Most were motivated by jobs in the booming US Industrial Revolution, with plans to earn money to return to Italy and buy land or start businesses. They were peasants stuck in medieval socioeconomic relations, while others were proletarian sharecroppers and migrant farmworkers, all without skills beyond agriculture. Like the mass of Irish famine refugees who preceded them four decades earlier, the majority of the four million Italian immigrants to the US were fleeing grinding rural poverty in Southern Italy and Sicily. At the top of their list of demands of governments: declaring October 12 “International Day of Solidarity and Mourning with Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.” They formulated a comprehensive plan of action. In 1977, a hundred Indigenous representatives of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas convened the International NGO Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas at the United Nations’ Palais des Naciones in Geneva, Switzerland. During the Black Lives Matter mass mobilization in 2020, at least 33 of the statues were either pulled down by protestors or removed by authorities for safe keeping storage.īehind these recent successes are longtime, organized movements of Indigenous Peoples throughout the hemisphere. As of 2020, there were some 150 statues of Columbus across the US, most but not all of them the work of the Catholic lay organization, the Knights of Columbus and Italian communities. A related demand, the removal of statues of Columbus, has also seen some success.
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