Cinco de Mayo
A Recent Culture In our culture
By Marty Martindale
 It’s a victory celebration each Cinco de Mayo, fifth of May
in more places each year. Mexican in origin, the holiday is celebrated on a
larger scale in the United States. Culturally, “It’s sort of like St. Patrick’s
Day,” says Pete Hamill, a Brooklyn-born author who lives in Mexico and New York.
“Food is the way Americans start to experience other cultures,” says Hamill. “It
started with Italian; then Americans discovered some Jewish and German foods.
Now it’s Mexican.”
“Mexico’s presence has been growing in California, Texas
and New York for years, but this growth is true now in places like Minnesota,
Michigan and Maine, where no one ever imagined this growth, ” says Andrew Erlich,
head of the market research firm, Erlich Transcultural Consultant. “We’re
talking about something deeper, from lifestyle to food to dance and music.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 59% of the 30 million
Hispanics living in the U.S. are of Mexican origin. By the year 2010, there will
be an estimated 41.5 million Hispancs in the U.S., 25.6 million of them Mexican.
Migrant Mexican families follow the harvests, and lately tending to settle down
for their childrens’ education and seeking other types of employment. To learn
where crops grow in the U.S., visit Purdue University’s CropMap. It breaks out
the numbers of farms, acres planted and annual yields for each county:
http://newcrop.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/cropmap/default.html.
A popular misunderstanding is that Cinco de Mayo
commemorates Mexican independence day. However, this holiday honors a lesser
battle, but nonetheless an important moral victory day, when the Mexican army
miraculously defeated Napoleon III’s troops in the Battle of Puebla, over 135
years ago.
The Mexican army could to no wrong on this day in 1862.
During France’s occupation of Mexico, their soldiers set out from Vera Cruz to
storm Mexico City. When they arrived at Puebla, 100 miles east of the city,
humiliation fell upon them. Out-numbered two to one, the tattered, ill-clad,
ill-trained, ill-fortuned Mexican army incredibly toppled the famed and
highly-reputed French army valiantly led by the gallant and noble Napoleon III.
His army had not been defeated in 50 years! So, on Cinco de Mayo each year
Mexicans celebrate the day they could so no wrong.
How To Celebrate
 Beyond the battle enactments, the cultural excitement
expresses itself in: Folklorico presentations, joyful mariachi music, loaded
piñatas, suspenseful bull fights, scrappy cock fights, games, singing, street
dancing, costumes, carnival rides, food stands and here and there strains of the
Mexican Hat Dance. Mexican fun times charm North American people, let us examine
the ways:
Eats
More of a North American twist is gulping down marguirita
cocktails with corn chips laden with luscious guacamole and snappy salsas. This
drink helped establish the Mexican tourist industry once they extracted
aguamiel from the agave cactus and made it into tequila. It, mixed with lime
juice and orange liqueur, has knocked the socks off of many touristos.
The Ballet Folklorico
This is usually a performance by dancers plus music and
scenery suggestive of old Mexico. Participants act out in dance the traditions,
legends and customs their native culture with loud enthusiasm.
Mariachi Music
The lilt to mariachi music is infectious. When the
Spaniards arrived in Mexico in the early 1500s, they discovered the the Aztecs
and Indian were playing it for their own enjoyment. The term refers to one or a
group of musicians, usually seven to nine of them.
Each band is made up of violins, trumpets, guitars and two
distinctive stringed instruments, the vihuela and the guitarron. The latter
makes a “plinking” sound when two of its strings are plucked at one time.
Mariachi musicians are costumed like troubadours in large sombreros, short
jacket and snug trousers with shiny buttons. During the music, squeals peal out
called “gritos” at appropriate times. No mariachi music is complete without
these.
Piñatas
Rather like a Mexican Christmas stocking, the piñata is a
16th century Italian renaissance custom handed down to the Mexican culture. A
typical piñata is made of paper mache or cardboard trimmed with bright tissue
papers and sometimes made to look like an animal or other carnival figure. Each
is filled with trinkets and candy, hung from a line for blindfolded children to
poke and batter with a stick until the piñata falls from the line spewing its
treasures on the ground. Then the children scramble for their booty.
Finale
Like the theatrics on North America’s Fourth of July, the
typical Cinco de Mayo finale is fuegos artificiales or fireworks whose loose
translation is “fire, artificial!”
Ole!
Marty Martindale can be reached at
Comments@www.FoodSiteoftheDay.com.
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