Click the play button above to watch the video (UCLA’s David Hayes-Bautista discusses his book, “El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition,” which tracks the historical evolution of the holiday, in an interview in 2012.)
UCLA Newsroom
May 5, 2025
If you were to go to Mexico on May 5 and try wishing Mexicans a happy Cinco de Mayo, you’d likely be greeted by some puzzled looks, UCLA’s David Hayes-Bautista says. It just never has been that big a deal south of the border.
Which begs the question: Why is the holiday — which commemorates the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 — so widely celebrated in California and the United States when it is scarcely observed in Mexico?
What are the origins of Cinco de Mayo?
Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine who directs UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, literally wrote the book on the subject: His “El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition,” published in 2012, was the first to delve deeply into the origins of the holiday.
First, he stresses, Cinco de May is not Mexican Independence Day. The latter is celebrated annually on Sept. 16 and marks the beginning, in 1810, of Mexico’s fight to free itself from Spanish colonial rule.
Second, Cinco de Mayo isn’t Mexican at all. Rather, the holiday had its roots in the U.S., in the early days of the American Civil War.
By 1862, a year into that conflict, the Confederacy, which sought to keep African Americans in slavery, had expanded into New Mexico and Arizona and hoped to get all the way to Los Angeles. In response, groups of California Latinos joined the U.S. Army and organized units of Spanish-speaking cavalry in California and unoccupied portions of New Mexico.
At the same time, Emperor Napoleon III of France, realizing the U.S. government was too involved in its own war to object, sent troops into Mexico, seeking to overthrow the country’s democratic government of President Benito Juárez and, among other things, reintroduce slavery, which had been abolished there 50 years earlier.
But Napoleon’s forces were decisively beaten by the Mexican army at Puebla on May 5 and had to withdraw to strongholds along the coast of Mexico.
How a network of Latino groups throughout California turned Cinco de Mayo into a holiday
For the vast majority of Latinos in California, Hayes-Bautista says, the battles against the Confederacy in the U.S. and against French interventionist forces in Mexico were viewed as twin struggles for freedom and democracy.
So when news of Napoleon’s defeat reached these communities, they celebrated the good news by parading through the streets of towns in California and Nevada carrying the U.S. and Mexican flags side by side, signaling their commitment to freedom, racial equality and democratic government.
The Mexican victory at Puebla also galvanized the disparate and independent juntas patrióticas mejicanas, or Mexican patriotic assemblies, which existed throughout California, into forming a strong statewide network that, in addition to raising funds to support President Juarez’s wartime efforts, encouraged the ongoing public commemoration of the battle.
And that is why, at its heart, Cinco de May should rightfully be seen as a Mexican American holiday — and one that has expanded to appeal to other Americans, Hayes-Bautista says