By Marilyn Harris with Howard Switzer

A three-act play in verse, “1492 The Play” is a re-education project of Marilyn Harris, a former Spanish teacher with Metro Nashville Public Schools.. 

Created in 1992, the Quincentennial Year, to counter the myth that Columbus discovered America,  the play nudges us to consider the point of view of the natives who discovered Columbus and his many followers.

Re-education can be done in a light-hearted manner.  The script mixes a sense of humor, singing, dancing and rapping with intent to pry minds both young and old loose from the long-held notion of heroic discovery.   

In 1992 Berkeley, California became the first US city to reject Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous People’s Day.  Now in more than 50 US cities and 13 states across the US, Indigenous Peoples Day is the official holiday. President Joe Biden formally commemorated the holiday with a presidential proclamation in 2021.

At least 33 statues of Christopher Columbus have been taken down since the Black Lives Matter protests in the spring of 2020. Indigenous leaders and members of Mexico‘s Zapatista movement sailed across the Atlantic from Mexico to Spain in 2021, calling attention to the 500 years of indigenous resistance after the Spanish colonizers settled in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.