Cinco de Mayo +2: Ethnic Peeves

(I’m a couple days late with this post. It’s been busy here and with the Mets playing out on the west coast it screws up my schedule.)

Gilbert wrote in Ethnic Unawareness:

As someone who is of Hispanic decent, I feel the same way about Cinco de Mayo.
Way to celebrate our culture by getting drunk.

I’m Chinese and while I don’t think people go out and get blitzed on Chinese New Year it kind of bugs me when people get tattoos with Chinese (or Japanese) characters. It just strikes me as an superficial attempt to be hip and/or multicultural. If African Americans are the only ones who can use the word “nigger” and not get grief over it, then I think only Asians should be able to get tattoos with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters. Heck, and most of us second- and third-generation Americans can’t even read the characters.

(Of course I love it when non-Asians get hipster Asian tattoos, only to find out that the tatt doesn’t mean what they thought it was supposed to mean: Crazy Diarrhea.)

I noticed ads in the paper last week touting Cinco de Mayo. They were from grocery stores suggesting that consumers load up on things like refried beans, Doritos, Pace picante sauce, and margarita mix. I heard an announcer on the local classical station say something about “Aaron Copland and Cinco de Mayo,” which I found odd because — well — Copland wasn’t from Mexico. But later that day the station played Copland’s “El Salon Mexico” which I missed, but I found a recording of it on YouTube:

Just think if the California or Texas or any southwestern state had held a primary election near 5 May. The candidates would have contorted themselves to hit every Cinco de Mayo parade, sing along with mariachi bands, and eat a whole lot of tacos to “prove” that they respect Hispanic culture.

After reading Gilbert’s comment I realized I didn’t know much of anything about Cinco de Mayo (except for something a French friend once said; he was married to a Mexican woman), so I did what I always do at such times: click around the Internets to see what I could find. From Wikipedia:

… The holiday commemorates an initial victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín over French forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. … Although the Mexican army was victorious over the French at Puebla, the victory only delayed the French advance on Mexico City; a year later, the French occupied Mexico. The French occupying forces placed Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico on the throne of Mexico. The French were eventually defeated and expelled in 1867. Maximilian was executed by President Benito Juarez, five years after the Battle of Puebla. …

According to a paper published by the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture about the origin of the observance of Cinco de Mayo in the United States, the modern American focus on that day first started in California in the 1860s in response to the resistance to French rule in Mexico. The 2007 paper notes that “The holiday, which has been celebrated in California continuously since 1863, is virtually ignored in Mexico.”

In Mexico the holiday is only celebrated in the state of Puebla, which is where the noted 5 May battle took place.

I guess it’s only because America is such a mixed bag of ethnicities that we have these ethnic awareness festivities. Most other countries are very homogeneous, and becoming multi-ethnic has presented a lot of problems for some of them. So I don’t want to sound crabby about Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo, and St. Patrick’s Day. It’s just that I wish “ethnic awareness” meant more meaningful than getting drunk, selling groceries, or getting a tattoo.