by Carlos B. Gil
Hispanic Link News Service
The celebrated events of Cinco de Mayo reflect a global struggle that was beginning to unfold across the cultural West. They took place near the Mexican colonial city of Puebla in 1862 at a time when a fight over the acceptance of new forms of government had already been initiated in Western Europe and in the Americas.
The elites of the old world and the new locked in fierce debate. Liberals wanted a radically new republican system of government replete with presidents, congresses and other trappings of democracy. Conservatives wished to maintain the time-sanctioned monarchies, their kings, queens, viceroys, counts, dukes and other forms of privileged aristocracy.
The struggle was particularly heated in Mexico, where Spanish imperial government had been supreme for nearly 300 years, between 1521 and 1821. The Spanish viceroy was expelled from Mexico in 1821, thus ending Mexican colonial ties with Spain.
Many attempts were made to get republican democracy to work in Mexico in the meantime. Still, 40 years after independence, influential men who strongly believed that a king or an emperor was best for Mexico continued to voice their opinions and pursue that goal. Their belief that monarchies were best for Mexico caused “rivers of blood to flow,” using the words of a famous Mexican historian.
In 1862, the still vigorous French empire, under the direction of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, sought once more to extend its domination into the Western Hemisphere, thereby counteracting the ever-growing republic of the United States, now distracted by civil war. The silver mines in Sonora appraised by French agents some years earlier probably constituted an additional reason for expansion.
Given the background, agents of Louis Napoleon met with Mexican conservative leaders to plan for a French-protected emperor to rule from Mexico City.
These events coincided with certain decisions by Benito Juárez. Mexico’s president and embattled republican leader of the time, he temporarily suspended the payment of debts owed by the government to foreign countries, among them France.
This was made necessary by the ferocious strife the country was undergoing due to infighting between conservatives and liberals. As a result, 2,500 French troops were dispatched to Mexico, ostensibly to force payment of the arrears, but also to implant a French colony on Mexican soil.
The port city of Veracruz was occupied by the brightly clad French troops in January 1862. By late April, they marched westward and upward to the capital city 7,000 feet above sea level on the central Mexican plateau.
The Napoleonic dream of a trans-oceanic empire was at hand: It was nothing less than grandiose imperialism requiring the occupation of Mexico City. Puebla, however, had to be overcome first.
There, the would-be heroes of the holiday we now call Cinco de Mayo awaited: Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza was assisted by several eager lieutenants, including 32-year-old Porfirio Díaz. They were surrounded by excited, armed Mexican patriot-civilians and enlisted troops.
The French expected garlands of welcome. Instead, they received hot gunshot.
The performance of the Mexicans on the fifth of May was singularly brilliant, worth the pride it has elicited ever since. Fighting for the control of the military forts of Loreto and Guadalupe on the outskirts of the city and armed with aging British rifles first employed in the Napoleonic Wars, the descendants of Aztecs and Spaniards defeated the French zuoaves led by Generals Count de Lorencez and Bernard Mallas L’Herillier.
The ancestors of modern-day Mexican Americans won the Battle of Puebla, but for five years thereafter lost ground in an imperialist war. Napoleon soon sent more troops, forcing Juarez-led republicans to take cover in the mountains while Mexico City became the seat of the ill-fated French empire, with blond, bearded Archduke Maximilian at its head.
The archduke’s fate was sealed however. Maximilian’s ultimate fate can be said to symbolize the end of European tutelage over Mexican affairs. As a member of one of Europe’s oldest royal families (the House of Hapsburg), Maximilian settled accounts with Indian Juárez in 1867 by paying with his own life for the tragic French intervention.
In that year, Napoleon’s troops were withdrawn and Maximilian was captured, tried, and shot by a Mexican republican firing squad. His bullet-riddled body, shipped back to Europe, underlined Juárez’s firm resolution: foreigners should never be allowed to rule over the destiny of Mexicans again under any circumstances. Greater America demonstrated once again its need to be independent of Europe.
Chicanos or Mexican Americans, as cultural and historical inheritors of the Mexicans, can in this way easily identify with the stirring significance of the Battle of Puebla fought on the Cinco de Mayo. Parenthetically, the Cinco de Mayo does not represent Mexico’s holiday commemorating independence. This is celebrated on Sept. 16.
It is important to note that ceremonial recognition of the victory of the Cinco de Mayo goes far in re-affirming the goal for which Juárez struggled and sacrificed: Mexicans (and Chicanos by inheritance) must insist upon and maintain the right to self-fulfillment. We must jealously guard as strongly as we can our capacity to grow spiritually and intellectually no matter what the odds be. In other words, if Juárez, Zaragoza and other Mexicans fought for national and cultural independence in the 1860s, Mexican Americans must continue to struggle for their survival and complete self-fulfillment. This is the true meaning of Cinco de Mayo.
(Dr. Carlos B. Gil is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington, Seattle, author of We Became Mexican American: How Our Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream, 2012, and Publisher of DiversityCentral.com)© 2013
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