 Welcome! This is our first live event since November 2019, and I am so thrilled to see people. The talk today, so I have a few things to connect here, including this exhibit which surreptitiously opens today. There's a story behind that, but I'll just give you a little bit of the details. The talk today is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing colloquium series in other semesters on research relating to Latin America and New Orleans. So I wanted to give a little bit of context as to where this comes from and situate the library and our role in this. So New Orleans, of course, was part of the Spanish Empire in the 18th century, beginning in the 18th century, or in the 18th century. Latin Americans, especially those like me who are from the Caribbean and come to the city for the first time, are struck by its lateness, its Caribbean-ness. Even if at first we're not sure how to articulate or understand what we're perceiving and what we're feeling. This is quite striking because it's a city that famously looks to its French and not its Spanish colonial roots, let alone does it recognize its strong commercial ties and cultural ties with Latin America that can be traced to the early 19th century at least. For the last maybe 15 years, this has been changing. I have no doubt that Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that devastated the city was also a catalyst. Since the hurricane brought Mexican, Brazilian, and other Latin American workers to rebuild, and many have remained. For many reasons, including Hurricane Katrina, there is a growing body of work that reflects more interest in the city's Latin American connections in this period of time. Even to explain New Orleans' uniqueness by inserting it within a comparative Gulf or Caribbean context. If we look at that more recent history, we find that since at least the 1920s, the city of New Orleans was involved in a concerted effort to become the gateway of the Americas, which I think Maryland is going to touch on. In the words of one of its main promoters, Mayor Chet Morrison. The story of the rise and fall of these efforts, which included, oops, I left the Spanish in here, meaning to transition efforts, not only of the mayor's office through successive administrations, but also the Chamber of Commerce, the Port of New Orleans, and many other administrative centers around the city, that story has not been told. Our contribution, meaning the Latin American Library's contribution to furthering our understanding of this history, is to document the life and work of Latin Americans who settled in New Orleans from the early 20th century to the present. As some of you know, we have many different magazines, newspapers, ephemeral publications that attest to that present. But I just wanted to touch very briefly on some notable donations that we've received recently, some of which are not even catalogued or available yet. But one of them is the Pan American Life Insurance Group Archive, and that was our last meeting here. We had an exhibit opening and an exhibit that seemed to last forever because we left it through the pandemic. And that has been the major employer in New Orleans where many Latin Americans in the city have worked. We received recently the papers of Margarita Gutierrez Nahera. She is the daughter of renowned 19th century Mexican writer Manuel Gutierrez Nahera. And she settled in New Orleans in the 1920s. She studied at Loyola and also wrote a column on Latin American issues for local newspapers. This was a donation of Terry Bible, her granddaughter, and their family. Recently, I have also been offered and we are ready to consummate that transaction. The papers of Ricardo Apardo Sr., a Cuban emigre activist within the Cuban exile community here in New Orleans. His papers will be coming to the Latin American Library. He worked in media here and had a Sunday segment. This is mid-20th century on news about the local Latin American community. This was a gift of Maria Pardovete and her family. So these are all examples of how we are documenting this history. So just very briefly before moving on to the main event, I just wanted to encourage you to take a look afterwards. I invite you to have something to drink and to eat. And I hope you visit our exhibit that there is a very long story as to why this exhibit is taking place today, but it has to do with COVID and a canceled event and you can fill in the dots. But we're thrilled and there is a connection actually. The connection is that because one of the main reasons why this library is so strong in Central American materials has to do precisely with the historical and commercial ties between the city and the region and also of Tulane. So it's all connected. Now please take a program. They're outside. All right. So I am thrilled to present our first speaker in this series, Marilyn Grace Miller, who will share ongoing research into one mid-century episode of this largely untold history of New Orleans and Latin America with a top titled Lament of the Libertadores, monumental demise in New Orleans' Garden of the Americas. Marilyn Miller is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese here at Tulane and Siseler Seisler Professor in Judaic Studies at Tulane. Marilyn's work focuses on issues of race, slavery and Jewish identity in inter-American context. She's the author of Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race, the Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America and editor of the volume Tango Lessons, Movement, Sound, Image and Text in Contemporary Practice. Marilyn's focus on New Orleans and Latin America is not new. She wrote A Ya en Tierras del Sur, Horror and Recoil in Jose Martí's New Orleans on Martí's views of the American South as a warning to Latin American readers. This was published in the Global South in 2019. She's also the author of an excellent book, Port of No Return, Enemy Alien Internment in World War II, New Orleans that just came out last year from LSU Press. And it has been nominated for the Louisiana Endowment for Humanities Book of the Year Award. Congrats. Research on that book has been featured in the radio programs Tripod, New Orleans at 300, and Latino USA. She's currently completing a study of the works of Guatemalan author Eduardo Alfón, forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press. And now I give the floor to Marilyn. So thank you so much to Ortencia, to Rachel, to all the other kindred souls in the Latin American Library. It's really a pleasure to come here and speak to you all. Today in this inaugural series and Ortencia said ongoing research. It's really incipient research, more than ongoing research. But in any case, I would like to start by asking how many know anything about the Garden of the Americas? Right on. Right on. All right. We're doing what we need to be doing then, talking about something that's new and fresh and forgotten at the same time. In this new research endeavor, I'm exploring one very weighty example of New Orleans efforts to highlight and enhance its partnerships with Latin America and the Caribbean in the long decade between 1955 and 1966. Which is going to work better here. Can you all see this? Can you see the screen? Because this is really image driven. You can't see it and there's a couple of seats up here that are closer. Can we tilt this at all? It's okay? You can all see it? Great. So during this decade, three large statues of Latin American independence heroes, Simon Bolivar, 1957, Benito Juarez, and Francisco Morasan, 1965 and 1966, were installed on the neutral ground of Basin Street between Canal and St. Louis, following the demolition of the Southern Railway Terminal in 1955. Basin Street running parallel to Rampart, just one block from Rampart, once served, as many of you know, as a dividing line between the French Quarter and Storyville, distinguishing the front of town from back of town. Back of town, of course, associated with the Lumpen sector of the city. A monumental project dubbed the Garden of the Americas reflected New Orleans many historic engagements with Latin America, but also testified to new efforts to deepen diplomatic, commercial, and cultural ties between the two regions. Designed as part of a citywide beautification project, the Garden of the Americas touted the historical connections between New Orleans as a city that once formed part of Spain's colonial dominions by foregrounding three Spanish-American leaders whose independent struggles together spanned the regions of North, Central, and South America. But how many New Orleansians pay attention to the Garden of the Americas? Obviously not a lot. Or even are aware of it. How many students and scholars of Latin America know of the Garden of the Americas? How many visitors to the city consider its importance to visit Marie Lavo's tomb in the adjacent St. Louis No. 1 cemetery? In comparison, how many New Orleansians, Tulanians, historians, visitors know of Lee Circle and the Confederate monuments controversy? So the community deliberations and events around these installations provide us with a sense of the depth of interest and enthusiasm in these inter-American alliances. For the occasion of the dedication of the Statue of el Libertador Simón Bolívar in November of 1957, for example, a large contingent of Latin American diplomats and businessmen hobnobbed with local political personalities during the inaugural speech by the Venezuelan Minister of Health, a speech that was translated and reproduced in a fancy edition for those in attendance. It wasn't just a big statue, times Picciun columnist Mike Scott explains. It was a big affair, the kind of weekend long to do that included a special mass at St. Louis Cathedral, a luncheon for visiting Venezuelan dignitaries aboard the dockboard yacht, the Good Neighbor, for real, there was a yacht called the Good Neighbor, publication of a special section of the New Orleans item and a pre-unveiling military parade down Canal Street. What could be more symbolic than New Orleans civic leaders and a group of Latin American dignitaries having lunch together aboard a boat named the Good Neighbor or attending mass together at St. Louis Cathedral next to the Cabildo and fronting Jackson Square known during the Spanish colonial era, of course, as the Plaza de Armas. I think Scott may be wrong about the lunch party on the Good Neighbor consisting entirely of Venezuelan dignitaries, though. Many of the activities, you can see here, for example, there's a list of dignitaries here on the right top and then there's this image on the left is the address that the Venezuelan Minister of Health gave at the Bolivar unveiling. Many of the activities around the dedication of the Bolivar statue were sponsored and planned by members of the Bolivarian Society of Louisiana based in New Orleans, some of whose names appear on the image in the right corner of this slide including Adolfo Ejewish, Ejewish president, and Mario Bermudez, secretary. Ejewish, born in Veracruz, Mexico in 1878, had immigrated to New Orleans in 1923. Bermudez was a native of Colombia who served as director of international relations for the city for several years as well as for the International House. So it seems that the Bolivarian Society was a kind of pan-American social aid and pleasure club that at least for a time wielded a powerful hand in the city politics and social life. It was Ejewish, for example, who decided where the Bolivar statue would stand even before the rail terminal on Basin was demolished in 1955. And as we see from the image in the right corner, besides Ejewish and Bermudez, the Bolivarian Society counted among its honorary members the governor of Louisiana, the mayor of New Orleans, and the consuls general of Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama. So the larger project of the Garden of the Americas in which these three statues were inserted was a multilingual mid-century gambit to foreground and enhance New Orleans' role as a hub of interaction with its neighbors in the other Americas. That role had expanded during the World War II period with the increased circulation of people's war equipment and other supplies through New Orleans' port. And local leaders wanted to hold on to that expansion and the revenue and commercial opportunities it represented. And I should point out that while these efforts to link New Orleans to the rest of the world were often cast in the 50s and the 60s as international or global, there was nonetheless a prominent focus on ties to and circulation with Latin America, central and South America in particular. This focus, or bias if you will, is very apparent in a publication from the era touting the International House as a, quote, non-profit clearinghouse and meeting place for visiting Latin American businessmen founded in 1943. The front cover that's the image on the left of this undated magazine casts New Orleans as a world trade center in several languages with English and Spanish appearing first and second. And on the back cover under the banner, the world comes to New Orleans. New Orleans serves the world. That's the globe image. A map situates the Americas front and center in a depiction of global circulation in which Europe and other regions have basically disappeared. So inside the magazine we find evidence that the International House was about more than trade. The caption for the image on the right, this one of the super madmen looking students, caption for the image on the right explains that it also administered the Cordell Hole Foundation helping talented Central and South American students attend U.S. universities. These medical students are enrolled through the foundation at Tulane University Medical School. So there were many other signs of this inter-American rapport and interaction in the decade I am focusing on in relation to the Garden of the Americas. In these ephemeral items from the archives of Mayor Morrison at the New Orleans Public Library, we have at top left a pamphlet from International Week held October 12th to 18th, 1958, here in New Orleans to the right of it. You can see the... Cablegram from Mayor Morrison dated January 27th, 1956 accepting the invitation for New Orleans Queen of Carnival to participate in Carnival festivities in Caracas. Complacido informales, Reina Carnival Nuevo Orleans acepta on rosa invitación representar nuestra ciudad festividades ciudad amiga stop. Nuestra gentil embajadora y comitiva partirán para Caracas Febrero 11th stop. Carrosa alegórica Nuevo Orleans lista viajar Febrero 3th stop. Como siempre, lazos unen nuestras ciudades y pueblos. This is not the only carnival diplomacy practiced here in New Orleans, by the way. According to Dennis Wiltering's new documentary Blaine Kern, they call him Mr. Mardi Gras. Blaine Kern Sr. traveled to Cuba in 1959 with an entourage of other carnival personalities, and New Orleans sent a very large float on a barge to Havana. I found references to this trip in the Morrison papers at the New Orleans Public Library. I'm still looking for more details. Kern apparently didn't have nice things to say about Fidel Castro. There was something about the float was too big and they had to tear down a wall or something. But I just think it's hilarious that in 1959 Blaine Kern was in Cuba with New Orleans carnival. On the bottom right we have a pamphlet publicizing a series of inter-American seminars and town meetings to be held in New York in 1958 in cooperation with New Orleans International House. And on the bottom left a pennant announcing the inaugural direct flight between New Orleans Maracaibo and Caracas on Linea Aeropostal Venezolana. These items all suggest a context in which the Garden of the Americas initiative was not an anomaly or an oddity, but rather a realization or enactment of New Orleans vision of itself as fundamentally Latin and inter-American. Today though this vision or version of New Orleans as a hub for political, commercial, educational and cultural interconnectivity with the other Americas seems to have waned. You can still find International House in the Central Business District but it's now just a boutique hotel with few remnants of its earlier role as a haven for international visitors, particularly those from Latin America. No one seems to know what happened to the multilingual library with over 10,000 titles International House boasted about in its glossy magazine. And over on Basin Street the statues of Bolívar, Juarez and Morazan still preside over the Garden of the Americas but these memorials were notably not part of the recent fracas over which of the city's monuments should stay up and which should come down, a debate that drew international attention and resulted in the removal of four figures associated with the Confederacy. While all that was happening the Garden of the Americas continued to suffer neglect, decay and perhaps most notably indifference. Despite its proximity to important landmarks such as Armstrong Park, Congo Square, St. Louis No. 1 as well as to the French Quarter itself it's hard to even imagine this historic stretch of Basin Street as a garden-like oasis that invites us to stroll its symbolic paths. Some wonder what these monuments are even doing in New Orleans. In July 19, in a July 19 column July 2019 column for the Times-Picayune-Nola.com Mike Scott responded to this very question from one of his readers. Why do we have or need a statue of Simon Bolívar? Just what does he have to do with New Orleans? So if there's no remaining logic for the presence of the Bolívar monument perhaps there's even less of a raison d'être for the garden of the Americas and its other two figures, Benito Juarez, president of Mexico from 1858 to 1872 and his Central American independentista counterpart, Francisco Morasan, president of the Federal Republic of Central America from 1830 to 1839. Though there is no evidence that Bolívar even visited New Orleans Juarez lived in the city twice during two periods of exile a topic you can hear more about if you come back here on April 8 to hear my colleague Yuri Herrera's talk Juarez and New Orleans, la ficción hecha de fragmentos de verdad. So it's his new novel in progress, I encourage everybody to come. At this early stage in my research I am mostly just still articulating questions about these materials rather than generating answers. So some of those questions are what was the impetus for this massive material and symbolic investment in inter-American identity in post-World War II New Orleans? What was the significance of the garden of the Americas in an era in the era when these three statues were installed and what meaning does it retain for us today? What is its demise suggest about the inter-American identity of New Orleans in our own times? Does its decline signal the erosion of the city's once celebrated position as gateway to the Americas as well? First though, given the context of these talks as a platform for research in progress underlying in progress, I also want to talk a bit about how I came to the topic and how it's developed thus far. As often happens with our research the work started as an abstract for a conference paper, a conference presentation I assured myself would not distract me too much from the book manuscript I also have a manuscript that for which the deadline has already been extended from the advanced contract. So to be perfectly frank the idea for the Garden of the Americas research rests on a rejection. In my initial proposal for the 2022 Modern Language Association meeting held in New York this past January I was hoping to talk about the Jewish lawyers, financiers and weapons suppliers who backed revolutionary leader Jose Marti in the Cuban independence struggle. This inquiry into Marti's circle of New York based Jewish fixers admittedly yet another tempting distraction from my book project seemed to dovetail nicely with a theme of the 2022 MLA multilingual US a theme that could productively be read two ways as either the multilingual United States or multilingual us. But that first proposal was rejected in my opinion unjustly of course. So as they say when at first you don't succeed I went on to submit a second proposal for the MLA in fact I submitted an entire panel in response to the October call for just in time sessions the just in time sessions are last minute additions to the program designed to highlight hot button issues in the academic and intellectual conversations of the moment. And one of those trending topics was of course still is the monuments controversy in which New Orleans had been an early nexus. What did the presence or perhaps better said the absence of the garden of the Americas in the monuments controversy signify? Was anyone considering the inherently bilingual nature of these monuments and their insertion in a formulation of the US or of us as also multilingual. On this panel which we titled multilingual monuments in the Americas I invited two colleagues to join me Esther Allen from CUNY City University of New York agreed to speak about the twin Jose Marti equestrian monuments by sculptor Anna von Hyatt Huntington situated in New York Central Park and near the intersection of the avenue of the Americas and in Centro Havana and I also topped our own center graduate students Elena Manastorres take a take a bow. Take a stand take a bow. Elena is going to present on the 3060 foot high bronze statue bronze monstrosity of Christopher Columbus known as the birth of the New World installed on the Atlantic coast of Puerto Rico Arecibo. So our collective aim with this session was in is to analyze these fraught monumental landscape projects in 20th and 21st century Puerto Rico, New Orleans New York and Havana as material and discursive proofs of trans-territorial and multilingual negotiations of inter-American identity that at the same time reveal local realities of racial, socioeconomic and linguistic conditions in the communities in which they're situated. Our session was accepted and we were all excited to convene for our in-person panel at the MLA in New York but that too had to wait. Besides the problem of the pandemic itself my husband Eduardo was in a serious accident just days before we were scheduled to travel and the MLA panel was postponed until 2023. So if you're going to be there I invite you to come here about this topic in this larger and no doubt richer context of multilingual monuments in the Americas could be an edited volume or something down the line after the book is turned in, right? So thinking about how I got interested in this research I should also acknowledge that in some senses it sort of is a sequel to my 2021 book Port of No Return, Enemy Alien Interment in World War II New Orleans in which I focused on the United States efforts to apprehend and detain thousands of persons deemed dangerous enemy aliens in Latin America between December 1941 and the end of World War II. Besides offering the principal port through which these men women and children passed en route to detention camps throughout the U.S. New Orleans also boasted its own detention facility Camp Algiers located on the west bank of the Mississippi. A couple thousand of these Latin American detainees deported to the U.S. were held at Camp Algiers including a unique group of Jewish internees who were concentrated at the New Orleans site after being held alongside Nazi sympathizers in other U.S. detention camps in the U.S. south. The monuments projects this monuments project proves I'm not quite done yet with our Port of No Return I guess I'm assuming that all of three of these statues destined for the Garden of the Americas also passed through it before they stood them up on Basin Street. Yet another source of inspiration has been the recently concluded Sawyer seminar sponsored by Tulane's Newcombe Art Department, the School of Liberal Arts, and the Mellon Foundation titled Sites of Memory, New Orleans, and Place-Based Histories in the Americas. The Sawyer hosted a series of provocative presentations and site visits which offered me new angles from which to approach the Garden of the Americas project. One of the seminar speakers Lorraine Liu, professor of Spanish and Portuguese and African American Studies at UT Austin was gracious enough to walk through the Garden of the Americas with me, explore with me from her own area of expertise on the symbolic value of the built environment in urban resistance efforts in Brazil. And finally, the Latin American Library itself has played a hand in stoking my curiosity on this topic. LAL featured the Garden of the Americas in Case 4 of its Pan-American Life in New Orleans exhibition inaugurated in November of 2019. Many of you will remember this lovely depiction of New Orleans as the Eje de Lemosferio Occidental on the left. The exhibition also included this photo of the Bolívar Statute on Basin Street which was featured on the cover of the Sunday magazine of the Times-Picayune for March 26, 1921. And I would say that this photo shows us that the Garden of the Americas and especially the Bolívar Monument itself had within a few years of its installation become an iconic symbol of this Pan-American life. The exhibition text noted and I quote, through the 1960s and to a lesser extent the 1970s, New Orleans continued to aggressively market itself to more affluent Latins as a prime destination for travel, education and pleasure. Perhaps no other single person was as instrumental in this endeavor as four-time Mayor de Lessep's story, Chep Morrison. He was mayor from 1946 to 1961 who served as a promoter and ambassador of all things Pan-American. Morrison who once declared that he was, in his soul, a Latin-American made the pursuit of trade and cultural exchange with the region the cornerstone of his country. Described by one of his biographers as probably the best known United States citizen in Latin America, the four-time Mayor was indeed the driving force behind such initiatives but as we shall see far from its only proponent. As a monumental landscape dedicated to Latin American leaders we might compare New Orleans Garden of the Americas project to New York's Avenue of the Americas a stretch of Sixth Avenue in Central Park that Mayor Fiorela La Guardia rechristened in October of 1945 accompanied by Chilean President Juan Antonio Rios. Besides the monument to Martí in Central Park, that section of the park also boasts a statue of Bolívar and José de San Martín, the two great liberators of South America. We could also consider parallels with monumental series of pro-series within Latin America and the Caribbean such as Havana's Avenida de los Presidentes along Calleje in the Vedado neighborhood which also boasts monuments to Bolívar and Juarez, amongst other Latin American leaders. Both of these statue-wary landscapes are still important landmarks, though the Castro government pruned its own garden-like path of the presidents, removing the bronze statue of Tomás Estrada Palma, President of the Republic from 1902 to 1906. So you have here the Palma, the original Palma and then here he's been removed. For the Revolutionary Barbudos, Estrada Palma was a traitor, not a liberator, a weak leader who had compromised Cuban independence and sovereignty by supporting decisions that prompted U.S. political and military intervention in the island. So soon after the Revolutionary triumph in 1959, Fidel and his followers removed the statue of Estrada Palma from its primary position amidst the presidential figures stretching along Calleje. Ironically, Palma's shoes Estrada Palma's shoes remained behind. You can sort of see it right there. On the statue's pedestal creating for some an apt metaphor of the unfilled shoes of truly democratic leadership in Cuba. As mentioned, the Garden of the Americas was the brainchild of a group of Latin-leaning New Orleans civic leaders headlined by Mayor Chet Morrison himself. But arguably, long before the 1957 dedication of the Bolívar Monument, Morrison was already on his Latin American mission. I think I have the book. So this is Morrison's Latin American mission. It's his memoir. It's a little bit tragic because the book was published posthumously in 1965. The year after he and his son died in a airplane accident in Mexico. Arguably, oh yeah, we did that. He was already on his Latin American mission as the title of his posthumous memoir declared. And I'm citing Morrison here. By vocation, I am a lawyer and politician. But my avocation has been and is Latin America. He wrote in that poem. In fact, throughout his long tenure as Mayor and well before being appointed ambassador, the first ambassador, in fact, to the Organization of American States by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, Morrison earned a reputation as a tireless champion of the Latin tinge of New Orleans. He traveled to Latin America and the Caribbean on numerous occasions, meeting with scores of leaders ranging from Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic to Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina. As part of this mission, he instituted a long list of America's friendly initiatives and projects of which the Garden of the Americas then is only one item. Nor was Morrison the first to express these sentiments. Thomas Griffin wrote in his 1961 volume, New Orleans, a guide to America's most interesting city. New Orleans was a Latin city a century old before it became part of the United States. Griffin heralded the city as, quote, the gateway for the Midwestern area of the United States two ports in Central and South America, the West Indies, and the world. Its docks are always lined with ships flying foreign flags. Every day, sailings carry visitors to and from the Caribbean via cruise or cargo vessels. And airplane flights are numerous to the romantic islands of the West Indies. So known as a charismatic figure who spoke Spanish and marched into the formal world of Latin American protocol with a directness, a freshness, a complete lack of pretense that overwhelmed his colleagues, Jeff Morrison was a missionary even an evangelist for New Orleans as the axis of the hemisphere and the gateway to the Americas. In his introduction to Latin American mission, Gerald Frank wrote that Morrison was brash, unafraid and unorthodox in his dealings with Latin Americans but he liked them. He meant well for them and they knew it. They responded the vast majority of them to their chepito with the same open affection he exhibited toward them. Chepito, chat Morrison. Chepito. These photos were two of the publicity shots released for Morrison's inauguration in 1946. In the first we see a long line of cars waiting to participate in his inaugural parade starting it appears from the foot of Canal Street. In the second photo on the right we can see that each car is draped with the name of a Latin American country. In this case Bolivia, Brasil, Chile and Colombia. Did everyone in these cars travel from these places to represent their countries? We don't know but the visual message is still remarkable and nearly unthinkable in our own times. Plus these are awesome cars, right? While the Garden of the Americas may have been his idea Morrison only lived to see the first of the three monuments installed. It was at the ceremony for the Bolivar dedication in fact that the city unveiled the Garden of the Americas a quote, landscaped swath of Basin Street neutral ground that in addition to the Bolivar statue includes seven flag poles one for the flag of each of the six Bolivarian countries and one for the U.S. flag. In November 15, 1957 press release from the mayor's office announced New Orleans on November 24 will pay tribute to the memory of Simon Bolivar, the great South American hero and patriot with the dedication of a handsome and imposing monument capital M erected in his honor. The monument, capital M is located on famous canal street and is a gift to the city from the Republic of Venezuela. It consists of a standing figure of the renowned liberator who is known as the George Washington of South America. Set in a beautifully landscaped plaza with walkways of fountain and reflecting pools. Mayor de Lesseps S. Morrison has urged the citizens of New Orleans to attend the dedication ceremony to quote express our gratitude to Venezuela for their generosity in building this beautiful monument in the heart of our city and to reaffirm the warm and enduring ties of friendship existing between New Orleans and Latin America. End quote. Another announcement released five days later from the public relations office at City Hall mentioned a parade scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. and included a list of the Venezuelan military and diplomatic delegates who would be in attendance. The President Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs would also be on hand to represent the United States. The most reverent El Abel Cuaillote Cuaille Auxiliary Bishop of New Orleans would deliver the invocation and Mario Bermudez who we've already met Director of International Relations for the City and International House would serve as MC. Members of the Tulane University to see cadets were tapped to form an honor guard at the monument and the police department band would provide the music. So designed by Venezuelan architects and engineers and cast in granite in Italy by Venezuelan sculptor Abel Valmit Hannah the Bolívar monument was described as quote modern in appearance. It weighed 7 tons, I guess it still weighs 7 tons and a cantilevered platform five-heat high which was covered with iron ore representing the mineral riches of Venezuela. This is all very weird now that we're talking to Venezuela again and we're friends with Venezuela again so that we can get their gas their petroleum. At the time of its dedication viewers could approach the standing figure via a sweeping ramp that crossed over the reflecting pools below. In addition the flags and national emblems of each of the six nations for which Bolívar was known for liberating Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Panama formed part of the monument together with the United States flag. The Basin Street neutral ground was officially designated the garden of the Americas by the city government with the expectation that other Latin American nations would erect monuments to their national heroes there as well. I don't know what happened but Griffin described the statue of Bolívar the only one that had been erected in 1961 when his guide book came out as quote tangible evidence of how New Orleans rates as a good neighbor to Latin America end quote. More of this tangible evidence would follow with the installation of the Juarez Monument in 1965. It bears the inscription peace is based on the respect of the rights of others in English a translation of Juarez's own declaration that which he reportedly pronounced in July of 1867 after entering Mexico City following the defeat of Maximilian and the second Mexican empire. There's some debate in the historical literature as to whether or not Juarez was also paraphrasing a similar expression by Immanuel Kant. In any case the bronze plaque was added in a bronze plaque was added in 1972 on the centennial of Juarez's death suggesting continued engagement with the symbol with the monument. The statue of Francisco Morazan the least familiar name amongst these three right did anybody know whom Francisco Morazan was okay and the least cited in references to the gardens of the Americas was dedicated in 1966 as we see on the corresponding bronze plaque here. There is another round brass plaque that reads provincias unidas del centro de America within a pyramid or triangle and I provided a close up here as well on the right bottom of the Phrygian cap if I'm pronouncing it wrong please Phrygian thank you Phrygian cap or Liberty cap which also appears on the plaque the Phrygian cap which is also in the Cuban coat of arms the Phrygian cap which appears in representations of a variety of other republics signifies freedom from the crown which typically would appear in emblems of countries still subject to monarchies and imperial governments in 2013 on Morrison's lasting impact on New Orleans published in 64 parishes authors Glenn Jeanson and David Lursen mentioned the garden of the Americas project but left out the Morazan monument poor Francisco Morazan always short-shifted on this they also noted that the renowned sculptor Lynn Emery had created another monument in 1966 this one to mayor Morrison himself in the Civic Center whose construction he spearheaded they wrote in this article quote although Morrison rapidly lost political influence after stepping down as mayor his legacy in New Orleans remains significant even today the municipal government continues to operate under the city charter he implemented in 1954 and many of the public works and monuments erected during his administration including the Union passenger terminal city hall complex the widening of Basin street and statues honoring Benito Juarez and Simon Bolivar remain part of the city's landscape today however these monuments languish in various states of disrepair or neglect with the Bolivar statue in the worst shape of the three the base and surrounding platform for the statue are crumbling and Bolivar now looks out at us almost Dracula like perhaps a Dracula dressed up in a Mardi Gras costume of a 19th century Latin Libertador it's not uncommon to see drug paraphernalia at Bolivar's feet which were spray painted red at one point and as we see here the platform for the statue has been tagged by Grafiteiros what does the Ojos message so here this is the base of the statue and you have the Grafite of Ojos what does the Ojos message tell us should we read it as the Spanish equivalent of the open your eyes messages that adorn several other New Orleans urban canvases so this huge building here with the eyes and then this here says open your eyes though I am not an expert on New Orleans not Richard Campanella or on monuments or on Bolivar Juarez, Morasan or the other Libertadores as a Latin Americanist I am convinced that the forlorn and forgotten Garden of the Americas is noteworthy for its very absence from important discussions of the key symbols of New Orleans contemporary urban landscape so to conclude I want to return to some of my earlier questions perhaps slightly reformulated why were these statues virtually ignored in local efforts to dismantle monuments to the confederacy and other historical narratives based on doctrines of white superiority what might the disregard for the Garden of the Americas signal in relation to the city's historic claim as a unique environment for a multiracial and multilingual Creole or Creolio culture what does it seeming demise mean in the context of New Orleans self-promotion as a multicultural gumbo to what should we be opening our eyes we would do well to bring this monumental project into the frame I believe alongside the Robert E. Lee statue and the other confederate figures removed in 2017 amid on the one side local citizens demanding take them down NOLA and on the other confederate flag bearing antagonists insisting that local authorities keep them up it's true that the monuments in the Garden of the Americas in the Garden of the Americas do not appear in CJ Hunt's provocative new 2021 documentary the neutral neutral ground how many have seen it fantastic documentary on the you're screening it okay good which reflected on the New Orleans monuments controversy from several different angles Hunt's film which aired a few months ago on PBS's point of view shown at Tulane in April did not include the Basin Street neutral ground along which our Libertadores languish even though it's called the neutral ground even though the documentary is called that in fact I'm still trying to figure out whether these monuments are even included in the massive monuments project this this image on the right on the bottom is from that website how many of you know about the monuments project yeah a couple few people the art history people know a kind of census correct me if I'm wrong on this a kind of census of US Statuary and monuments the monuments project itself has been funded by the Mellon Foundation to the tune of 25 million dollars not so with the Garden of the Americas it seems instead that the Garden of the Americas has been untended in both physical and discursive terms suffering from indifference on both counts it simply has not been part of the discussion but perhaps it should be thank you