Alana Casanova-Burgess

For me, the statue and Hispanic heritage has always been really interesting because of how it sort of has become not so much now, but it definitely during the 20th century when the U.S.

was trying to Americanize Puerto Ricans, a lot of them sought refuge in Hispanicity.

It was a way of saying we aren't Americans.

We are something else.

And rooting themselves in European and Hispanic Spanish heritage was sort of a defensive mechanism.

Being Spanish was special, different.

For example, there's a debate that comes up in 1908 for the 400th anniversary of Ponce de Leon arriving in Puerto Rico.

The official historian of Puerto Rico, Cayetano Colito Oster, is adamant that Juan Ponce de Leon has his own national holiday.

He's a hero in Puerto Rico.

And he specifically mentions, and I love this quote, he says, hopefully all conquistadors of the Indies would have been as benevolent as Juan Ponce de Leon was with the indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico.

This is simply not true.

because it's always that Puerto Rico is an exception, right?

That we are somehow devoid of racism because in our historical origins, thanks to Spanish civilization, we were conceived through mixture and tolerance from the beginning.

And this narrative is always constructed by positing that there is an other that is racist and refuses to mix, and those are the British, and that is the United States.

So at some point, though, you get up on the pedestal.

So getting up on the pedestal was not the plan?

It was around 2 p.m., a little less than four hours before the king of Spain was slated to arrive in Puerto Rico on this fateful day.

Municipal workers had been readying the base to receive the repaired statue.

One of them had left a ladder.

He put a ladder there and he left.