El Parque de Mexico in Lincoln Heights once housed dozens of statues dedicated to Mexican heroes. But over the past decade, thieves made off with almost all of them
1 Feb 2021
Thomas Fallon was a soldier in the Mexican-American War and a mayor of San Jose, California, but now left-wing activists are calling for “melting” the bronze statue erected in his honor because they believe he was a racist and a white supremacist. He planted an American flag in 1846 into the city’s soil to claim the land for the United States.
A website that catalogs “interesting” locations around the world wrote about the controversy:
In the 1980s, San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery had the city commission a statue of Fallon raising the U.S. flag in San Jose at a cost of over $800,000. The statue was completed in 1988, and was scheduled to be located in the City Park Plaza (now known as Plaza de César Chávez) near the site of the flag raising. However local groups, including Hispanic Americans, protested that Fallon represented American imperialism and repression of the Mexican population. The statue was stored until 2002, when it was finally displayed in a small p