Resistance, Remembrance, and Comunidad: Cinco de Mayo, Mount Pleasant, and the Rebuilding That Erases
Cinco de Mayo is often misunderstood in the United States. It is reduced to a marketing holiday, a day of beer specials, paper flags, mariachi clichés, and the shallow consumption of Mexican culture without the burden of remembering Mexican history. But the heart of Cinco de Mayo is not consumption. It is resistance.
The day remembers the Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862, when Mexican forces defeated the French army, then one of the most powerful military forces in the world. It was not Mexican Independence Day. It was not the founding of Mexico. It was a day when a people under pressure from empire stood their ground. It was a day when the powerful were resisted by those who were supposed to lose. It was, at its deepest level, a day about memory, dignity, land, sovereignty, and the refusal to be swallowed by imperial appetite. (MySA)
That is why, for me, Cinco de Mayo cannot be separated from another May 5: May 5, 1991, in Washington, D.C.
I was there.
Read the rest of the essay at PeaceGrooves.com.
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