A Brief History of Cinco de Mayo

Featuring the History Guy

Feliz Cinco de Mayo! It’s a great Mexican-American holiday, and you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be out celebrating at a Mexican restaurant later today.

It’s also a story of imperialism and resistance, and was only made possible by the American Civil War, the end of which would also end the attempted French conquest of Mexico.

The History Guy, super-nerd that he is, gives a great less than 10 minute description here.

THG here mentions the Reform War, the Mexican Civil War you’ve probably never heard of, which went on from 1857 to the beginning of 1861. It pitted Conservatives—landowners, military officers, the Roman Catholic Church—against the Republicans, headed by one Benito Juarez.

They were basically 19th Century liberals with some land reform ideas, and they won the civil war. Unfortunately, Mexico was so broke it couldn’t pay the interest on some IMF European loans, and nuevo Presidente Juarez suspended them for two years.

The French, British, and Spanish Empires, which had provided most of the defaulted loans, sent a fleet and expeditionary force to collect. They occupied Veracruz, and then French Emperor Napoleon III announced there was a new Austrian Emperor of Mexico, one Maximilian, and sent in French troops to back him up.

The British and Spanish decided they wanted no part of expanding French imperial glory and split. The French stayed, helped along by the defeated Mexican Conservatives who wanted a monarchy and aristocracy back. The only reason they did at the time was because the United States was preoccupied with its own Civil War and couldn’t do jack shit about it.

Juarez was forced to flee southern Mexico, retreating north all the way to what was then called El Paseo del Norte, now called Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, and he got some help from Texas.

This Tejano named Zaragoza took command of Juarez’s ragtag bunch of working class and peasant revolutionaries, and armed with smuggled American weapons, and delivered a sharp setback to French troops attempting to occupy the town of Puebla in northeastern Mexico on May 5, 1862.

The victory was temporary—the French Foreign Legion made an appearance a few weeks later and successfully captured Puebla—but it demonstrated to the Mexican population, and to one Abraham Lincoln, that the Juaristas were a determined bunch who were in it to win it.

It wasn’t in America’s interests to allow another major European empire to be on its borders—the British were still in Canada—so after the US Civil War ended Lincoln sent a message to Emperor Napoleon III in Paris: Get the fuck out of Mexico or I’m sending Sherman and Sheridan in to kick y’all’s asses out.

After three years of mobile guerilla warfare, the French people were getting tired of it and the French Army had no desire to take on veteran Union troops, who were probably the best fighting force on the planet at the time.

The French abandoned Maximilian and his aristocratic Mexican allies to their fate, which was this in June, 1867:

So please, go celebrate the Cinco de Mayo, but remember the working class Mexicans who fought for their rights and their independence against both foreign and domestic upper class domination on that day.

Thank you for reading and hopefully watching, have a good day or night, and good luck.

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