Reconsidering the Past, One Statue at a Time
From Virginia to New Mexico, protests over police brutality have brought hundreds of years of American history bubbling to the surface. A crew removed the statue of Juan de Oñate from outside the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque on Tuesday. The statue was removed by the city's police department.
Across the country, monuments criticized as symbols of historical oppression have been defaced and brought down at warp speed in recent days. The movement initially set its sights on Confederate symbols and examples of racism against African-Americans, but has since exploded into a broader cultural moment, forcing a reckoning over such issues as European colonization and the oppression of Native Americans.

In New Mexico, it has surfaced generations-old tensions among Indigenous, Hispanic and Anglo residents and brought 400 years of turbulent history bubbling to the surface.

“We’re at this inflection point,” said Keegan King, a member of Pueblo of Ácoma, which endured a massacre of 800 or more people directed by Oñate, the brutal Spanish conquistador and colonial governor. The Black Lives Matter movement, he said, had encouraged people to examine the history around them, and not all of it was merely written in books.

“These pieces of systemic racism took the form of monuments and statues and parks,” Mr. King said.

The debate over how to represent the uncomfortable parts of American history has been going on for decades, but the traction for knocking down monuments seen in recent days raises new questions about whether it will result in a fundamental shift in how history is taught to new generations.