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Connecticut city dedicates monument to immigrants where Columbus statue once stood

A Connecticut town dedicated a new monument to immigrants on Sunday to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus that was removed in 2020 amid nationwide criticism over the European explorer’s role in the enslavement and murder of Native Americans.

The statue in Wooster Square, a predominantly Italian neighborhood of New Haven, depicts a young immigrant family arriving in the United States with only a handful of suitcases.

The statue was made by local artist Marc-Anthony Massaro and is called “Indicando la Via al Futuro” or “Pointing the way to the future.”

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The 1,400-pound bronze sculpture depicts a father holding a suitcase in one hand and his son in the other. The son points his finger at something in the distance while his mother stands behind her sister, who is holding a book in her hand.

New Haven city skyline. (Photo by: John Greim/Loop Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Massaro, the grandson of Italian immigrants, says the piece is meant to honor the immigrants who arrived in the 20th century and transformed countless cities across the Northeast, including New Haven, home of Yale University.

“My sculpture is intended as a gesture of respect for my grandfather’s generation,” he said in a video on the Wooster Square Monument Project’s YouTube page. “A generation of immigrants, not only from Italy but from all over the world, who laid the foundations of opportunities for their descendants.”

The Columbus statue had been in the park for more than a century, but the city removed it after a local high school student organized a petition to remove it.

Statues of the Italian explorer are among controversial monuments that received renewed scrutiny across the country during a national reckoning over racism sparked by the 2020 killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

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Columbus’s maritime expeditions opened the door to centuries of European exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas, including the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade and the slaughter of dozens of Native Americans.


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