A Connecticut city dedicated a new monument to immigrants Sunday to replace a statue of Columbus that was removed in 2020 amid nationwide criticism of the European explorer’s role in enslaving and murdering Native Americans.
Located in New Haven’s Italian-American neighborhood of Wooster Square, the statue depicts a young immigrant family arriving in America with just a handful of suitcases.
The statue was created by local artist Mark Anthony Massaro and is called “Indicando la Via al Futuro,” which means “pointing the way to the future.”
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The 1,400-pound bronze statue depicts a father holding a suitcase in one hand and his son in the other, who is pointing at something in the distance, while his mother stands behind his sister, who is clutching a book.
New Haven cityscape. (Photo by John Greim/Loop Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Massaro, the grandson of Italian immigrants, said the piece is meant to honor the immigrants who arrived in the 1900s and transformed countless Northeastern cities, including New Haven, home to Yale University.
“My sculpture is a tribute to my grandfather’s generation,” he said in a video on the Wooster Square Monument Project’s YouTube page, “generations of immigrants, not just from Italy but from all over the world, who laid the foundations of opportunity for their descendants.”
The Columbus statue stood in the park for over a century before being removed by the city after local high school students started a petition calling for its removal.
The statue of the Italian explorer was among the controversial landmarks that faced new scrutiny across the country amid a national reckoning over racial justice sparked by the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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Columbus’s expedition opened the door to centuries of European exploration, conquest and settlement of the Americas, including the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade and the murder of many Native American peoples.
