Tomorrow, October 17, is a national holiday in Colombia, which means hooray! No work. Día de la Raza, or Day of the Races/Day of Ethnicity, is the Colombian celebration of Christopher Columbus Day. Before 1983 it was celebrated on the second Monday in October, as in the US, but a law changed it to move to the following Monday.
Actually, in schools around Colombia, the whole preceding week as well as the following Monday are vacation days, and maybe for some work places as well. Schools in Colombia celebrate Día de la Raza in much in the same way as in the US, with skits depicting the discovery of the Americas, but here, at least in the school where I worked, we also talked about different races and groups of people.
Spain and almost all Latin American Countries celebrate some version of Columbus Day or Día de la Raza. Some call it Día de la Hispanidad (Hispanic Day), others Día de Descubrimiento (Discovery Day), Día Panamericano (Pan-American Day), and Día de la Liberación, de la Identidad y de la Interculturalidad (Liberation, Identity, and Intercultural Day), among many other names. Although they have different names, they are all based on the discovery of the Americas and the formation of various races from that point on.
Colombia’s Día de la Raza was first created in 1913 by Faustino Rodríguez-San Pedro, who at that time was the president of the Ibero-American Union. He wanted to form a union between Latin America and Spain by celebrating a holiday and bringing together all Spanish-speaking nations and cultures.
Celebrating Christopher Columbus Day is quite a controversial topic. The Colombia version of Día de la Raza is a bit different from the US version because it focuses not on Christopher Columbus but on the discovery of the Americas and formation of the American countries and peoples. However, both holidays revere a man who captured natives for slaves, slaughtered indigenous people, stole, and brought awful diseases such as smallpox that killed millions of native people.
If Christopher Columbus had come upon land that was inhabited by white settlers and then killed and enslaved them, we would very doubtfully celebrate him as a great man but instead condemn him as a murderer and oppressor. However, we tend to overlook the injustices and deem such acts acceptable, so much so that we (the people of the Americas) even have a holiday for this man.
By commemorating Christopher Columbus, a man who did make an important discovery (in that he discovered the Americas for Europe, not that he was actually the first to find this land) but who also murdered and enslaved people, is a huge insult to indigenous peoples everywhere.
It’s always nice having a holiday from work, but it is important to remember that we have these holidays for a reason, and we need to make sure we have them for the right reasons. We need to take away focus from Christopher Columbus and not teach our children that he was this great man. I think that Spanish-speaking countries are a little closer than the US is to having the right idea of celebrating various peoples and cultures and races that have formed in the Americas since 1492, but we all need to remember the indigenous roots of the Americas and that they were truly the founders of the Americas, not Columbus.