From Puebla to Party

It's Monday, May fifth, and welcome to HigherIQ. Happy Cinco de Mayo. If you're planning to celebrate today, you probably know it involves Mexican food, margaritas, and some vague sense of honoring Mexican culture. What you might not know is that Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day. That's September sixteenth. Today commemorates a single battle, fought on May 5, 1862, in which a massively outgunned Mexican army defeated the French. The holiday is celebrated more in the United States than in Mexico, where it's a relatively minor regional observance. The version of Cinco de Mayo that most Americans know was created not by Mexican tradition but by Chicano activists in the 1960s and beer companies in the 1980s. And the battle it commemorates may have helped determine the outcome of the American Civil War. In 1861, Mexico was broke. Years of internal conflict, including the Reform War and the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, had left the country financially devastated. President Benito Juarez, a lawyer of indigenous Zapotec heritage who had been elected that year, made a desperate decision: he suspended payments on Mexico's foreign debts to Britain, Spain, and France. All three countries sent warships to the port of Veracruz to collect. Britain and Spain negotiated and withdrew. France, under Emperor Napoleon III, had bigger ambitions. He wanted to conquer Mexico and install a European monarch, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, as its ruler. In the spring of 1862, six thousand French soldiers, widely considered one of the finest armies in the world, a force that had not been defeated in nearly fifty years, marched inland toward Mexico City. Standing in their way at the city of Puebla, about eighty miles southeast of the capital, was a force of roughly two thousand Mexican soldiers. They were poorly supplied, outnumbered three to one, and led by General Ignacio Zaragoza, a thirty three year old who had been born in what is now Texas. On May fifth, the French launched their assault. Zaragoza had fortified two hilltop positions, the forts of Loreto and Guadalupe, and the French attacked them repeatedly throughout the day. By evening, the French had suffered nearly five hundred casualties and withdrew. Fewer than a hundred Mexicans had been killed. It was a stunning upset, and it sent a ripple across the Western Hemisphere. The victory didn't end the war. The French returned with reinforcements, eventually captured Puebla, took Mexico City, and installed Maximilian as emperor. He ruled for three years before Mexico reclaimed its independence, and Maximilian was executed by firing squad in 1867. The Battle of Puebla was not a turning point in the military sense. It was something arguably more important: a symbol. An indigenous president leading a ragtag army against a European imperial power and winning. That symbol would take on very different meanings over the next hundred and sixty years depending on which side of the border you were standing on. The detail that most Americans don't know is that the Battle of Puebla may have influenced the outcome of the American Civil War. Napoleon III was sympathetic to the Confederacy. France hadn't formally recognized the Confederate States, but recognition was under active consideration, and a French-controlled Mexico would have given the Confederacy a friendly neighbor on its southern border. Historians have documented that Napoleon planned to ship weapons, including long-range artillery, overland from Mexico through Texas to Confederate armies, circumventing the Union naval blockade that was strangling the Confederate war effort. The Mexican victory at Puebla delayed those plans. The French had expected a quick march to Mexico City. Instead, they were forced to retreat to Orizaba and wait nearly a year for reinforcements before resuming their campaign. By the time French forces gained control of the Mexican border with Texas in the summer of 1863, the Union Army had already won the Battle of Vicksburg, cutting off Confederate access to supplies from the west. The window for French military aid to the Confederacy had closed. This connection was not lost on the Mexican-American community in California at the time. California Latinos were strong Union supporters. When news of the Puebla victory reached San Francisco in the spring of 1862, Mexican communities erupted in celebration. They formed organizations called Juntas Patrioticas, patriotic assemblies, that met monthly and raised money to send to President Juarez. Eventually a hundred and twenty nine of these organizations existed, mostly in California. For these communities, the victory at Puebla was a shared triumph: Mexico and the Union were both fighting against imperialism and the forces aligned with the Confederacy. The first Cinco de Mayo celebration in the United States took place in Columbia, California, on May 22, 1862, just seventeen days after the battle itself. For about a century after those early celebrations, Cinco de Mayo was a modest community observance, maintained primarily by Mexican-American families in the Southwest. It was not widely known outside those communities. That changed in the 1960s. Chicano civil rights activists on college campuses across the Southwest reclaimed the holiday as a symbol of resistance and cultural pride. The Battle of Puebla, in which indigenous and mestizo soldiers defeated European invaders, resonated with a movement fighting discrimination and demanding recognition within the United States. Cinco de Mayo became, for Chicano activists, a declaration of identity: we are here, we have a history of resistance, and we are proud of where we come from. Then, in the 1980s, something else happened. Beer companies noticed. Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors created Hispanic marketing departments and began sponsoring Cinco de Mayo events across the country. By 2003, American beer companies were spending over five million dollars annually on Cinco de Mayo promotions. The holiday expanded far beyond its Mexican-American base and became a mainstream American celebration. Today, Cinco de Mayo generates beer sales on par with the Super Bowl. It is one of the highest-grossing drinking holidays in the United States, and the vast majority of people participating in it could not tell you what the Battle of Puebla was. The evolution mirrors what happened with St. Patrick's Day, which began as an Irish religious observance and became an American drinking holiday through a similar combination of diaspora pride and corporate marketing. In both cases, a culturally specific celebration was adopted, broadened, and commercialized until its origins became almost invisible underneath the party. In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is not a federal holiday. It is celebrated primarily in the state of Puebla, with military parades and reenactments of the battle. Across most of the country, it's a relatively minor date, overshadowed entirely by September sixteenth, Mexico's actual Independence Day, which marks the 1810 revolt against Spanish colonial rule. Surveys have found that roughly forty percent of Americans believe Cinco de Mayo IS Mexican Independence Day. In Mexico, nobody makes that mistake. The irony is that the holiday's original meaning, resistance against a foreign power trying to impose its will on a weaker country, is more relevant than ever. The Chicano activists who revived it in the 1960s understood that. The beer companies that commercialized it in the 1980s didn't need to. The holiday survived the transition from political symbol to party because it was fun enough to sell and vague enough to mean whatever the person celebrating wanted it to mean. That's how most American holidays work. The question is whether knowing the real story changes anything about how you celebrate. It probably should, even if it doesn't have to. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, in which a vastly outnumbered Mexican army defeated French forces that Napoleon III had sent to conquer the country. It is not Mexican Independence Day. That's September sixteenth. The battle may have helped the Union win the Civil War by delaying French plans to supply the Confederacy through Mexico. The first American celebration happened in California in 1862, organized by Mexican communities who were raising money for Juarez and supporting the Union cause. Chicano activists revived the holiday in the 1960s as a symbol of cultural pride and resistance. Beer companies turned it into a mainstream American event in the 1980s. Today it generates more beer sales than almost any other day on the calendar, and forty percent of Americans think it's something it isn't. The real story is better than the party. It usually is. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.