Groups gathered in Tucson's Christopher Columbus Park Oct. 8, 2017, to demand the city change the name.
Three Tucson groups marked the lead-up to Columbus Day by demanding the city rename a park bearing the Italian explorer’s name.
Lucha Unida de Estudiantes y Padres (LUPE), Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and the Chuckson Water Protectors held the event at the west-side park on Sunday — adjacent to families and fishermen dotting the shore of the park’s Silverbell Lake — to draw attention to public spaces in Arizona that they said represent problematic and violent histories.
A flier for the event said the groups wanted to expand on growing nationwide efforts to remove confederate monuments by also focusing on the “genocide of Indigenous peoples and racist immigration policy.”
The accepted historical narrative about Christopher Columbus is wrong, organizers said.
“His legacy is colonialism, slavery and the destruction of people and cultures. What Anglo America and Eurocentric history has taught and continues to teach is false,” a speaker from LUPE told those in attendance.
In addition to the renaming of Tucson’s Christopher Columbus Park, the groups are also asking for the removal of the border wall as well as a Confederate monument at Picacho Peak.
“[The rallies are] organized around these types of monuments — these racist monuments that are all over the nation, of course — and we’re starting off with Christopher Columbus.” said Stteffanny Cott, also with LUPE. “We’re here protesting and demanding these monuments be taken down and this particular park is renamed.”
The groups are circulating a petition to convince the city to change the name and work with the Tohono O’odham Nation to find a new one.
“Change the narrative and the discourse on Christopher Columbus," Cott said. "Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America. People had been living here for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
The groups don’t recognize Columbus Day, Cott said, and instead observe Indigenous Peoples' Day.
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