The Real Meaning of Cinco de Mayo Celebration

Well, it’s that time of year again. I’ve got them over-hyped, beer-guzzling, hot-and-dusty Cinco de Mayo Blues.

Some people get depressed at Christmas. I get in a funk over a Mexican holiday I never even heard of until I was in college.

I ask you: How can a holiday have magic or meaning without childhood memories? I remember Thanksgiving feasts, egg hunts on Easter Sunday, paper shamrocks on St. Patrick’s Day and family barbecues on the Fourth of July.

I don’t recall anybody getting festive every 5th of May over Mexico’s defeat of the French at Puebla. My parents were as proud and patriotic as Mexican immigrants get, but they simply overlooked the annual opportunity to put one of those big, blowup Budweiser bottles in our frontyard.

Truth is, nobody really celebrated Cinco de Mayo in the United States while I was growing up. (Come to find out, people in Mexico don’t make too big a fuss over it either.) The festivities didn’t become a tradition here until the 1960s and 1970s, propelled by two unlikely allies, Chicano activists and corporate product peddlers.

The Chicanos were pushing something too: ethnic identity.

It’s easy to see why the historic events around the Battle of Puebla in 1862 would hold symbolic appeal for movement leaders in the Southwest a century later. The barrio battle cry was self-determination and resistance to cultural dominance. Those were the very principles that fired up the outnumbered Mexican fighters-- many of them indigenous peasants armed with machetes--who turned back the haughty, imperialistic French troops for all their real and imagined superiority.

General Comte de Lorencez, French commander of the invasion forces, made the following boast before being repelled on a muddy battleground by defenders of what he considered a mongrel nation:

“We are so superior to the Mexicans in race, in organization, in discipline, in morality, and in refinement of sensibilities, that as of this moment, at the head of our 6,000 valiant soldiers, I am already the master of Mexico.”

Oops. You spoke too soon, mon general.

Lorencez learned a tactical lesson Pete Wilson should have studied before getting so pushy about immigrants: Don’t ever provoke the underdog. (Notice how the French don’t try to take over Mexico anymore and the Republicans are being super nice to Latinos this election year.)

As with so many other holidays, the true meaning of Mexico’s victory has been overshadowed by shameless commercialism. And I must admit, I once fomented the mania to sell, sell, sell on Cinco de Mayo.

In the late 1970s, I worked as a buyer for an enormous music wholesaler based in North Hollywood. I was in charge of stocking and promoting Latin product in the music departments of national retail chains like Sears and Montgomery Ward.

Every year, we pushed a Cinco de Mayo promotion with special pricing, saturation advertising and colorful in-store displays. The Latin labels loved us because we bought so much of their music at one shot. It was one of the few times their product was moved from the back rows and given a prime spot to catch the customer’s eye.

Our non-Latino sales staff, however, was sick of handling merchandise still considered schlock. The grumbling crew sarcastically renamed the holiday to sound like a foul-smelling sandwich spread: Stinko de Mayo.

Soon, artists like Vicente Fernandez and Julio Iglesias started breaking into the list of Top 10 sellers. And suddenly, the Cinco de Mayo sale started smelling a lot sweeter to the marketing men.

In business, as on the battlefield, you’ve got to fight for your position.

All of this came to mind last week after a call from Ana Kadin, a mother who had volunteered to help celebrate Cinco de Mayo in her son’s third-grade class. She wanted my help because, honestly, she didn’t know much about the holiday.

Ana hails from El Salvador, not Mexico. Latinos make up a tiny minority at her son’s school in Holmby Hills, an affluent island within L.A. Unified. Most are children of live-in groundskeepers, maids and nannies.

All the more reason they need their own day to celebrate, says Ana, who’s married to an American lawyer. They need heroes to look up to and victories to feel proud of. That’s why she’s going out of her way to shop for pinatas and horchata and learn more about a neighboring nation’s history.

Ana’s got the true spirit of Cinco de Mayo. It’s not about beer and street festivals. It’s about people learning to respect each other.

Now let’s party.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.