At a moment when communities throughout the Americas have come to arms over retaining or removing statues associated with colonialism, slavery, and racism, Multilingual Monuments in the Americas proposes a discussion of three cases in which public monuments conceive of US sites as multilingual spaces. Analyzing instances in 20^th and 21^st-century Puerto Rico, New Orleans, New York and Havana, respectively, the presenters argue for reading these installations as material and discursive proofs of conceptions of US identity as fundamentally intertwined with those of the other Americas. Such monuments prompt a profound reckoning with the understudied relationship of statuary evocations of inter-American identity to conditions of race, class, language use and historical representation in the communities over which they preside.

In “Arasibo-Cacique Rolls in his Grave: A Multi-Layered History of Tsereteli's Columbus Statue in Arecibo, Puerto Rico," Elena Vanasse Torres will consider Birth of the New World, an homage to Christopher Columbus installed in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The Estatua de Colón, she argues, serves as a tangible example of selective Hispano-centric historicity, of the nearly routine practice of political chanchullo or corruption, and of how transnational exchanges of capital have been harnessed to provide a “national” history for Puerto Rico as a non-nation state. After the 360-foot monument’s arrival on the archipelago in 1998, a tug-of-war ensued between local politicians as they bid for its erection in their respective municipalities, swayed by the allure of potential tourism revenue. The larger-than-life monument figures in the Puerto Rican imperative to celebrate Spanish heritage and history—specifically a heroic conquest or “discovery” narrative—as a cultural pillar of boricuaness that runs counter to its history of US conquest and cultural and linguistic whitewashing of the Puerto Rican subject. Birth of the New World is a different monument from any other in the Caribbean/greater United States not only for its scale, but also in its ability to incarnate a multilingual function possible only in the last colony of the Americas.

In “Lament of the libertadores: Monumental Demise in New Orleans’s Garden of the Americas,” Marilyn Miller considers New Orleans’s efforts to enhance its status as a Gateway to the Americas by erecting statues of Latin American independence figures Simón Bolivar, Francisco Morazán and Benito Juárez along a flank of the city’s historic French Quarter between 1957 and 1966. The celebration of the "Garden of the Americas" included visits of foreign ambassadors, toasts aboard the yacht Good Neighbor, and a special mass at St. Louis Cathedral. Part of a city-wide beautification project, the monuments testified to the geographic, commercial, and cultural ties between the Spanish-speaking Americas and New Orleans, a city that once formed part of Spain’s colonial dominions. Drawing comparisons with Havana’s Avenue of the Presidents and New York’s Avenue of the Americas, the monuments document in stone New Orleans’s mid-20^th century self-fashioning as a multilingual contact zone between the United States and Central and South America. Today, however, the monuments languish in disrepair, ignored in local efforts to dismantle monuments to the Confederacy and other historical narratives resting on doctrines of white superiority. What does this indifference signal in relation to the city’s historic claim as a unique environment for a multiracial and multilingual Creole culture? What does the demise of the Garden of the Americas mean for New Orleans’s self-promotion as a multicultural “gumbo”?

In the final paper, “Man Falling Off a Horse: Translating Anna Hyatt Huntington's Martí between New York and Havana,” Esther Allen analyzes the bronze equestrian statue of Cuban independence leader José Martí in New York’s Central Park within a larger project by Nelson Rockefeller to reimagine Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas. Created by Anna Hyatt Huntington, the Martí monument now stands facing the Avenue on Central Park West between statues of José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar. The controversies that surrounded Huntington's Martí statue before and after it was finally unveiled in 1965 broke out again half a century later when the Bronx Museum launched a successful multimillion dollar fundraising campaign to gift a duplicate of it to Cuba, where it now stands outside the Museum of the Revolution in Havana. What these gift horses were officially intended to mean by their givers and officially understood to mean by those who accepted them is at quite a far remove from what they mean within the contexts of their respective urban environments, the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, and the recurrent theme of statuary, in New York City and elsewhere, in José Martí's work.