Skip to main content

Cinco de Mayo




You certainly won't hear this in a Trump administration -- Obama offering praise for Mexico on its national holiday.  The speech is from 2014, but he celebrates the day every year, and a big event is planned today as well.

Unfortunately, all Trump and many Republicans see is a wall between us and Mexico when it has been a very fluid border throughout the centuries.  One that has benefited us far more than it has Mexico.  It took decades to finally get the Colorado River flowing into Mexico again, after all the dams we had built upriver to supply US farmland and provide electricity.  This was a signature moment for the Obama administration when it signed the US-Mexico Water Pact, the kind of relationship we should have with Mexico.

Instead, many of us see Mexico as an enemy, forever evoking the Alamo, which paved the way for one of the biggest land grabs in American history.  Not only did we take Texas, but all of the New Mexico territory and California, after the "Lone Star Republic" infamously declared independence from Mexico.  Abraham Lincoln and other Whigs were staunchly against the Mexican War, as they saw it as nothing more than imperial ambition.

We had a growing cotton plantation system that desperately needed more land, so expansion was inevitable.  Mexico had only recently gained independence from Spain and was struggling to build a nation state out of its far-flung territories.  It was poorly equipped to defend them, so President James K. Polk saw a golden opportunity to give his Southern brethren what they wanted.

Mexico was in danger of being overrun by France during the American Civil War, but the Mexican Army stood tall at the Battle of Puebla, beating back the unwanted invaders.  This is the moment it honors from its six-year war with France.  Given the highly festive ways in which Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo it is easy to confuse it with Independence Day, which is celebrated September 16.

It is nice that we share in this holiday with Mexico, making us all Latinos at least for one day.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...