Cinco de Mayo

Around noon on 5 May 1862, three columns of French infantry began climbing the muddy slope toward two hilltop forts, Loreto and Guadalupe, that guarded the northern approach to the city of Puebla de los Ángeles. They belonged to one of the most admired armies on the planet, had not lost a major European battle in decades, and carried rifles that easily outranged the muskets waiting above them. By evening they were retreating toward Orizaba, having tried the hill three times and failed three times. The man who held it, General Ignacio Zaragoza, sent a dispatch to Mexico City that schoolchildren still memorise: “Las armas nacionales se han cubierto de gloria” — the national arms have covered themselves in glory. That single afternoon, fought between roughly four thousand Mexicans and six thousand Frenchmen, is what 5 May commemorates.

The Debt That Started a War

The battle did not begin over land or ideology. It began over money. After a brutal civil conflict known as the War of Reform, the treasury of President Benito Juárez was empty, and in July 1861 his government suspended payments on Mexico’s foreign debt for two years. Three creditor nations took offence. Britain, Spain and France signed the Convention of London in October 1861 — sometimes called the Tripartite agreement — and dispatched a combined naval force to occupy the customs house at Veracruz and squeeze repayment out of the port’s revenue.

What looked like a joint debt-collection mission quickly fractured. Britain and Spain wanted their money and nothing more; once it became clear that France had broader designs, both negotiated terms with Juárez and withdrew their forces in April 1862. France stayed. Emperor Napoleon III had spotted an opening that had nothing to do with overdue interest: a chance to plant a French-backed monarchy in the Americas while the United States, then tearing itself apart in its own civil war, was in no position to invoke the Monroe Doctrine and object. A Mexican empire under French influence would extend Paris’s reach across Latin America and check the rising power to the north. The debt was the pretext. Empire was the project.

The Battle of Puebla

General Charles Ferdinand Latrille, Comte de Lorencez, commanded the French expeditionary column that marched inland toward the capital. He was confident to the point of carelessness, reportedly assuring his superiors that the superiority of French arms and discipline made his men masters of Mexico already. Standing in his way at Puebla was Zaragoza, a Texas-born general (his birthplace, Goliad, lay in what was then Mexican territory) who fortified the two hills of Loreto and Guadalupe and waited.

The figures vary between sources, but the shape of the mismatch is consistent: Lorencez fielded somewhere around 5,700 to 6,500 troops against a Mexican force usually counted between two thousand and four thousand, poorly supplied and armed with older weapons. Rather than manoeuvre, Lorencez chose to batter straight at the fortified high ground. His artillery opened the morning, and his infantry made three frontal assaults up ground softened by rain. Each time the Mexican defenders — with Porfirio Díaz, a young officer who would later dominate Mexican politics for three decades, holding part of the line — drove them back. By the day’s end the French had lost in the region of 460 to 480 men killed and wounded; the Mexican side counted roughly 350 casualties. Lorencez pulled back, and was relieved of his command.

It is worth being precise about what the victory did and did not achieve, because the legend tends to outrun the history. Puebla did not end the war. It bought a year. Napoleon III, stung, sent reinforcements until the French army numbered some thirty thousand. They returned to Puebla in 1863, took the city after a long siege, marched into Mexico City, and installed Archduke Maximilian of Austria as Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in 1864. Juárez’s government fled north but never surrendered. Zaragoza himself did not live to see any of it: he died of typhoid fever in September 1862, only four months after his finest hour.

The empire he had delayed proved short-lived. Once the American Civil War ended in 1865, Washington began pressing France to leave and quietly backing Juárez’s forces. Caught between Mexican guerrilla resistance and a hardening United States, Napoleon III withdrew his troops in 1866 and 1867, abandoning the emperor he had crowned. Maximilian was captured and executed by firing squad at Querétaro in June 1867. The republic was restored. Measured across those five years, Puebla was a single won battle in a war Mexico nearly lost and then, against the odds, won.

Not Mexican Independence Day

The most stubborn misunderstanding about 5 May is also the easiest to correct: it is not Mexican Independence Day. That distinction belongs to 16 September, which marks the Grito de Dolores — the call to revolt issued by the priest Miguel Hidalgo in the town of Dolores in 1810, launching the eleven-year struggle against Spanish rule. Cinco de Mayo commemorates a single defensive battle against France half a century later. The two dates honour entirely different enemies, different centuries and different stakes, and conflating them flattens both. Knowing the difference is the first courtesy any 5 May celebration owes the event it claims to mark.

A Quiet Day in Mexico, a Loud One Abroad

Within Mexico, the date is observed with real seriousness in exactly one place: the state of Puebla, where it is known as El Día de la Batalla de Puebla and marked with parades, historical re-enactments and military ceremonies. Across the rest of the country, 5 May is an ordinary working day. It is not a federal holiday; banks, offices and shops stay open, though public schools close. For most of the population the morning passes without mariachi or marigolds.

The festival familiar to the wider world is, paradoxically, an American invention. Mexican communities in California began commemorating the Puebla victory in 1862 itself, treating the news from home as a rallying point. Over the following century the observance spread among Mexican-American communities, and during the Chicano civil-rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s it took on fresh weight as an emblem of pride, resistance and cultural identity — a homegrown victory of the underdog that activists could claim as their own. The way an inherited day can carry shifting meaning across generations is something other heritage observances grapple with too; the case made each February for the International Mother Language Day is, at root, the same argument about who decides what a community remembers and in whose words.

How Beer Bought the Holiday

The leap from community commemoration to nationwide spectacle happened in a single, well-documented decade. The day had drifted eastward out of California through the 1950s and 1960s without ever catching fire. Then, in the 1980s, American beer importers and marketers recognised a date with no fixed religious or political baggage, an easy theme and a built-in excuse to drink, and they spent heavily to make it their own. The campaigns worked spectacularly. By 2013, more than 600 million dollars of beer was sold in the United States for Cinco de Mayo — outselling both the Super Bowl and St Patrick’s Day — and Americans now buy on the order of 87 million pounds of avocados for the occasion, more than for any other single day of the year.

There is an irony worth sitting with. A battle fought to repel a foreign power’s commercial and imperial designs on Mexico became, north of the border, a commercial product in its own right — its history sanded down until, for a great many revellers, “Cinco de Mayo” means little more than discounted margaritas. The festival as celebrated today preserves genuine and joyful elements of Mexican culture: mariachi and brass bands, folklórico dancing in regional costume, papel picado bunting in cut tissue paper, mole and tamales and the green, white and red of the flag. But the line between honouring a heritage and merchandising it runs straight through 5 May, and it is worth seeing clearly. The same tension haunts gentler observances built around shared culture, from the conversations marked on World Arabic Coffee Day to the stories carried on UNESCO World Radio Day: the tradition is real, and so is the temptation to sell it back.

Fun Facts

• The general who won the battle, Ignacio Zaragoza, was born in what is now Goliad, Texas — at the time still part of Mexico — making the hero of Cinco de Mayo, in a sense, an American.
• Puebla, the city he defended, has since been officially renamed Heroica Puebla de Zaragoza in his honour.
• Porfirio Díaz, a junior commander at Puebla, went on to rule Mexico for roughly three decades — and was eventually toppled by the very revolution his long reign provoked.
• More beer is sold in the United States for Cinco de Mayo than for the Super Bowl, and Americans buy around 87 million pounds of avocados for the day — the single biggest guacamole occasion of the year.
• In Mexico itself, 5 May is not a federal holiday; for most of the country it is a normal workday, and the largest celebrations of the date happen abroad rather than at home.
• The French commander, Lorencez, was so confident of victory that he reported home as much before the battle — and was dismissed from his command after losing it.

A Closing Reflection

Few days carry such a gap between what they record and what they have become. A defensive stand by an outnumbered army, against a foreign empire that wanted the country itself, has been reshaped a century and a half later into a festival of imported beer in the very nation whose neighbour France was trying to outflank. Neither version cancels the other. The history is real: Zaragoza’s three repelled assaults bought Mexico a year and a legend, even as the war ground on toward Maximilian’s firing squad. The festival is real too, an authentic expression of Mexican-American identity that activists turned into a banner before marketers turned it into a margarita. What the date rewards is attention — the small effort of knowing that the man on the hill was not fighting for independence, that the battle was won and the war nearly lost, and that the surest way to honour an underdog’s afternoon is to remember why he was outnumbered in the first place.