“CINCO DE MAYO”: WHAT IN REALITY HAPPENED AT PUEBLA, MEXICO ON MAY 5, 1862

By Rene Guerra

panchito42@eleutheros.us

  

With Cinco de Mayo –May 5th, that is– just around the corner, it is an opportune time to make some comments on some inaccuracies about the ethnic and historic values attributed to that festivity. It is opportune as well to comment on the interpretation that some groups in the United States give to Cinco de Mayo for the benefit of their own demagogic interests the ones, and for their traitorous interests the others..

  

Anyone who has lived in Mexico and learned about Mexican civic festivities of significance gets really mystified by the convoluted meaning that those groups have given to Cinco de Mayo here in the U.S.A. The inordinate hoopla surrounding the celebration on this side of the border perplexes Mexican nationals visiting the U.S., and non-Mexican Hispanics newly arriving in the U.S.A. don’t connect with the celebration at all.

ETHNICITY OF CINCO DE MAYO

Cinco de Mayo does not appeal to all Hispanics; it appeals only to those of Mexican ancestry, which includes Mexican nationals and Americans of Mexican ethnicity or Chicanos.

  

The term Hispanic is much broader in meaning; it encompasses peoples that speak Spanish (Castilian and derivatives) as their native language. This includes countries such as Spain, and all Spanish speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, in addition to people from Mexico, the term Hispanic encompasses people from, for instance, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Honduras, Chile and more than fifteen other Hispanic countries that have nothing to do with Cinco de Mayo. Cinco de Mayo is as alien to the majority of Hispanic ethnicities in the U.S.A. as Saint Patrick’s day is to almost all those of European ethnicity.

  

Put it plainly, to the majority of Hispanic ethnicities in the U.S.A., Cinco de Mayo is just a cheerful springtime occasion to party on Mexico’s delicious cuisine and beautiful customs: burritos, tacos, quesadillas, chalupas, enchiladas, cochinita pibil, etc. with a background of picturesque charro parades, colorful folkloric dances and mariachi band (from the French “bande de marriage“) music. And nothing more, at all!

Peoples in the U.S.A. of South American or Caribbean origin do not celebrate it at all.

As for those of Central American origin, only the ones with ties to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador join the party, but mostly because of culinary affinity, for, historically, there has been bad blood between Mexico and Central America. Thus, there is a wide and deep gap between enjoying the enchanting frolics of Cinco de Mayo and the overall-Hispanic ethnicity that some here in the U.S.A. want to deceptively attribute to the festivity.

  

It fits however to affirm that the 5th of May should mean a lot to all freedom and democracy loving ethnicities that constitute the United States.

On April 10, 1942, a day after General Edward P. King surrendered the American and Filipino troops in Bataan to the Japanese during World War II, the barbaric Japanese forced about 55,000 Filipino and 8,000 American captives to march toward Camp O’Donnell. That was the start of the horridly infamous Death of March of Bataan.

Although the Japanese kept marching, and murdering them along the march, American and Filipino prisoners to Camp O’Donnell from April through mid June, the core of the March survivors completed the torturous trek on April 24.  However, the most monstrous passages of that horrid torment did not end until the 5th of May of 1942, a day before the fall of Corregidor to the Japanese. That’s the real Cinco de Mayo to America!  That’s the 5th of May we all should reflectively and temperately commemorate in somber memory of those defenseless victims of Japanese bestial barbarity.  May 5th should be a day for all of us to take a glance at the future of America with deep circumspection and heed.

HISTORY OF CINCO DE MAYO  

The meaning that some people in the U.S.A. deceptively and demagogically give to Cinco de Mayo as a great Mexican historic event is based mostly on a fabrication.They claim that the date commemorates a great war victory in Puebla by Mexican ragged peasants over the modern French armies occupying Mexico in support of Emperor Maximilian, an archduke of the Habsburg-Lorraine Austrian house of nobility, and an importation by traitorous monarchist Mexicans facilitated by Napoleon III, Emperor of France. Maximilian was the youngest brother of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I.

 

  

The real truth is that there was no such thing as a great defeat of the French at Puebla by anybody, as Mexicans in Mexico very well know, but which most Chicanos here in America and Americans in general have been duped into believing it happened. It was not even a defeat, for the French simply lifted the siege to Puebla and left to conquer other cities.

That’s why in Mexico May 5th is only a day of subdued joy memorializing what in reality was just a Pyrrhic achievement of the Mexican army at resisting the siege that a mere minor fraction of the invading French forces had laid to Puebla.

It has to be stressed that the defenders of Puebla were regulars of the well disciplined, trained and armed Mexican army under General Ignacio Saragoza, and not the ragged peasants as widely contended by Cinco de Mayo deceiving promoters here in the U.S.A.  It was the same kind of well disciplined Mexican army that, less than 22 years before, had overrun The Alamo under the command of Generalísimo Antonio López de Santana.

What in reality happened at Puebla on May 5, 1862 was just that the French troops lifted the siege to join the rest of the invading army in the pursuit of more valuable targets. After winning decisive real battles nearby, the French came back in full force a year later to seize Puebla on May 17, 1863. 

They then took the capital, Mexico City itself, on June 7, 1863, just less than a month after sweeping Puebla’s defenders.

Thereafter, almost everything went downhill for the Mexican patriots…until April 10, 1865, the very day after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his defeated, badly beaten army to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. It was then when, just four days before being murdered, none else than Abraham Lincoln –victorious over the South, with a well seasoned and powerful 900,000 strong Union army, irked at France’s support for Dixie and outrageous attempts to pool several European countries to intervene militarily in the Civil War, and invoking the Monroe Doctrine— sent Napoleon III a stern ultimatum to pull his troops out of Mexico.

In a message that Secretary of State William Henry Seward conveyed to Napoleon through the American Consul in Paris, Abe threatened Napoleon with sending, firstly, an expeditionary force to flush out the French troops from Mexico, and, secondly, sending the U.S. Navy, to sink France’s Navy ships anchored on the Mexican Atlantic port of Veracruz.

Along with, and to give weight to his warning, Abe also ordered the march of 50,000 troops under the command of the bellicose General Philip H. Sheridan to the banks of the River Grande near Laredo, Texas, and issued orders preparing the Navy to sail south to Veracruz.

Napoleon correctly understood that Lincoln meant business; as a token of his compliance with Abe’s ultimatum, Napoleon readily heeded by immediately pulling some small forces throughout the end of 1865. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, kept the pressure on Napoleon.

Goaded even more convincingly by President Johnson and Secretary Seward in a new stern written message issued on February 12 of 1866 demanding the complete withdrawal of all French forces, Napoleon evacuated the bulk of his troops out of Mexico between June 15 and December 18, 1866. He left behind just a rogue force of about 300 French soldiers and foreign mercenaries as palace guards of phony emperor Maximilian.

It must be credited however that before the end of the evacuation, the Mexican republican patriots –armed with guns and ammunition sent by Abe and later by Johnson– hit very badly the French forces marching to the ports of embarkation.  Those were battles of real significance in the sense that the French were punished hard.  However, at that stage the French troops were more interested in going back home than in holding ground in Mexican territory.

Among others, there were the great republican battles against and victories over the French at Santa Isabel, Matamoros and Santa Gertrudis.  The May 5, 1862 event of Puebla pales in all and every sense to these three great battles.  Cinco de Mayo is less than a little blip in the real story of the French occupation of Mexico.

HOW IT ALL STARTED…AND ENDED

  

The whole mess started after Napoleon III failed in his attempts to enroll England and Russia to intervene along with France in assisting the South in the Civil War. Taking advantage of the fact that the Civil War impeded the United States to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in Mexico or anywhere else in the Americas, he schemed along with Great Britain and Spain –the three, angry unpaid creditors of Mexico’s– the landing of troops on Mexican territory purportedly in retaliation for uncollectable loans Mexico owed them.

Forces of the three countries landed in Mexico in December, 1861. Mexico’s constitutional president at that time was Benito Juárez, one of the greatest statesmen that the Western Hemisphere has so far produced, on a par with Washington and Lincoln, a great patriot by heart, a Zapotec Amerindian by blood and –as his pen friend, Abraham Lincoln– lawyer by training and great statesman by the Providence.

 

The Juárez’s administration had been left penniless after the War of the Reform, a civil war that ran from 1858 through late 1860, aimed at eliminating outrageous abuses of the Mexican oligarchy and the Catholic Church on the majority of pauper Mexicans.

The Mexican Congress suspended payments of the foreign debt on July 17, 1861.

On October 31 of the same year, France, Great Britain and Spain signed the Treaty of London, uniting their efforts to obtain payments from Mexico, by force if necessary, thus mounting the framework behind the military intervention.

Spanish troops stationed in Cuba landed in Veracruz on the 8th of December of 1861. On January 1, 1862, Lincoln advised Juárez that the U.S.A. could not help Mexico because of the Civil War. The British fleet arrived in Veracruz on January 6, and the French, on January 8, 1862. The French fleet took the port of Campeche on the 27th of February.

Although originally Great Britain and Spain  went along with Napoleon on the occupation of Veracruz, both the British and the Spanish decided on April 9, 1862, to back off when realizing that Napoleon had duped them into a territorial expansionist adventure of his own.

Taking advantage of the Civil War in the U.S., that is, knowing that Lincoln wouldn’t be able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, what Napoleon actually wanted was to make of Mexico a French colony. Furthermore, if the South showed solid signs of winning the Civil War, Napoleon had planned that the French troops stationed in Mexico would come in assistance of the Confederates to consolidate their victory.

The ultimate goal of European monarchists –supported by the Vatican and spearheaded by Napoleon III, the Emperor of France– was to break down the great menace that the United States of America, as a democratic republic, posed to them. Constitutional republicanism and effective democracy were so contagious that by osmosis, capillarity and emulation could infect their monarchic autocracies.

Spain and England pulled their troops from Veracruz on April 24, 1862.

With no more support from Britain and Spain for his adventure in Mexico, Napoleon counted however with the support of collaborationists in the Mexican aristocracy and the Catholic Church.  With Veracruz and Campeche in French hands, he went along with his plans to conquer Mexico. A force marched on Puebla submitting it to a siege, while the rest of the French forces marched deep inland.

Puebla –defended by the Mexican army led by General Zaragoza– proved to be a place hard to take for the limited French forces under General Lorencez. On the 5th of May the French lifted the siege. The French then went on taking Orizaba on June 14, Tampico, on October 23, and Jalapa, on December 23. A French armada bombarded Acapulco to ruins on January 15, 1863. The French then returned and again laid siege on Puebla on March 16 to take it on May 17, and then took Mexico City on June 7.

On June 10, the French appointed a “Superior Junta” composed of Mexican monarchists and Catholic hierarchs. On June 16, the Superior Junta appointed Mexican monarchist General Antonio Almonte provisional President of Mexico.

Maximilan arrived in Mexico City on June 12, 1862.

Since April 10, 1864 France’s Napoleon III, with the complicity of Mexican monarchist collaborationists and the Catholic Church hierarchy, had chosen Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico.

On the 10th of July of 1863, the Superior Junta officially proclaimed the Mexican Catholic Empire and offered the crown and title of Emperor to Maximilian, who gingerly accepted, duped by the Mexican collaborationists and Napoleon III.

Republican nationalists supporting Juárez waged a heroic but no more than nagging guerrilla war against the French occupiers and their collaborators.  However, during most of this time of struggle, Juárez kept in close touch with Abraham Lincoln who couldn’t help until he was freed of the burdens of the Civil War.

By the end of 1866, following the firm ultimatum by Abe to Napoleon, the tens of thousands of French troops occupying Mexico had been already called back to France except for the 300 who stayed behind as Maximilian’s palace guard. Abe, followed by his successor Andrew Johnson had, at gun point but without firing a shot, successfully expelled the French from Mexico.

So, once the French troops left Mexico hurriedly –with the tail tucked between their legs, attentively listening to Abe’s soft talk, and out of fear of his big stick– what continued in Mexico was actually a civil war in which Mexican republican patriots kept fighting Mexican monarchist traitorous collaborators.  Yes, with the French gone, later battles, larger for that matter, were exclusively between Mexican republican patriots and Mexican collaborationist traitors; that is, between good Mexicans and bad Mexicans.

ONCE LINCOLN AND JOHNSON SPOOKED THE FRENCH OUT OF MEXICO…

The two Mexican bands kept fighting fiercely through the end of 1866 and early 1867.

Finally, on May 15, 1867, in the great Battle of Querétaro, an army of patriots led by Mexican Generals Mariano Escobedo and Ramón Corona took the city of Querétaro –and captured Maximilian himself– thus defeating an army of collaborationists led by Mexican generals Miguel Miramón, Tomás Mejía and Ramón Méndez.  These three generals, like Juárez, were Zapotec Amerindians also, and had advanced through the ranks from mere privates to brigadiers. They, together with Maximilian, were executed on June 19, 1867 at the Cerro de Las Campanas (the Hill of the Bells).

  

So, being the story of a fictitious great defeat of French troops that, here in the U.S.A., demagogues have concocted and that the Left has embellished to the tilt, Cinco de Mayo really means not too much in Mexican history.  Such is indeed the insignificant level of importance that regular Mexicans in Mexico give to the event. Cinco de Mayo pales down to sheer insignificance compared to any other event in the Mexican civic calendar.

The Left, particularly the Democrats, alongside Chicano and Mexican irredentists, lie through their teeth about Cinco de Mayo, portraying it for what it is not. And, capitalizing on the festivity, the Obama regime and the Democrats will agitate around it to the brim to ram us with blanket amnesty for illegals, for the vast majority of them are Mexicans. By the way, 215ners –and, in increasing numbers, regular Americans– refer to Obama as “The Undocumented Worker in Chief”. (215ners = those who demand from Obama unequivocal and unambiguous proof of full compliance with “Constitution 215”, i.e., Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution of the United States of America.)

  

Mexicans in Mexico give a very much greater importance to June 19, 1867, the day Maximilian and his Mexican collaborationist generals were executed; they see it as a day of national vindication and as a vivid warning to budding usurpers and traitors. (Beware, usurpers and traitors!!)

The lesson to be drawn from the events of Cerro de Las Campanas is that the sure fate of both usurpers and collaborators who dare to commit any attempt against Mexican sovereignty is to end up standing in front of a firing-squad.

In Mexico, Cerro de Las Campanas means a lot, as it should. As a mater of fact, among Mexican civic celebrations, the 19th of June is second only to September 16, Independence Day.

  

Practically, in Mexico, Cinco de Mayo was no more than a modest tool in the propaganda arsenal that the infamous PRI –the racketeering clique that, in the disguise of a political party, ruled Mexico like the mob for 71 long years, from 1929 until 2000– employed to keep most of Mexicans in perpetual political and moral torpor…and misery. PRI is the acronym in Spanish for Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) a bombastic name used to co-opt the domestic Left into participating in the system…and to participate in the looting of Mexico’s national treasure. The Soviet Bloc nomenklaturas were mere child-play compared to the Mexican PRI. But the Democrat nomenklatura in the U.S.A. is well on its way to dwarfing the PRI’s.

Much in the same way, leftists and other demagogues in the United States of America, namely Democrats, have made of Cinco de Mayo one more trick, though a formidable one, to brazenly dupe unsuspecting Chicanos with misguided pride, and to subliminally nurture among them ethnic strife in America, based on Mexican nationalistic feelings.

Since the Left has purposely wrecked the K-12 curricula, where at some point in sixth grade or in high school this episode of the history of the Americas should be studied, Americans don’t know about all this. And since the vast majority of those who major in History in college are indoctrinated into Leftism, they keep hush regarding all these Mexican historic events.

So, here we are, with this fabrication of a balkanizing festivity being celebrated by great numbers of regular Americans, without suspecting that they are being duped big time, much the way they are duped every year with Earth Day, which was deceptively created to celebrate Lenin’s birthday by leftist Democrat U.S. Senator for Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson in 1970.

And that was the real story of Cinco de Mayo: a great fabrication at the service of those who seek the destruction of America from within; that is, the Left and its main front, the Democrat Party of nowadays, alongside Chicano and Mexican irredentists. It was Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, alongside Benito Juarez, who actually got the French out of Mexico, and not a military victory at Puebla that never happened.

CHICANOS COULD SOW A PROMISING FUTURE FOR THEMSELVES 

Chicanos should reject being fooled by Cinco de Mayo kind of demagoguery. They should rather keep and cultivate only positive and constructive Mexican traditions –which are rich and beautiful– and then embrace whatever positive and constructive can be found in abundance in American traditions and thus become a more active and live part of the great American Melting Pot.

Chicanos should stop also other nonsense such as pushing for bilingual “education” for the children of newcomers; bilingual education is a trap that only makes them second class citizens, and underclass, to be manipulated by the Left, particularly by its main front, the Democrat Party. Total immersion in English will help those children much more in their quest to procure a future in America; Spanish should be learned and practiced as a second language only.

They should also stop rallying unconditionally behind the Democrat Party; their absolute allegiance to the Democrats makes them in America pawns to a type of economic, social and political manipulation equivalent to the one that the demagogic big-brother and arch-corrupt PRI inflicted on their parents in Mexico. Bargaining their support for political power and status with both Democrats and Republicans –or with any other entity in the American political spectrum for that matter– as most Americans do, will help Chicanos reach the place they should have in American politics and in American life, in general.

The only ones in the U.S.A. to gain from keeping Chicanos so intimately tied to Mexico are those who want to perennially keep under-classes in America, under-classes that they can use in their morbid thirst for class warfare: the Left and its main front, the Democrat Party.

As for Cinco de Mayo itself, Chicanos should rather transfer the fire is their hearts to celebrating the 4th of July with great joy, as do Americans of other ancestries: Honduran, Italian, British, Danish, Argentinean, Dutch, Russian, Irish, Latvian, etc.

Chicanos should realize that the 4th of July is not only Independence Day, but also the day when modern-history democracy was born in the World.  Chicanos should acknowledge also that if it hadn’t been for the 4th of July, Abe Lincoln and Andy Johnson wouldn’t have been around to scare away the French out of Mexico.

Besides, as hard as life may be in this country for some Chicanos, at least it isn’t as miserable as it is in Mexico for the vast majority of Mexicans. Such fact is very eloquently asserted by the hundreds of thousands of destitute Mexican crossing the border each year bound for the U.S.

America offers hope for substantial advancement if one works hard and intelligently. Attempting to Mexicanize American politics will absolutely take Chicanos nowhere. 

Education, even modest, not to mention a high level one, and intelligent, savvy political activism is what will contribute substantially to making a marked difference for Chicanos.

Therefore, instead of lending themselves to being opiated by the Cinco de Mayo demagoguery of the Democrats, who want to keep Chicanos as an underclass to exploit on election day, and instead of lending themselves also to have their hearts poisoned against America by the traitorous calls from despicable irredentists, what Chicanos should do is to wake up to the happy reality that the U.S.A. is their only fatherland.