This Saturday, the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, was filled to capacity. In the center of the ring, two boxers with Mexican roots—Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramírez, from Mazatlán, and David “El Monstruo” Benavidez, born in the United States but with a Mexican father—disputed the cruiserweight titles of two different organizations. The entire previous card consisted of Mexican against Mexican fights, as part of the traditional boxing weekend that is celebrated every year on Cinco de Mayo in the United States.
But it is not the only festive event that is organized in the United States for this historic date. Cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Austin or Denver hold parades, community festivals and a large number of cultural activities. Restaurants and bars serve tacos, tequila, margaritas and all kinds of Mexican dishes and tex-mexwhile mariachi music plays in the air. South of the border, however, May 5 passes as just another day on the calendar, without being considered an official day of restand functions rather as a notable anniversary that is instilled in basic education. How, then, was the symbolic weight of this date invested between one country and another?
What happened in the battle of Puebla
According to the research by David E. Hayes-Bautistaprofessor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) specializing in Latino studies, the Cinco de Mayo as a holiday He was not born in Mexico, but in the Mexican community of California, during the American Civil War.
In the mid-19th century, the United States had been divided between the Union – the Northern States, which defended the permanence of the country as a single nation and the limitation of slavery – and the Confederacy, made up of eleven Southern States whose economy and political power rested on the forced labor of millions of enslaved people. For Southern elites, slavery was not just an economic institution, but the lynchpin of a social and political project based on white supremacy, the plantation, and the right of slave states to secede rather than accept federal limits.
The Battle of Puebla was fought on May 5, 1862.when the Mexican army, under the command of General Ignacio Zaragoza, defeated the French forces that surpassed it in numbers and weapons power, during the Second French Intervention. Against all odds, Mexico won.
When native Mexicans in California learned of that victory, they not only celebrated it as a patriotic triumph, but as indirect support for the Union cause against the slaveholding Confederacy. For them, Mexico’s resistance against the Second French Empire was associated with the fight for freedom and democracy in the United States. These communities began to organize civic events, patriotic meetings and parades in which the flags of Mexico and the United States were raised, intertwining the fight for freedom on both sides of the border.
From the Chicano movement to the commercial party
Decades later, during the sixties and seventies, the date took on new meaning thanks to the Chicano Movement. Activists adopted the Battle of Puebla as a symbol of pride and cultural resistance, comparing the figure of the small Mexican army against a world power with their own fight for civil rights and social justice in the United States. In this way, Cinco de Mayo stopped being a simple military memory to become a tool of identity affirmation for the mexican american community.
Starting in the 1980s, the celebration expanded massively due to commercial and cultural factors. Food and beverage companies promoted the date as a consumption opportunity, while the US government began to promote it as part of the country’s celebration of diversity. Today, the holiday has evolved into a multicultural celebration of Mexican heritage that, in many cities in the United States, has even more relevance and visibility than in most of Mexico itself.
Currently, the Government of Donald Trump has reinforced a more restrictive immigration policywith measures that tighten legal access, expand deportations and keep the relationship with Mexico and Latin America tense. The prioritization of the security discourse has generated a climate of uncertainty among millions of people with ties on both sides of the Rio Grande. In this context, Cinco de Mayo remains a space of cultural pride for the Mexican-American community, but also as a symbolic counterpoint to policies that limit the visibility and recognition of that heritage in American public life.
