ULA Celebrates Columbus School Renaming

John Lugo and a dozen fellow local immigrant rights activists gathered at a familiar site for an unfamiliar occasion.

After 18 years of protests, advocacy, and historical consciousness raising at the corner of Grand Avenue and Blatchley Avenue, the Unidad Latina en Acción organizers turned out to celebrate the Board of Education’s decision to rename Christopher Columbus Family Academy.

That victory rally took place Tuesday afternoon outside of the Fair Haven K‑8 public school at 255 Blatchley Ave.

Since founding ULA in 2002, Lugo has led protest after protest at that corner, where he’s called on the city to remove the name of the 15th-century explorer whose legacy is so closely tied to the histories of slavery, genocide, rape, and colonization in the Americas.

Lugo said that ULA decided to celebrate at that corner Tuesday because of the Board of Education’s vote Monday night to rename the school and to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the district’s calendar.

He said the group was also celebrating the city parks commission’s vote last week to remove the century-old Christopher Columbus statue from Wooster Square.

“When we started the movement for immigrant rights in New Haven in 2002, one of the goals of this movement was to remove all these names that mean pain and horror in our communities,” Lugo said. ​“And one of those names is Christopher Columbus.”

Lugo said that he and ULA have pushed so hard over the decades for Columbus memorials to be renamed because of the violence and cruelty with which Columbus treated indigenous people, thousands of whom he ordered sent from the Caribbean to Spain into slavery.

“Why is there so much celebration around somebody who produced so much pain in our countries?” he asked.

He heralded Monday night’s Board of Ed vote as finally heeding ULA’s call at a moment of nationwide reevaluation of whom should be memorialized in the context of this country’s history of racism and white supremacy.

New Haveners originally from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia took their turns after Lugo to throw their support behind the school board’s decision.

Kubibirí Rivera (pictured) said her mother’s family is Taino and her father’s family is African American — meaning that both sides are connected to peoples directly harmed by Columbus’s actions five centuries ago.

“These lands have been dominated by the oppressor, and mostly white male Americans,” she said. ​“We need to change that a little more and start being more diverse. I think to have the name of Christopher Columbus in front of a school in a Hispanic area is another form of mental slavery.”

Wilmer Barzallo (pictured) agreed.

“Christopher Columbus is a symbol oppression,” said Barzallo, who was born and raised in Ecuador.

He said that indigenous peoples in the Americas built Machu Picchu, harvested corn and beans and pineapples and potatoes, and developed some of the most advanced scientific and medical knowledge in the world at the time, all before European colonizers arrived.

“I really feel very happy that things like this are happening through the country, where monuments that represent oppression, exploitation, genocide, violence, rape are being removed. Today we celebrate this great occasion.”

Catherine John (pictured), who originally hails from the West Indies, identified Columbus as ​“the pioneer of white supremacy.”

And Erik Sarmiento, who emigrated to New Haven from Mexico, said he hopes that this current national reckoning with this country’s history of violence and racial oppression extends beyond Columbus memorials.

“There is all this new consciousness that racism is something that is in the spirit of this country,” he said, as translated from Spanish into English by Lugo. ​“And that’s something that should be changed, and more monuments should be changed.”

Lugo said that ULA’s decades long, and now successful, movement for the renaming of Columbus Academy and the removal of the Wooster Square statue is not meant to be a slight against New Haven’s Italian American community.

He recognized that Italian Americans have contributed much to the culture and history of the Elm City.

Columbus, he insisted, is simply the wrong person to memorialize when looking to celebrate that history because of all of the harm and pain he caused so many other people.

Lugo said singled out the early 20th century anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti or the 19th century founding father of the modern Italian nation state Giuseppe Garibaldi as more worthy figures of recognition.

As for what Christopher Columbus Family Academy should be renamed to, Lugo said he would like to see the city and the Board of Education recognize the indigenous people who lived where New Haven now stands before white European settlers arrived.

He said the city’s sole plaque commemorating the Quinnipiac people on Townsend Avenue is not enough of a recognition of the rich cultures, histories, and peoples that occupied this land before the 1600s.

“We hope that when they choose a name,” he said, ​“we hope that they choose somebody who used to be here before Europeans arrived in New England.”