On Sunday, a new monument honoring immigrants was unveiled in New Haven, Connecticut, replacing a statue of Christopher Columbus that was removed in 2020 amid nationwide criticism of the explorer’s role in killing American Indians.
The new statue, located in the city’s heavily Italian neighborhood of Wooster Square, depicts a young immigrant family arriving in America with just a few suitcases.
The bronze sculpture, titled “Indicando la Via al Futuro” or “Pointing the way to the future,” was created by local artist Marc-Anthony Massaro. The 1,400-pound piece shows a father holding a suitcase in one hand and his son in the other, with the son pointing his finger towards something in the distance. The mother stands behind the daughter, who is clutching a book.
Massaro, the grandson of Italian immigrants himself, designed the statue to honor the immigrants who arrived in the 1900s and transformed countless cities across the Northeast, including New Haven, home to Yale University.
He expressed his intention to pay respect to his grandfather’s generation, which included immigrants from all over the world who laid the foundations of opportunity for their descendants.
The Columbus statue had stood in the park for over a century but was taken down by the city after a local high school student organized a petition calling for its removal.
Statues of the Italian explorer were among the controversial landmarks that faced renewed scrutiny across the country during a national reckoning over racism triggered by the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in 2020.
Columbus’ sailing expeditions opened the door to centuries of exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas by Europeans, which included the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade and the killing of countless Native Americans.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.