From NewRepublic.com, October 12, 2002.
Interesting thoughts on Columbus Day.
"Anglosphere: Celebrating Wrong Italian? (Columbus vs. Cabot)
United Press Int'l ^ | October 12, 2002 | James C. Bennett
Posted on 10/13/2002, 11:02:58 AM by Tancred
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- A few years ago I chanced to be in Buenos Aires on Columbus Day. It is a major holiday there, during which no business is transacted. I spent the day wandering about town enjoying the celebrations. One plaza held a Columbus Day festival in which passersby could enjoy demonstrations and samples of music, dance, crafts and foods of all the various Latin American nations, and of many of the source-nations of Argentina's immigration.
The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and the holiday celebrating his landing in the New World, are seen throughout the Spanish-speaking world as having to do primarily with the extension of Spanish-speaking, Catholic civilization to the New World and the creation, through a conflicted encounter, of a new culture. It is, to coin a phrase, the creation of the Hispanosphere that is commemorated.
Traditionally, the role played by the United States in this narrative is not one of a joint participant, but rather an antagonist. In the narrative of Hispanosphere nationalists, Latin America is Shakespeare's Ariel, the graceful and sensitive artistic spirit. The United States, or "Gringolandia" as it is sometimes called, is Caliban, the powerful but ugly monster that dominates tragic Ariel.
Columbus Day in the United States carries an entirely different set of connotations.
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