This is a portion of a large group representing Spanish colonizers on the trail north to New Mexico. A controversial subject!
DrFumblefinger explores the architecture in “Downtown Casablanca”. Most were constructed in the period between WWI and WWII, and show art deco and art nouveau features combined with Moroccan/Moorish features.
A delicious lunch was capped by a pleasant young Berber girl pouring mint tea for us.
I was visiting a friend, and this was the view from their house. I could understand why they built their house facing this direction. I was taken by the beauty!
Samantha shares some street art pictures from her recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia.
A garden in South Wales is the topic of today’s post from ProfessorAbe
Vienna’s Clock Museum, one of the biggest and best of its kind doesn’t really have 10,000 clocks, but you’d never know that as you get lost in its world of time.
The oldest monumental fountain in Paris has a long history of rebuilding, renaming and relocating
This is all the clue there is: Is it enough for you to name the scene of a future TravelGumbo blog? Email answers by Monday midnight to [email protected]
UPDATE
When I posted this image two years ago, and described it as ‘a controversial subject,’ that was really a faint reaction to a serious issue. I wish now I had gone deeper into it, especially now that the statue’s meaning and its removal have become big news.
Here’s a bit of background. The statue came about through the efforts of the New Mexican Hispanic Culture Preservation League about twenty years ago. The League wanted to “represent our deep desire to acknowledge our Spanish Colonial roots.” That’s been an issue in New Mexico since the arrival of “Americans” in 1848, after the Mexican War took the territory from Mexico.
But underneath that history is the 16th conquest of the native peoples of New Mexico, especially the Pueblos, by those same “Spanish Colonial” forces represented in the statues of colonizers led by Juan de Oñate. Oñate himself seems a strange figure to commemorate; he was so known in his own time for cruelty (he ordered the execution of 800 members of the Acoma Pueblo, routinely had prisoners’ feet cut off and more) that the Spanish government convicted him of cruelty and banished him.
And so, we see how complex history is: facts do not always add up to truth. To the still active and organized Pueblos the arrival of Oñate is tragedy; to the also-large and organized New Mexicans of Spanish colonial descent, it is triumph and a rebuke to the narrative that civilization arrived with the Anglos. Given that, the idea of erecting the ensemble, with public funds on public land, not in the distant past but in current memory, certainly seems like an act of aggression rather than commemoration.