NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia, assistant professor of digital history at Texas State, about the Latino community's push to remove statues of Spanish conquistadors.
And so a lot of the colonial statues that we see of Christopher Columbus, of Isabel, of Ponce de Leon, all these people really comes from this idea that there were people that were not being accepted as Americans in the 19th century, and they tried to lay claim to that through these statues.
And is there a link between movements on the far-right supporting the Confederate statues and those within the Hispanic community to maintain these monuments to Spanish colonialism?
VALENCIA-GARCIA: A lot of the far-right actors are using this language of reconquest to talk about taking back land, and that's prominent in, like, the statues of Isabel and Columbus.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia is assistant professor of digital history at Texas State University.
