what to do with La Jornada. In October, the group presented its final report to the Albuquerque City Council.
“The takeaway from these responses,” the project’s summary read, “is to balance two sets of needs. First are the needs to learn from history and to respect and honor all cultures. The second are the needs to stand in solidarity with groups that have been harmed and not glorify harmful actions.” The majority of participants felt the Oñate statue glorified such actions, and said they don’t want it back on the Cuarto Centenario grounds. The city council has yet to decide on bronze Oñate’s fate; there will likely be more public hearings.
Rivera, who sculpted the Oñate in La Jornada, said the removal amounts to whitewashing, and ignores how the conquistador’s arrival shaped life throughout North America. “The Oñate caravan brought religion, livestock and new ideas like mining and an irrigation system – acequias – which have impacted everyone in this country today,” he wrote in an Albuquerque Journal op-ed. “I do think it’s wrong to destroy or remove controversial art. Just like I don’t believe controversial books should be burned.”
Despite the animosity that has always surrounded Cuarto Centenario and the atrocities Oñate committed against Pueblo people, Naranjo Morse also wants the statue to return, albeit with an education campaign to ensure Oñate’s actions are known far and wide.
“There are very important lessons, especially in this particular project. It speaks to all of those things we’ve been talking about — the dynamic of colonization, and how people are working through it,” she told me. “All of this, from the arrival of Oñate in 1598 to the removal of his statue in 2020, are a part of critical social issues that remain unresolved.”
When Naranjo Morse was conceptualizing Numbe Whageh, she visited Pueblo communities around the state, asking folks what her memorial should entail. Those conversations led her to design it in response to the adjacent statues; losing Oñate, therefore, affects the message of Numbe Whageh.
Her use of natural elements, of rocks donated by pueblos around the state, “was in contrast to that idea of paying tribute to Oñate, to that other worldview,” she said. “In Pueblo thinking, you are among the clouds, among the mountains, among the rocks, among the animal life — not more than them. That idea is represented in Numbe Whageh.” Naranjo Morse contrasted that with “Oñate, pointing north with the entourage of technology and militarism and conquest. And that visual juxtaposition speaks to contrasting worldviews.
“At a young age,” she continued, “we were socialized to believe we were marginal. And, in order to be of any worth to dominant society, we needed to be colonized. In reality, our culture, our way of life had, has great significance and sustainability.”
