Columbus or Indigenous Peoples Day? It no longer matters because I was born on October 12, before Nixon changed it to a Monday.
My birthday still comes on the 12th, but it is no longer Columbus, or Indigenous Peoples Day. Meanwhile, a growing number of municipalities have been slowly replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.
POTUS Joe Biden issued a presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples Day, lending the most significant boost yet to efforts to refocus the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus toward an appreciation of Native peoples.
This is also Columbus Day, which commemorates the arrival of the Italian explorer to North America in 1492. However, many Native American groups say the day celebrates Western colonialism by paying tribute to a man who promoted the trans-Atlantic slave trade and is responsible for the genocide of indigenous people, while some Italian Americans see the move to scrap the holiday as an affront to their ethnic heritage.
I have another idea, I'm going to start calling it UB Day, or Roberto Soto Day. I like the way that sounds today. At the end of the day, I was born in The land of Hatuey, Cuba's First National Hero. As the first prominent freedom fighter of the Americas, Hatuey not only united Africans and Indigenous people against the invaders but in bringing his people and fighters from Hispaniola to Cuba, he initiated the first pan-American resistance struggle. A statue erected in Cuba celebrates Hatuey as a national hero. Also, my grandmother was of Italian heritage. Her maiden name was Polo.
