From the Editor: Brown Spaces, Memory, and Awakening

In a 1984 essay, Toni Morrison writes that "Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation." Remembering helps us make sense of our lives. We are living in an age when memories, and the very act of remembering, are hotly contested, when commemorative spaces and monuments have become battlegrounds for competing values, narratives, and spatial claims.

This fact was powerfully evident in the violence that enveloped Charlottesville, Virginia, during the summer of 2017, when white nationalists used the proposed removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee as a pretext to unite supporters and recruit followers. They were met by thousands of counterprotesters, twenty-eight of whom were injured and one killed when a neo-Nazi plowed his car into the crowd. The so-called "Unite the Right rally" at Charlottesville drew back the veil on a swelling white supremacist movement. But the ostensible impetus for the event—the proposed removal of the Lee statue—was emblematic of another phenomenon: in recent years, communities throughout the country had been grappling with the value and meaning of their public monuments, and the monuments' implications for historically oppressed communities.

The Lee statue, like hundreds of Confederate monuments throughout the country, had been inaugurated during Jim Crow, presumably as a solemn tribute to white Southerners' "Lost Cause" during the Civil War. As more such statues were erected during the Civil Rights movement, they amounted to little more than ominous declarations of white power and territorial supremacy. Charlottesville awakened the country to the urgency of addressing historical monuments; to the ongoing legacies of violence that they represented for communities of color; and to the social division they evoke today. Monuments have been contested for generations, but Charlottesville seemed a turning point. It catalyzed protests throughout the United States, including in Latinx communities, as social justice advocates demanded an end to the glorification of racial oppression.

In New Mexico, for example, just four weeks after Charlottesville, twelve activists were arrested while protesting the festive reenactment of Spain's 1692 "reconquest" of the region. In the state, which boasts the nation's largest percentage of what the US Census terms "Hispanic or Latino" residents (48%), the proliferation of statues and commemorations honoring Spanish conquistadores dates to the early twentieth century. During the 1920s, civic leaders, aiming to counter Black Legend narratives of New Mexicans as depraved, idolatrous, and racially backward, conspired to create a White Legend founded in chivalry, conquest, and Christianity. Thus was born the Santa Fe Fiesta. Until this year, as Elena Valdez recounts in her essay in this issue, the Fiesta featured a reenactment of Diego de Vargas's "entrada" into New Mexico a dozen years after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which had sent Spanish colonizers in retreat. Protestors insisted the entrada was a celebration of Spain's subjugation of Pueblo and other Indigenous communities. Responding to activist pressure and following considerable debate, in July 2018, organizers of the Fiesta agreed to end the entrada reenactment.

Within weeks of Charlottesville there were numerous other instances of direct action against reminders of Spain's imperial exploits. Three Columbus statues in and around New York City were damaged. One in Central Park had its hands drenched in red paint and its base sprayed with the phrase "Hate will not be tolerated." In nearby Yonkers, a bust of Columbus was decapitated; and in Queens, a Columbus monument was tagged, "Don't honor genocide, take it down." On the West Coast, several monuments venerating the recently canonized missionary Junípero Serra were similarly targeted. To Indigenous activists and their allies, Serra embodies the leading role the Catholic Church played in Spain's depredation of Indigenous communities.

These instances of direct action call our attention to ways "deliberate acts of remembering" and commemorative spaces are contested. And they throw light onto the vexed relationships that Latinx (or self-identified Hispanic) communities and individuals have with legacies of imperialism, colonization, and racial exploitation. At issue are the meanings and narratives that are attached to these lieux de mémoire (memory sites), and their repercussions for contemporary...