Onate or the Equestrian?
There is nothing that I find more interesting that these kinds of controversies over the representation of history, which I owe partly to my graduate advisor, David William Cohen, and some of the other professors I studied with at Johns Hopkins. They’re a central part of what my advisor called “the production of history”, and they’re especially interesting controversies for historians in the United States and Western Europe as they invariably intertwine professional historians and popular ideas about history.
The temptation is just to step back and study these controversies for themselves, of themselves, because they themselves bear extraordinary witness to the substance of historical experience, as the British historian Raphael Samuel passionately argued in Theatres of Memory. As the South African historian Carolyn Hamilton observes regarding the Zulu monarch Shaka, in all subsequent representations of Shaka right up to the miniseries “Shaka Zulu” or the heritage amusement park Shakaland, one can discern the footprint of an original, source history—but it cannot be separated out or subtracted from the later history of thinking about or imagining Shaka.
The same is true in this case: the attempt to represent Onate has intricably embedded inside of it the entire history of Spanish colonization of the American Southwest, its annexation by the United States, race relations on the US-Mexico border, the treatment of Native Americans, and contemporary identity politics. Studying the debate isn’t just a matter for a contemporary sociology.
Satisfying as it is to simply stand on the sidelines and look on with interest, it seems to me that the responsibilities of professional historians go beyond Olympian detachment—even if they don’t demand an equally problematic Promethean intervention. A thread at Invisible Adjunct asks, “What does the public want from historians?” There were a lot of interesting answers in the thread, but clearly one of the things the public wants is that historians enter into disputes over the meaning and uses of history as participants, not just observers.
The problem is that a debate like the one over Onate offers no simple point of entry for a scholar. What the statue’s makers observe is true. Onate is part of the history of El Paso; in his own time and place, he could legitimately be called courageous, and equally, was not notably more or less brutal than most of his European contemporaries in the New World. True enough that to oppose a statue to Onate is almost necessarily to oppose all celebratory representations of European settlers. And what historian Marc Simmons observes in the Times article is also true, that vilifying Onate and ennobling the Acoma Indians, his victims, overlooks the extent to which the Acoma themselves once were victimizers before they became victims, much as the Sioux were imperialists who became the victims of imperialism. A scholar can agree that what Simmons says is true—but a scholar can also confirm that what the Acoma say is true, that Onate committed acts of brutality and aggression, and his notable achievement was no more and no less than an act of imperial conquest.
The problem is that this doesn’t tell us anything about how we should choose to represent history in our public spaces. The past stretches out in infinite variety. Why Onate on a horse, and not Onate ordering the mutilation of women and children? Both representations have a truth to them: they happened, they’re part of our historical imagination, they resonate with an actually existing part of the American public.
Do we make monuments to celebrate or venerate the past? What person, then, is so unambiguously worthy of celebration that we could all feel comfortable with a statue of them, while also being important to or emblematic of the past? Do we make monuments to educate about the past, or to mourn it? What, then, shall we choose to teach about, and how can we select the singular moments to mourn in the long procession of humanity’s pain? (Not to mention the fact that if we’re building a monument to history at an airport, there really might be something rather odd about saying, “Welcome to El Paso, where 406 years ago, some Native Americans were mutilated by Spanish conquerors”.)
In my Production of History course, one of my favorite assignments in terms of results has been when I’ve handed students events and individuals not normally the subject of monuments or museum exhibits and asked them to lay out a design for a public representation of their topic. The best paper ever came from one student who was handed the Whisky Rebellion. She designed a museum exhibit that was built as a series of concentric circles. In the core circle was a “just the facts, ma’am” overview of the Whisky Rebellion, written as a series of scholarly presentations. The next circle out was primary documents and materials from the Whisky Rebellion. The next circle beyond that was later representations of the Whisky Rebellion by American writers and intellectuals over the years. The next circle beyond that was connected histories: histories of tax revolts, of American populism from Jackson to early 20th Century progressivism, of rural-urban antagonism, of the “paranoid style” in American politics and hostility to “big government”. Finally she had a circle where visitors would craft their own impressions of the history they’d seen—where current tax dissenters might be able to make an exhibit, or where contemporary moonshiners might be able to talk about the history of their craft, or audiences could debate the importance of what they’d seen through their own contributions.
I thought that was the most perfectly envisioned exhibit you could imagine, both about the event itself and about the way that the event has become meaningful to wider public, including scholars. I agree that it is not easy to accomplish the same density of effect with a statue or memorial, but it is not impossible, either. Perhaps that’s the role scholars can play, not by arguing for or against something like the Onate statue, but by urging us to ask why we want to remember the past, and about how we might best accomplish our diverse purposes.