Buenos Aires’s Statue of Juana Azurduy
This piece was written for Prof Karl’s Comparing Societies and Histories: The Impact of Time and Place class (AH152) at Minerva University in November of 2022.
Read an animated version of this story here!
If you take a stroll in Buenos Aires’s busy Puerto Madero neighborhood, you’ll see men and women lining up for bus stops to head home from work. You’ll smell the smoke from choripan stands, mixed with a sea breeze blowing in from the Atlantic. You’ll also find the Plaza del Correo. Placed in front of the Kirchner Cultural Centre is a monument to Juana Azurduy de Padilla, the legendary 19th century guerrilla fighter. The towering statue is 16 meters tall and weighs 25 tons. Juana lunges forward, holding aloft a sword. In the folds of her billowing dress, you can make out the determined faces of men, women, and children. These are representations of the First Nations: Trabuqueño, Aymara, Quechua, Colla, and gauchos (‘cowboys’) who fought alongside Juana for Bolivian independence (Lerer 2018). The sides of the monument’s cubic base are engraved with Juana’s history and achievements.
Me in front of Juana Azurduy’s statue
Most people passing through don’t pay the statue any attention. Juana has become a fixture of this plaza, a part of these workers’ daily commutes. Who was this woman? Why is her statue so prominent, and what is its hidden history? In this digital story, I will demonstrate how replacing a statue dedicated to Christopher Columbus with one of a guerrilla military leader fighting for and alongside Indigenous peoples demonstrates a clash in conceptualizing Argentine identity in the public sphere.
Juana Azurduy was born in Chuquisaca in the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, which is modern-day Sucre. At the time, Buenos Aires was a flourishing Spanish outpost, rich from silver from the Bolivian Potosí mines. Potosí (also known as Cerro Rico, or “Rich Mountain”) was a mining town that mined 80% of the world's silver supply between the 16th and 18th centuries (Mann 2011). However, the silver was extracted at the forced hands of thousands of indigenous people. Many died through brutal treatment, mining accidents, or mercury poisoning. Additionally, around 30,000 African slaves were also forced to work and die for silver (Cortesi 2011).
On May 25, 1809, the citizens of Chuquisaca participated in the first outbreak that helped begin the Bolivian War of Independence. At the time, the Spanish colonies followed a strict casta system. At the top were Peninsulares (Spanish-born leaders), then Criollos (of pure Spanish descent born in Latin America), Mestizos (a mix of Spanish and Indigenous descent), and finally, the indigenous population (the biggest social class, primarily speaking Aymara and Quechua). These groups had different aims for independence, with Criollos simply wanting more freedom from Spain and indigenous people wanting the Spanish to leave altogether (Jackson 1995). The casta system left a deep imprint in Latin American society, with European whiteness remaining socially valued for centuries to come.
Juana Azurduy was born in Chuquisaca in 1780, to a white Spaniard father and a half-Mestizo, half-Indigenous mother (Museo Histórico Nacional n.d.). She was considered mestiza under the casta system. After the death of her mother in 1787, Juana developed a close relationship with her father, who taught her to become a skilled sharpshooter and rider. She accompanied him to work the land alongside indigenous laborers (Museo Histórico Nacional n.d.). It was here that she became fluent in Aymara and Quechua. At the age of 17, Juana returned to her late father’s hacienda. She witnessed the brutality of the treatment of the workers in the silver mines, quickly becoming a passionate ally to the indigenous revolutionary movement (O’Donnell 1994). Juana married her childhood friend and fellow revolutionary Manuel Ascencio Padilla in 1805.
From 1809 to 1825, Juana Azurduy was a guerrilla military leader during the Bolivian War of Independence, fighting alongside her husband. At the highest point in her control, Juana controlled an army of 6,000. With her local knowledge, Juana inspired indigenous people and even other women, known as the Amazonas, to join the cause. During an 1815 battle, in a legendary act, Juana left the battlefield to give birth to her fourth son and later returned to the front lines to rally her troops (Gantier 1946). This maternal power is reflected in the statue—Juana’s bronze figure carries a baby on its back. In 1816, Juana even temporarily liberated Potosí from the Spanish, earning her the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. However, later that year, while expecting her fifth child, her husband was captured and beheaded by the royalists. She was forced to flee, but remained a commander (O’Donnell 1994). Unfortunately, Juana Azurduy de Padilla died impoverished and without pension on May 25, 1862 and was buried in a communal grave (Gantier 1946). Though Juana died forgotten, her memory lives on today.
In 2011, the president of Venezuela paused during a meeting with Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to point out the window and ask, “What is that mass murderer doing there?” He pointed to an 85-foot-tall statue of Christopher Columbus that had stood in the plaza behind Argentina’s government house for a century. “Columbus was the head of an invasion that produced not a massacre, but a genocide,” he continued. “You should put an Indian there.” (Frei 2019). Two years later, President Kirchner announced that the Columbus statue would be moved near the Jorge Newbery Airport in a lesser-known area in the city. A statue of Juana Azurduy de Padilla, aided by a US $1 million donation by Bolivian president Evo Morales, would replace Columbus in 2015. The statue was the work of Argentine sculptor Andrés Zerneri and built in bronze. The statue was later moved to Plaza del Correo for repairs, where it stands today (Frei 2019).
The replacement of Columbus with Juana Azurduy reflects conflicting views of Argentine nationalism. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of Italian, Spanish, and other European immigrants poured into Argentina. The liberal elite saw immigration as the solution to populate Argentina’s large landmass and whiten the population of creoles and Indigenous. At the same time, the largely uneducated immigrants were blamed for rising social unrest, crime, and disease. Native-born Argentinians viewed immigrants as a threat to a national culture worth preserving, and many faced discrimination (DeLaney 2020).
Historian Anthony D. Smith argues that nationalism has deep roots. According to him, national identities depend on long-developing “patterns of values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that form the distinctive heritage of the nation” (Smith 1991). However, this view operates on the national scale, and is muddled in the case of Latin American countries like Argentina, whose local culture has been transformed by global migration. Despite systematic attempts at extinction (including the infamous Conquest of the Desert), the presence of Indigenous peoples remains in conflict with an identity emphasizing Argentina’s whiteness. This is particularly salient in a visibly European place like Buenos Aires, nicknamed the ‘Paris of Latin America’ (Frei 2019). Who gets to define the Argentine ser, the supposedly “immutable core essence” of the Argentine people? (DeLaney 2020). Does it include indigenous people? Creoles? Gauchos? Immigrants?
Monuments are a way to shape public conceptions of national belonging. In 1909, Argentine historian Ricardo Rojas wrote that “the historical sense, without which lessons are sterile, is formed in the spectacle of everyday life… through commemorative monuments” (Rojas 1909). This echoes Michael Billig’s idea of banal nationalism. Everyday symbols of nationalism, such as flags or public monuments, remind the public of their national identity in subtle ways (Billig 1995). For Italian immigrants facing discrimination in their new nation, Christopher Columbus became a symbol for integration (Lerer 2018). Thus the statue of Columbus that once stood in the Parque Colón—a 1921 gift from Buenos Aires’ Italian immigrant community—is a ‘flag’ helping to carve a visible space for Italian immigrants within Argentine nationalism, and demonstrate their contributions to their adopted homeland (Lerer 2018).
(see Brittany Dick’s lovely project for an in-depth discussion on this topic!)
However, for many people in Argentina, Columbus represents the beginning of centuries of colonization, disease, extermination, and exploitation. His visible statue asserts his importance in the national canon, serving as a painful reminder of the deaths of millions, including the indigenous people who perished at the Potosí mines or in battle for independence.
Juana Azurduy’s statue stands as a re-conception of Argentine identity, one that recognizes and celebrates historically marginalized peoples: the First Nations and women. Interestingly, sculptor Andrés Zerneri’s initial sketch of the monument included a multi-figural group of independence heroes; however, President Kirchner asserted that only Juana should be represented. This change, from a male group to a female individual, puts the focus on a woman’s narrative and highlights the absence of female memorials in Argentina (Lerer 2018). Zerneri later said the Azurduy monument provides Argentines with “a way of seeing our identity,” articulating “not just a representation of our shared past, but also a call for future action” (Frei 2019).
Yet, the statue remains controversial. After the decision to move the Columbus statue to the fringe of the city, outraged demonstrators circled the plaza (Frei 2019). The Italian-Argentine community filed lawsuits against the government, and the dispute went to Argentina’s Supreme Court (Lerer 2018). The decision became a flashpoint between President Kirchner’s center-left government and conservative Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri. Additionally, the one million dollars donated toward the monument sweetened an energy deal between Bolivia and Argentina— the statue was the result of several motives, not all of them socially progressive (Lerer 2018).
The limit of using these two statues as a comparison of conflicting views on Argentine identity is that these statues are known and seen by only a small percentage of the Argentinian population. The statues were commissioned by political elites, and their discourse was shaped by political motives— they are by no means representative of everyday Argentinian nationalism. However, I argue that Juana Azurduy’s statue is useful in highlighting the difficulties of defining and representing Argentine ser in the public sphere. Though the replacement of Columbus is seen as an affront to some immigrant communities, Juana’s presence in the Plaza Del Correo is a triumph in the fight for commemorative representation of historically marginalized peoples.
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