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Cinco De Mayo is now celebrated more widely in American than in Mexico. A 2020 survey from YouGov found only 40% of Americans knew May 5 wasn't commemorating the country's independence.
May 5, 2020 · Today, Cinco de Mayo is still celebrated in the town and its surrounding state (also called Puebla), where the holiday is known as Battle of Puebla Day. How Cinco de Mayo became popular in the U.S.
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- Dillon Thompson
May 5, 2020 · Many Americans assume Cinco de Mayo is Mexico’s Independence Day. It’s not. That holiday falls on September 16 and commemorates the Grito de Dolores, a priest’s ringing of a church bell in ...
May 1, 2024 · Today, Cinco de Mayo is celebrated by the Mexican state of Puebla, as well as Mexican-American immigrants in parts of the United States. Similar to St. Patrick’s Day for Irish Americans, Cinco de Mayo is a day of pride to honor Mexican heritage and culture.
- Tim Goodwin
- Overview
- The origins of Cinco de Mayo: The Battle of Puebla
- How Cinco de Mayo became a U.S. holiday
- How Cinco de Mayo is celebrated today
The May 5 holiday honors Mexico’s victory in an 1862 battle—so how did it come to rival St. Patrick’s Day as a day of revelry in the United States?
Mexico City residents take part in a traditional reenactment of the Battle of Puebla—a victory for Mexican forces that took place on the May 5, 1862, or Cinco de Mayo. Although the holiday is celebrated in parts of Mexico, it has become larger than life in the United States.
Every year on May 5, fiesta lovers across the United States gather to celebrate the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo—literally "May 5" in Spanish. And some U.S. partygoers may be surprised to learn that Cinco de Mayo history is short on beer, long on bloodshed.
Cinco de Mayo is often mistaken for Mexican Independence Day, which is actually September 16. On that date in 1810, Mexico declared its independence from Spanish rule.
Cinco de Mayo traces its origins to the Mexican army’s unlikely defeat of far better equipped French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.
Emperor Napoleon III had sent French troops to Mexico to secure dominance over the former Spanish colony and install one of his relatives, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, as its ruler. Led by General Ignacio Zaragoza, a Mexican militia raced to fortify the city of Puebla against the advancing French troops.
(Here’s how the Battle of Puebla unfolded.)
Zaragoza won the battle, but the Mexicans ultimately lost the war. Maximilian became Mexico's emperor for three years before the country reclaimed its independence.
Left: Mexican President Benito Juarez and his troops march into Mexico City after the 1867 defeat of French Emperor Maximilian, whom Napoleon III had sent to conquer and rule over Mexico.
Photograph by Hulton-Deutsch Collection, CORBIS/Getty Images
Cinco de Mayo is celebrated only sporadically in Mexico, mainly in the southern town of Puebla and a few larger cities.
However, Cinco de Mayo rapidly gained popularity in the U.S., where changing demographics have helped to turn the holiday into a cultural event. Latinos are the largest minority in the U.S. today with 62.1 million people, representing 18.9 percent of the population, according to 2020 Census data.
(Hispanic? Latino? Here's where the terms come from.)
Cinco de Mayo gained its first popularity in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, partly because of an outpouring of brotherly love, José Alamillo, who was then a professor of ethnic studies at Washington State University, told National Geographic in 2006.
"The reason it became more popular was in part because of the Good Neighbor policy," he said, referring to a U.S. government effort at the time to reach out to neighboring countries.
"Cinco de Mayo's purpose was to function as a bridge between these two cultures," Alamillo said.
Then came the 1980s, and the commercialization of Cinco de Mayo.
This, Alamillo said, is when the meaning of Cinco de Mayo changed from community self-determination to a drinking holiday for many people.
He says U.S. corporations, particularly those selling alcohol, were eager to tap into the expanding Hispanic population in the U.S.
"It's not just the large number of the Hispanics but also that it's a very young population that is particularly receptive to advertisers," Alamillo said. “Cinco de Mayo became a vehicle to tap into that market.”
Today, most Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo by indulging in a glut of tacos, tequila, and beer. In fact, in recent years Cinco de Mayo beer sales have outpaced both St. Patrick’s Day and the Super Bowl.
But many communities still do honor the holiday with festivals, parades, and other events honoring the richness of Mexican-American culture and heritage.
- Stefan Lovgren
In the Cayman Islands, in the Caribbean, there is an annual Cinco de Mayo air guitar competition, [57] and at Montego Bay, Jamaica, there is a Cinco de Mayo celebration. [58] The city of Brisbane , Queensland , Australia, holds an annual Mexican Festival [ 59 ] to honor the day, and celebrations are held in London [ 60 ] and New Zealand. [ 61 ]
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May 4, 2022 · Today, Cinco de Mayo is actually more widely celebrated north of the border than it is in the south, with parades, festivals and Cinco de Mayo-themed parties held throughout the U.S. The world's ...
