Oñate statue supporter in Española now opposes reinstalling monument

Oct. 21—If Alex Naranjo could do it again, he wouldn't push to put the statue of Juan de Oñate back up.

"People obviously felt offended and I'm not going to offend anybody for the sake of a stupid statue," the Rio Arriba County Commission chairman said of a 3-ton bronze depiction of the Spanish conquistador officials had planned to bring out of storage late last month.

An announcement of the statue's planned reinstallation at a county building in Española prompted a dayslong protest that ended with a counterprotester accused of shooting a Native American activist. On the day of the shooting, Naranjo, who had supported the reinstallation, expressed frustration and disappointment — not with the shooter but with the protesters and law enforcement.

If it were up to him, he said at the time, the statue would have gone up as planned.

He later said at a contentious County Commission meeting the statue would not be installed again.

In an interview last week, he reiterated this as he discussed his views on the historic relationship between the Spanish who arrived in the area 425 years ago and the Indigenous people who were living here.

Revered by some, reviled by others, Oñate served as colonial governor of what is now New Mexico from 1598 to 1606. He is notorious for the Acoma Massacre of 1599, during which nearly 1,000 Acoma people were killed and some had their right foot mutilated or amputated in retaliation for an ambush in which 13 Spaniards, including Oñate's nephew, died, according to historical accounts.

Naranjo's uncle Emilio Naranjo, a former state senator and state Democratic Party chairman, was instrumental in obtaining funding for the creation of the large bronze statue of Oñate on horseback, which has drawn protest since it was installed at a visitors center in Alcalde, north of Española, in the early 1990s.

The sculpture's right foot was sawed off in 1998 but was later repaired.

The artwork was removed from the center in 2020 to prevent its destruction — or violence — when a protest erupted at the site amid a national movement against monuments to figures associated with the Confederacy and colonialism.

A man was shot during a protest over a similar monument to Oñate in Albuquerque just prior to the removal of the statue in Alcalde.

Many people have named Naranjo as the person who initiated the plan to bring the statue out of storage and return it to public display in Española.

Ryan Martinez, 23, of Sandia Park has been accused of shooting Jacob Johns, an Indigenous artist and activist of Spokane, Wash., outside a county building where a pedestal for the statue had been built and protesters had gathered for days to prevent its installation.

"If I would have anticipated all that, I wouldn't have considered helping with that process," Naranjo said. However, he added, he said he felt law enforcement should have removed the protesters.

Naranjo said he thought it would be "a beautiful thing" to reinstall the sculpture during National Hispanic Heritage Month — observed Sept. 15 through Oct. 15 — but he denied making the decision unilaterally. He would not have been able to arrange for the statue to go back up without the agreement of the other two commissioners and the county manager, he said.

Naranjo provided few details about how the plan developed, citing a recently filed petition seeking to gather signatures for his recall that points to his actions around the statue as among the reasons to remove him.

"I'm sure the county manager made communication with the other two commissioners about the statue," he said.

County Manager Jeremy Maestas and Commissioners Brandon Bustos and Moises Morales did not return calls seeking comment.

Naranjo, who is 80 but said he "feels 50," gave conflicting statements during interviews last week, saying he didn't think the statue would be a flashpoint for protest but also that he anticipated it could be.

"Did I think it was going to be a problem?" he said. "Probably. But did we have law enforcement to defend it? Yes. Why they didn't do that I don't know."

Naranjo said he went on a local radio station to talk about installing the statue and didn't get any negative community feedback.

"I thought it would be very nice if we could do that for National Hispanic Heritage Month," he said. "But if I was to do it again, my vote would be against putting that statue back up ... because of attitudes out there that are not in conjunction with my thinking."

Naranjo said he'd read some stories of Oñate's bad acts he said he thinks probably aren't true.

"Why would you want to cut the feet off people who you had enslaved to work the field for you?" he asked. "Why would you want to do that? ... I wasn't there, you weren't there. We don't know. We only assume these things happened."

Naranjo pointed to accounts saying the Spanish had protected local Native American communities from other tribes who had raided their pueblos during the colonial era. Asked why he would believe that part of the historical record but not the stories about Oñate, Naranjo revised his earlier comment.

"I realize that it probably occurred," he said of Oñate's brutality. "If that is what they are saying, I don't dispute that. I would never question history. I don't dispute history at all. ... I'm saying sometimes there is a tendency of exaggerating history."

Naranjo said he grew up living side by side with Native people, and some of his best friends were from Santa Clara Pueblo.

"My neighbors were all Native Americans," he said. "My dad baptized a lot of them."

The late Alfonso Ortiz, a member of Ohkay Owingeh and former anthropology professor at the University of New Mexico, was his first cousin, Naranjo said.

"Why would I insult my own relatives?" he asked.

Naranjo said some of the protesters against the statue, including Johns, aren't from the area.

"These people want to change the names of a lot of our streets," he said. "Hey, wake up! We live in America."

The commissioner said he hasn't gotten a lawyer to defend him against the recall petition filed recently in state District Court.

If he had, Naranjo said, they would probably advise him not to comment. But he's gotten calls from people from London to California wanting to talk about the statue, and he's talked to them, he said.

"I answered all their calls because I'm not ashamed of anything I've done in my life," he said.

"I don't know if what I did there was wrong," he concluded. "We'll let the court decide that."