While the celebration of Cinco De Mayo --the Fifth of May is fast approaching, Latino organizations and clubs around San Diego are preparing to commemorate the event. But how many people actually know what that event is?
A common misperception is that Cinco De Mayo celebrates Mexican Independence Day. In fact, Mexican independence is celebrated (in Mexico) on Sept. 16.
Cinco De Mayo is the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla in 1862, when 2,000 Mexican soldiers and townspeople managed to hold off more than 6,000 French troops. The interesting thing is, neither Mexico nor the United States celebrate both holidays.
Isidro Ortiz, head of the Mexican American Studies department at San Diego State University, said, "In practice now, it seems that Cinco de Mayo is more celebrated on this side of the border than on the other side."
Meanwhile, in the United States, it's Sept. 16 that often goes by unnoticed.
"Basically, in Mexico, they don't celebrate the Fourth of July (American Independence Day), so they don't celebrate Sept. 16 in the United States," said Marcela Ayala, chairwoman of SDSU's chapter of MEChA, the main Latino organization in California. "But because there's such a large population of Latinos in California, they celebrate Cinco De Mayo."
Ortiz said that among Chicanos, particularly those who grew up during the social activism of the 1960s, Cinco de Mayo represents a people's struggle against oppression.
"We had a case where we had an invading French army that was being resisted by Mexican forces," Ortiz said. "So for Chicanos today, who historically have engaged in resistance against oppression, it represents one victory against oppression."
But, according to Guillermo Mayer, president elect of the Associated Students of SDSU, there might be an ulterior motive behind some of the celebrations. Corporate America, he said, has seized the holiday as an opportunity to commercialize it, just as it has done with other holidays.
"The same thing is happening to Cinco de Mayo in the sense that's it's now more of a party thing," Mayer said. "Instead of your regular Budweiser models, now they're Latina Budweiser models."
Whatever the reason, the Battle of Puebla is celebrated as a key victory in Mexico's struggle for self-determination. Often unnoticed, however, are the struggles that led up to that fateful May day and the even deeper battles Mexico faced after it.
The battle before the battle
The Mexico that fought the Battle of Puebla had been shaped directly by the War of the Reform that tore the country apart from 1858 to 1861. By the time new President Benito Juarez and his liberal forces won the conflict, the country was in shambles, politically, economically and most of all, socially.
As Michael Meyer and William L. Sherman wrote in their book "The Course of Mexican History":
The desolation left in the wake of the civil conflict showed on the landscape dotted with burned haciendas and mills, potted roads, unrepaired bridges, neglected fields and sacked villages. But more important, it was epitomized in the minds and bodies of tens of thousands of exhausted, crippled, and aggrieved Mexicans.
The country needed a stable transition, and though Juarez easily won, his government was divided.
Juarez encouraged open debate in his administration, but such a policy almost ended his presidency: a congressional vote to demand his resignation lost by one vote.
The national deficit had reached $400,000 by September 1861, and European creditors were barking at Juarez's heels. On Oct. 31, Spain, England and France agreed to the Convention of London, whereby they would jointly occupy Mexico's coasts until it paid off its debts.
By February 1862, even after Britain and Spain left Mexico, the French remained. Emperor Napoleon III had sought to bring his "Second French Empire" to the New World, and Mexico gave him a golden opportunity.
General Charles LaTrille had been informed by his country's minister in Mexico City that the French would be welcomed in the rural city of Puebla.
"But Puebla, although conservative and pro-clerical," Meyer and Sherman wrote, "was not to be such an easy price."
Puebla
On May 5, Latrille faced General Ignacio Zaragoza, who had fought well in the War of the Reform. Though numerically superior, the invaders attacked recklessly, using up half their ammunition in the conflict's first two hours.
The deciding factor in the battle was led by Brigadier General Porfirio Diaz and the Mexican army's Second Brigade. Late that afternoon, Diaz held off an attack on Zaragoza's right flank. The French retreated to the city of Orizaba shortly thereafter, and May 5 became a rallying point for Mexicans everywhere.
Ironically, Diaz himself would be the victim of a revolution in 1910. This came after he seized control of the country in 1876 and set out on a 34-year course to modernize Mexico.
But, on this day, the country had made a stand.
"All of us look at it as a day when all of us united and fought against the oppressors," Ayala said. "The ones who were coming in and trying to take over their pueblito. It's not about two-for-one drink specials. It's about trying to communicate our history."
What's forgotten, however, is that the French rose again within a year. They attacked Puebla again, this time taking the city after a two-month siege. The attack reduced it to rubble and forced the inhabitants to eat their own pets.
"The French did succeed in invading Mexico," Ortiz said. "But at least there was that resistance."
Winning the war
Juarez fled for San Luis Potosi as French troops occupied Mexico City in 1863. Napoleon III installed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximillian of Hapsburg as emperor of Mexico.
Maximillian declared a free press and associated with Mexican natives occassionally. He quickly became caught between his conservative backers and a liberal country waiting for the chance to overthrow him.
During his exile, Juarez asked for American support and got it. The United States had been too entrenched in its own conflicts to intervene when the French had invaded Mexico. But with the Civil War's end in 1865, the United States was ready to look at France's violation of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
Through Matias Romero, his chief ambassador to Washington, Juarez was able to secure both political and military aid from the United States.
The Union's victory in the Civil War had left behind a surplus of ammunition to supply the Mexicans with (an estimated 30,000 muskets were given to Mexican troops from the Baton Rouge arsenal alone), and American Secretary of State James Seward began giving Napoleon III some diplomatic pressure.
The emperor also had to deal with Germany's emergence as a threat in the European political scene. In November of 1866, Napoleon III began pulling troops out of Mexico.
As Juarez's forces garnered victory after victory, Maximillian thought about leaving the throne. Instead, he gathered some loyal troops and made his final stand in Queretaro, where the war's final battle began on Feb. 19, 1867.
In a final ironic twist, it was the French who were severely outnumbered. The battle lasted over 100 days, as the city's water and food supplies dwindled. Maximillian chose to surrender on May 15.
Maximillian was tried by court-martial, and the six-man jury was split. Though all found him guilty, they were torn between exiling the former emperor or imposing the death penalty.
Casting the deciding vote was Lt. Col. Platon Sanchez, the court president. Aware that Juarez wanted to convey Mexico's intolerance toward foreign invaders, Sanchez voted for the death penalty.
On June 19, Maximillian and several Mexican loyalists tried with him were shot. Mexico controlled her destiny again.
"As tragic and senseless as the event might have appeared from the calm of abroad," Meyer and Sherman wrote, "50,000 Mexicans had just as surely lost their lives fighting the French."
The battle for the future
Any culture's past directly influences its future. Cinco de Mayo, Mayer said, gives the Latinos of today an opportunity to learn from their past.
"It's an event where you can continue to see the same dances, sing the songs and do everything so that tradition never dies," he said.
In California, that tradition has been jeopardized recently by political and social controversies like Proposition 187, which denied health care and education to children of illegal immigrants.
The taped beating of immigrants by Riverside County Sheriff's deputies this past April only added fuel to the fire, and Ayala said it reminded her that negative impressions of Latinos still linger.
"It's given a lot of people permission to say, 'I don't like you because you're brown,'" she said. "How can we all join hands and work together if we have this kind of thing going on?"
Even worse, Mayer said, is what he described as a neglect of the Latino history in the state.
"The biggest misconception is that we don't have a history in California," Mayer said. "We all have a history of being here; that's why there's a San Diego. A lot of that has to do with the Spanish colonizing, but that influence is here, and the biggest misconception is that we are foreigners."
Fighting misperceptions takes education, and so an effort has begun to increase education on Latino history in California. The San Diego Unified School District has started trying to find ways to integrate Latino education into eighth and 11th-grade literature and history courses.
"At other levels, you have the attempt to expand and elaborate on departments and programs of Chicano Studies," Ortiz said. "So that at the university level, you would have students being able to take advantage of the opportunity to study about the (Latino) experience."
Efforts like that are important in the San Diego community, so close to the Mexican border that a 30-minute drive can literally take you into another culture.
Ayala said such efforts are also the beginning of a solution to the tension that has divided the community, often among bitter racial lines.
"If we look beyond the negative, we can see the little steps that are taken forward," Ayala said. "They are little steps, but those are steps we're taking. At least we're not at a standstill."
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