Butcher Ponce de Leon Still Revered in Slaughto Rico
I'm new to the history game, having only recently learned that things happened before I was born. As an American, I prefer the narrow view, believing instead that everything important throughout all of history happened since I was born, specifically to me. This respect for Ponce de Leon, however, defies my limited comprehension. I thought he was kind of a bad guy, but just goes to show what I know.
Columbus didn't just discover Puerto Rico, he invented it. From what I can find, sure there were people there, but it didn't really exist until Christopher Columbus put it on the map. It was his own map, but still, he put it there. Today, there are statues of these guys all over the island.
Call me kooky-nuts, but if the governor comes in, subjugates the locals, forces them to till fields and mine gold until the hills, plains and people are depleted, maybe he isn't such a good guy.
Stockholm is in Sweden, but I fear the namesake syndrome may be ever-present on the island.
If somebody treated your lands and these people, would you honor him with statues like this? Sure, many of the residents of Puerto Rico are of Spanish descent, but almost everyone here has native blood, which is maybe something they forget, or maybe something they deny. Feels to me like a tribal organization erecting a statue to General Custer. Not unimaginable, but a bit weird.
When we first saw the statue, we didn't know who he was, so we called him what he looked like. He's a sword guy. Unsurprisingly, that's pretty much his legacy. Natives who worked in slavery were given tokens to prove they had done their share, and if anyone was found without it, they were killed on the spot.
Even if you are a Puerto Rican of Spanish descent, he's not so venerable when you consider that once the gold was all mined and shipped back to Spain, the island still wasn't treated with even an ounce of respect, and was more or less relegated to the bottom rungs of the wealthy imperial society. At least we know where the wealth came from.
But what do I know? All I know is that I'm free enough to call a sword guy a sword guy, and that's what I see, and that's what he was. The butcher remembered, how perfectly local.
Above - Bigger than other pictures we usually run, but this is our experience of the savage sword guy.
I'm new to the history game, having only recently learned that things happened before I was born. As an American, I prefer the narrow view, believing instead that everything important throughout all of history happened since I was born, specifically to me. This respect for Ponce de Leon, however, defies my limited comprehension. I thought he was kind of a bad guy, but just goes to show what I know.
