The DNA results are in. Should any angry readers search frantically for my ancestry records, they would indeed find that I have quite a bit of Indigenous blood. In fact, according to my father’s DNA test, I have more than enough to qualify for residence on most reservations, lest someone claim I am too removed from Indigenous people to comment on Columbus. This fact is not particularly shocking considering my last name is Esquivel and half my family traces their origins to Mexico, where virtually everyone is ethnically Mestizo. Still, it may come as a surprise to many that I do in fact choose to recognize Columbus day, and am saddened to watch Indigenous People’s Day be pinned against it annually.
In principle, I am not opposed to Indigenous Peoples’ Day; in fact, I am quite sanguine about the idea of having a national day of recognition for Indigenous people. Indigenous culture is central to North American history. We would be remiss as a society to ignore or downplay its place in that history, and the abuses which have been suffered by Indigenous people at the hands of colonizers. I resent the fact, however, that the push for such a day of recognition has been transformed into the club by which Columbus’s legacy is assassinated. A “Columbus Day” and an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” can and should peacefully coexist. I do not observe Columbus Day as a celebration of the man’s character, nor are his personal sins or virtues of particular interest to me. In the same way that I celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day despite allegations made against his character, I celebrate Columbus Day. Both men changed the course of history, and our lives have been bettered because of their accomplishments.
Columbus’s arrival to the Americas represented the commencement of American society. No, Columbus was not the first man to “discover America”, but the semantics game does not succeed in watering down the gravity of what happened in October of 1492. Columbus brought Western values to a land which never had the opportunity to experience movements such as the Renaissance or benefit from the academic progress of the Middle Ages or read Greek philosophy, all of which we are doing at Holy Cross on American soil thanks to Columbus. This is not to claim that there is no beauty to be found in Indigenous societies as well; Westerners are still dumbfounded by the architectural feats of the Inca and tourists in Mexico pay just to have a glimpse of an Aztec temple outside of the major cities. What could be better than Indigenous people and Europeans finally coming into contact with one another?
Of course, it is not that simple. With conquest comes bloodshed, and the Europeans who came to the Americas were in fact engaged in conquest, some malicious, some well-intentioned. This was the sad fact of virtually every society’s history at the time: European borders were created through ethnic and religious conflict, Indigenous tribes’ own land areas were won through violent conflict, as was that of the Mongolian Empire, the Islamic Empires, and so on. Though today we see a decrease in such traditional man-to-man warfare, we observe similar patterns which are executed more quietly through the threat of nuclear force (think the USSR and modern China). Thus, the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas was no historical exception.
I still choose to observe Columbus Day. I am eternally grateful that I was not born into the Aztec society of my ancestors. Cultural relativism is a popular outlook in modern America, but I wholeheartedly believe that I enjoy life in an objectively superior society than that of my ancestors. Had I been born and raised in Tenochtitlan, I would have watched several chests being slashed in order to harvest beating hearts and spilling blood for sacrifice to the god of the sun by now, had I not been the unlucky sacrificial victim myself. Were I a member of a high-ranking family in the Empire, I may have had the privilege of engaging in cannibalism as a sort of reward for my noble status. Were I from a low class I may have had to work as a serf or a slave, and would have been the first to starve during a famine or poor harvest.
While it may seem as if I am simply berating the Aztecs and their brutal practices for the fun of it, it is not my intention to anachronistically hold them to my ethical standards — standards to which they had not been exposed. I can, however, state with full confidence that I believe the society in which we find ourselves is exceedingly preferable to the one I just described. Needless to say, I am thankful that a society arrived in the Americas to inform my ancestors that there is no need to sacrifice a compatriot to the sun god, because the sun operates independently. Even a vast number of Aztecs seemed to agree with my evaluation, as masses willingly converted to the religion of their missionaries, namely Catholicism, which preached a dramatically contrasting message to the religion they had known for centuries.
My gratefulness extends beyond my aforementioned points — I could not have been born without Columbus! As stated earlier, the majority of Mexicans are Mestizo, meaning they are an ethnic combination of European and Indigenous blood. Most Mexicans can rightly celebrate Columbus Day as a historic event which laid the groundwork for their own bloodline, not to mention the fact that Mexican society, a culture which I love dearly, traces its foundations to the arrival of Christianity on the continent. A half-millennium later, I would be born, the product of a white mother and a Mexican father, in a society which gladly claims multiethnic people as its own due its philosophically enlightened foundations, an import made possible by Columbus’s landfall in 1492.
Still, ironically enough, Columbus finds himself being posthumously condemned by those who claim to hold the very values which his expedition brought to our continent. As previously mentioned, I am not here to defend Columbus’s personal character. The refusal to appreciate the historical importance of Columbus's landfall on the basis of ethical concerns, however, is unbelievable to me, as those criticizing him do not realize that their arguments are a product of a society which subscribes to the values Columbus had a large part in bringing to this side of the world. People ultimately fail to realize just how revolutionary the philosophical underpinnings of the West — brought to the Americas by Columbus — were and are in the face of world history. Though certainly not carried out flawlessly by all who came before us, the Western value system has proven the greatest facilitator of social progress in history. We must appreciate Indigenous people and the value of their respective cultures, and we should not gloss over the human rights violations suffered by Indigenous groups at the hands of unjust men. I cannot help but celebrate, however, the fact that Columbus made landfall so that I could live the way I do today. I therefore wish everyone a happy Columbus Day, and a happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!
