(uplifting music) (energetic drum music) - Most people have a much more mythic, and glorious idea of who Columbus is.

- You know, I mean, we have to remember the man was lost.

(laughs) - It's really not about Columbus.

It's really about the nature and the age, and what actually took place, and the fact that history has been taught as a one-liner all these years.

(MC speaking Spanish) (melancholic music) - It is important to understand that our means of giving meaning to history is to grab onto visual representations and fit them together with certain ideas so that we have this soup that we call our historical memory running around inside of our head.

And it's a history that's based on photographs, illustrations, and textbooks, and magazines.

And to have an art exhibition, a visual art exhibition that deals with history and its construction from a visual point of view is very important.

- A lot of what the show is trying to talk about is perceptions.

You know, we've all been taught a history that is not accurate.

- A show like "Counter Colon-Ialismo" brings out the complexities of the quincentenary.

It raises the fact that there are alternate versions of history and alternate experiences of that history that need to be transmitted, told, heard, and seen.

(energetic music) - One of the things I wanted to do was look at the whole Columbus thing in terms of how it is that we look at culture and how it is that we look at history and our understanding of it as adults is no more sophisticated than our understanding of it as children.

So I started out making these toys, this little toy boat, which is made out of a woman's high heel shoe.

La Nina, the little girl, Columbus flagship, was a Santa Maria, which was destroyed here in the Americas.

So he returned to Europe aboard the Nina, La Nina, and never reached the Orient.

But the Little Boy, which was the name of the bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima in 1945, did reach the Orient.

So there's somehow the story is interrupted, but eventually it proceeds and there's this connection made by showing that La Nina and the Little Boy live in the same house, and it's a house that connects the world in terms of imperial power.

- He took the surname Colon, which means repopulate in Latin and colonizar, before colonialism as we know it today, it meant to populate an area.

So he saw himself as the repopulator of this area, as the barrier of Christ to this area.

And as having this religious mystic political mission to bring Christianity and to take back wealth of that Christianity in the form of gold and spices to the old world.

- When Columbus first landed on the island that was known as Guanahani, and he renamed that island.

I mean, the colonial process started immediately when he first stepped foot on that.

He knew there was a name to that, he disregarded that.

He knew the people had a culture, he disregarded that.

- I have students who have never ever heard anything about 1492 other than this sort of like two line poem, or that, you know, I had a student last year which said, "You know, Columbus, (playful music) what's wrong with Columbus?

I thought he was a nice guy!"

- It's about progress that in the name of progress, and in order to get ahead certain things get done and they're bad and people suffer and sometimes it doesn't work well.

But in the end, it was done for a good goal.

And I think that that's the way Columbus is looked at.

Columbus is also seen as a kind of figure that was doing this in order to show everybody that the world was round, that it wasn't flat.

So then Columbus, it becomes so to say, the entrepreneur, the little guy who made it, the scientific genius.

It exalts the different values upon which American popular mythologies are constructed out of.

- The question is, why do we celebrate Columbus Day?

I mean, we could celebrate all kinds of days.

Why do we choose a man whose historical information is not even clear to us?

- That you can actually look to say someone like Columbus's biographer himself who uses the term genocide, and if people just think for a minute what this might mean, and many people use the comparison with the Holocaust and with Auschwitz, and, you know, there's no way that you would be able to have people celebrating the Holocaust in Germany and the destruction of so many of the Jewish people in Europe.

(pensive music) - [Victor] We cannot celebrate Columbus without, at the same time, seeing what that discovery brought to the people of this continent, to the indigenous inhabitants of this continent.

- [Jan] Everything had to be claimed and named in the name of the crown.

And the whole attitude about naming all these different peoples and places is a conquistador conquering mentality.

Because once you name it, then you pretty much give it its identity in future terms.

- A universe was changed forever in the invasion conquest and then the establishment of colonialism.

Ways of understanding, ways of being, ways of seeing, what's good, what's bad, and so forth.

That whole cosmic view was shattered and changed forever.

- Part of the exhibit makes it very clear what the Europeans actually brought here.

I mean, it was a kind of culture of death.

I mean, it still is a culture of death in terms of what they brought to the indigenous populations here and their attitudes toward them.

That attitude was a kind of genocidal attitude and that they still hold toward peoples of the earth and peoples of color.

- Blankets were given to the native people that did contain smallpox, and it did infect them and it did kill them.

And so she's created an outfit in memory of that.

(energetic music) It is a self-portrait.

She's talking about a current issue with Native American artists that has to do with everyone having to have this number, and the problem of these numbers sort of make you think of, you know, "Maybe they should have them tattooed on themselves or something."

You know, "What is this numbering system?"

The curious thing is not only, you know, "How do I get one, but do I really want one?"

Many artists can't get a number, because in order to get a number, you have to have some kind of documentation.

They don't have that documentation.

That's what her piece is talking about.

It's talking about sort of the divide and conquer syndrome, which is again, another manifestation of colonialism.

(energetic music) - Well, that particular installation is set in an idyllic, a Garden of Eden like situation.

And the statement being made is that, of course, "These people are savages!

They're filled with lust, they're sinners!

We must Christianize them!"

The justification was that they are hidden, they are sinful, they are lustful.

They are not civilized.

- What I wanted to do is look real specifically at the ways that the early conquistadors talked about women in their journals, in their diaries, and in their letters that they sent back to Europe.

And what really motivated the piece, the larger piece, the "New World [Women]" piece was I found the, what I would call the first documented rape in the New World written by the protagonist himself.

There was a person, (tense music) the second voyage coming back with Columbus, named Michele da Cuneo, and he talks about and how he was given a Carib woman by Columbus after they captured her and she was naked.

So he wanted to, "Take his pleasure," as he says, and she fought him off.

So he took a rope, he beat her.

So in other words, she was saying, "No, no, no."

But then he ends the narrative saying that, "She finally succumbed as if she were raised in a veritable school of harlots."

This is 1493.

He's writing about it in 1495.

And I was thinking, "This is so much like the typical rape scenario that's ongoing in our culture today."

What I've done is taken woodcuts, and these are enlargements, really, of smaller images that actually accompany either Vespucci or Columbus's letters.

This is not a piece really about real, live, flesh and blood women that it's really about the men's fears and fantasies, I think, about women, it was a projection of what they thought they were seeing.

They never really saw Amazons, they were always saying that, "Oh, they're 10 days, hence" in their journals, both in Vespucci and Columbus, but also in Cortes.

They were always thinking they were going to be seeing Amazons, because they thought that that's what was in the New World.

And they were very interested in seeing them, because if you come across a dangerous woman and you can subdue her, then you're a braver man.

- All the information that's coming out about Columbus has always been available.

There's very little in the way of new facts coming forward about Columbus.

It's been known for centuries.

For example, the atrocities that were committed by Columbus and his men.

- Part of the way colonialism has worked is that it has robbed people or appropriated people, the colonized, of their history and of the knowledge of the past.

- So Columbus discovered America.

Now, what does that mean?

I mean, if you go into someone's neighborhood and you see a nice house you like and someone's living there, can you just walk in and say you discovered it?

- The benefit of discovery to the discoverer is always that it provides a license for liquidating all history prior to that moment.

(tense music) (birds chirping) (insects chirping) - So many people believe that African Americans or African people are in the Western hemisphere only because of slavery, that they were brought here as slaves.

Well, that's to be questioned, you know?

Is that a fact?

- Vicky was talking about the African presence in the Americas prior to Columbus coming.

There's a lot of discussion going on now about the Olmec heads being influenced from African sculpture.

- If African people, you know, were brought to the New World as slaves, why did ancient people in Mexico speak of them in legend?

You know, there's a good question.

- What is a lie and what is real?

I think the show challenges one's worldview, anybody's worldview, anybody that sees that show will be challenged by it's the juxtaposition of different images, the juxtaposition of things that do not quote unquote, (ecclesiastical music) normally fit.

- [Liz] You are looking up at a gun, a revolver that you can see the bullets.

It's loaded.

It's a very powerful piece that speaks to the issue of forced Christianization.

- When one reads the Spanish accounts of the Christianization efforts, they were baptizing at some point, even 14 to 20,000 people a day.

They were very happy at all the souls they were bringing into Christianity.

Later, the same friars arrive on the fact of how the Mexicans embraced Christianity, but kept along their other practices and layered their practices.

Historically, the first mestizos were born out of the violent and domineering relationship of a Spanish man and an Indian woman, bringing together both worlds, but in an unequal relationship of power.

It's interesting that Chicanos are reevaluating the position of La Malinche, the translator of Cortes, this kind of woman figure icon that was blamed for everything and as a woman was blamed for everything.

And as it turns out, she was a translator and had a much more complex role than Mexican male mythology has made her.

(energetic music) - A woman artist is saying no, Malinche is not a passive recipient of Cortes's violation.

She is a woman of intelligence and nobility, and she's operating as an actor on the stage of history for people of mixed ancestry to look back at a creation myth in which our mother is subjugated by the conqueror and is essentially raped by the conqueror.

It's gonna have a very different effect on how we see ourselves versus the view that perhaps our mother was not only intelligent, but shrewd.

(playful suave music) - I had been actually researching information about the history of Columbus and discoveries of new lands for about five years.

And I had also been reading information about tourism, just the language of tourism and how the concept of travel had sort of gradually shifted over time to become tourism and completely changed the nature of travel.

And what I discovered is that the language of discovery being couched in terms of a woman's body was very much like the language of tourism today, 500 years later.

(upbeat suave music) - I think Karen Atkinson's piece connects the, quote unquote, discovery with certain attitudes and notions that persist to this day.

So now as tourists, we see ourselves as explorers, as discoverers.

"Discover the Caribbean."

"Discover Mexico."

"Discover the land of the Aztecs."

It's this idea that tourism has become this commodified version of colonial power.

(upbeat music) (singing in foreign language) - When you read about discovery of new lands, very often, it's also about the seduction of women.

The language is exactly the same.

John Donne writes about rubbing his hands through, you know, sort of virgin territories and was talking about penetrating new lands and things like that.

If you look through, say, Caribbean or Islands Magazine today, the advertisements do exactly the same thing.

I think that we tend to look at what's going on today and we don't really see where certain attitudes or certain ideas come from.

So what I wanted to do is go back through time and somehow pick out some of the language and the ideas which have sort of transformed themselves maybe from issues of discovery into issues of commodity.

If you use this particular language, then you actually sell a particular kind of product.

So I wanted to show that, you know, the language of tourism doesn't just come out of thin air.

It doesn't come from nowhere.

And I'm also interested in when people read tourist brochures that they never look at them the same again.

(upbeat music) (upbeat rock music) - "The Plane" was the first in the series of three pieces, and I began making it in response to the Persian Gulf War, which I saw as growing out of the same ideological framework that Columbus' venture across the Atlantic Ocean grew out of.

And that's this need to expand, this need to control, this need to dominate.

So I started making this plane, I started making it (energetic music) as a kind of toy, and I began seeing it as a kind of conflation between belief systems and military power.

So that's why you have this image in the center of the plane of a sacred heart.

This belief in military might, this belief in that might makes right, you know?

The Persian Gulf War is presented by some as just the thing we needed to get rid of the Vietnam syndrome in this country.

And the problem from one particular point of view of the Vietnam syndrome is that if your military victories are a manifestation of divine intervention, then what happens when you suffer a defeat?

(energetic drum music) - We as human beings may have developed a great deal technologically and materially.

Psychologically, I don't think we have grown as a species very much.

We are still cavemen in the sense that the big stick rules still.

- Columbus is the the first lie, the big lie.

- Who's being served by propping up the myth?

- We have an amnesia that's absolutely incredible.

- If the issues of 1492 are only couched in historical terms, then all we're doing is sort of arguing about history.

We're not really arguing about how those things, one still exists today, that the methods that we do, things essentially change, but what we do doesn't change.

- This is not a case where we are discussing something in terms of, "Well, that was then, and this is now."

- The colonization of our minds is still going on constantly.

- 1992 is when it starts, not when it's over.

- Is it enough in a society such as we have in the United States to look at literature, to look at history strictly from a single point of view?

Is there a need to introduce other voices?

Not so much for the purpose of getting at a single truth, but for the purpose of realizing that history, like anything else involving human beings, is ultimately a negotiation.

(melancholic music) - [Narrator] This program was made possible in part by support from the City of San Diego's Commission for Arts and Culture.

The preceding program is part of A World of Difference, a joint project of KPBS and the Anti-Defamation League, designed to promote respect for racial, religious, and ethnic differences.