By Patricia Negrón

The United States will celebrate Columbus Day on Monday, October 12. However, Columbus Day should not be celebrated because history should not be forgotten or looked at through forgiving eyes. What the Europeans did to the Native peoples of the Americas is simply barbaric, yet we continue to celebrate those actions.

How should we even celebrate a day like Columbus Day? Should we just unite, take over a town, kill and enslave everyone who lives there, eat their food and move into their homes? Or should we just barge into a company, kill the owners and make the employees work for free?

That plan sounds absurd because it is, plain and simple. We shouldn’t be celebrating the colonizer, especially when we’re not making the slightest efforts to honor all of the victims of colonization.

In Puerto Rico, my home country, the discovery of the island is celebrated on November 19, though we also celebrate Columbus Day because we have all the American holidays as well. As a Puerto Rican, I strongly feel that this holiday should not be celebrated.

It does not make sense that there is a day for Columbus in my country and other Hispanic-American countries, considering everything that was done to our ancestors by Columbus and the leaders that followed him.

If I do celebrate the long weekend, I will try to learn more about the other two-thirds of my heritage as a Puerto Rican, celebrating them in an attempt to decolonize my mind from all I learned. I already started relearning my country’s history, realizing that my hometown’s name, Cupey, is a word we inherited from the Taínos.

Also, I will celebrate the aspects of Taíno and African cultures that are part of my culture. Our ancestors survived colonization because they worked hard to ingrain their cultures into what was forming Puerto Rico. To preserve their own religions, they used Catholic saints’ names to refer to their own gods so that the Spaniards wouldn’t notice it.. If there’s one thing I won’t do is celebrate Columbus’ discovery because it is tainted with blood and suffering.

I do not plan on celebrating the fact that, more than 500 years ago, Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas and started calling everyone living there “Indians,” a word that is still misused, because he thought he had arrived in India. He did not discover the Americas, because you cannot discover a place that was already inhabited.

I refuse to celebrate the fact that the native peoples of the Americas were enslaved, raped, colonized and killed, according to the Centre for Research on Globalization. Also, I refuse to celebrate the fact that Taínos, the native people in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, were exploited and died from labor and sicknesses that the Spaniards brought.

Since Taínos had not been exposed to sickness from Europe, their bodies were unable to fight those sicknesses off, and “epidemics soon became a common consequence of contact,” according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Another fact that I refuse to ignore is that Africans were then enslaved and brought to the island, suffering from the same horrible conditions as the Taínos.

However, the ones who weren’t slaughtered were abused, exploited, and were prohibited from practicing their own religions, instead being turned to Catholicism, according to Welcome to Puerto Rico. They were slaves forced to assimilate to the colonizing culture, all in the name of the King and Queen of Spain and the Catholic Pope.

It’s clear Columbus was a pivotal person in history. However, everything that happened after he arrived in the Americas is, inevitably, a direct result of his arrival. The exploitation and killing of so many people can be traced back to his arrival, and celebrating this is an insult to all the people who were affected by his “discovery.”