Monument to Christopher Columbus (Paseo de la Reforma)

The statue was part of a plan to embellish the major thoroughfare with statues of persons of historical significance to Mexico. The work was a gift to the capital of the entrepreneur, Antonio Escandón, a member of a wealthy, conservative Mexican family and who had supported Emperor Maximilian, built the Mexico City-Veracruz railway with the help of French investments and British engineers.[2] The railway linked the inland capital with its main east coast port. Escandón "decided to commemorate the era of the railroad in Mexico with a monument to an equally epochal event, the Discovery of the New World."[3]

In 1873, Escandón commissioned French sculptor Charles Cordier to design and execute the statue, which was shipped to Mexico for installation. The statue was inaugurated almost immediately after liberal General Porfirio Díaz seized the presidency in 1876. The Cordier sculpture has been described as the construction of a monument "manipulated by a Mexican industrialist for greater economic ties with foreign investors."[4] It was originally to be placed in front of the Buenavista train station in Mexico City.[5] The statue had already been commissioned and sculpted in France, arriving in Veracruz in 1875. It was installed in 1877 under the supervision of Mexican engineer, Eleuterio Méndes.[6]

Detail showing Columbus lifting a veil from the globe

On the monument's pedestal are two bas-reliefs, one depicting showing Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World and the other, the construction of a church. On the corners of the pedestal are statues of friars, depicted in a seated position, said to be those who were important to the early history of Mexico including Franciscan Pedro de Gante, the first to evangelize Mexico's indigenous population, and Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas; and Antonio de Marchena and Diego de Deza, who aided Columbus in Spain.

As with "almost all the [Columbus] monuments, the gift or inspiration of Europeans or Europeans of mixed descent, include some reference to religion."[7] In Mexico, where anticlericalism and suppression of the power of the Catholic Church had embroiled Mexico in a civil war and a foreign intervention during the nineteenth-century liberal Reform, the Columbus statue's combination of religious iconography and symbolic embodiment of European conquest and domination, has made the statue a target of protesters.[8] One scholar suggests that Columbus "is portrayed as a conqueror, or even a conjurer, for he plucks a veil from the globe he holds."[9]

• List of monuments and memorials to Christopher Columbus

• Media related to Monumento a Colón (Paseo de la Reforma, Ciudad de México) at Wikimedia Commons