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The flood of beer commercials for the coming Cinco de Mayo would make one think that the event signifies Cinco Cervezas. Swamped in suds is the actual meaning, which is the commemoration of the battle at Puebla in 1862 where a hastily collected Mexican army stopped invading troops on their march to Mexico City to establish a colonial empire funded by Emperor Napoleon of France for Austrian Archduke Maximillian. 

Among the Mexican defenders at Puebla was Vicente Riva Palacio, a 29-year-old playwright, who helped recruit soldiers for the battle off the streets of the capital, and later rose to rank of general. Riva Palacio was the grandson of Vicente Guerrero, hero of the 1810 war for independence, who has a state in his name and was Mexico’s first president with African heritage. 

Riva Palacio commemorated the battle in the 5th of May 1869 issue of his Mexico City newspaper of theater and politics, “La Orquesta.” (A copy of the issue is at the Bancroft library.) 

The nation has its days of glory, breaks from painful memories and sad considerations. 

Mexico counts May 5 among these days, when the great Mexican family forgets its pains and sadness to lose itself in celebration of the memory of an immortal triumph, the commemoration of a great and heroic deed. 

The destiny of the nation had been decided on the fine desktop of the grand merchant of European politics. Napoleon was convinced his entrance would be a ball game, as certain as it would be lucrative, and the grandest achievement of his reign, yet attempted with a haste and flippancy, as if it wasn’t going to put two peoples in battle, as if this enterprise would not cost rivers of blood, as if his adversaries would not balance the power and wealth of France through their heroics, determination, love of the patria, and by the most complete and profound disdain for death. 

There are men who are indifferent to the fate of the people they govern, there are men elevated to power on the misfortune of their people, who sacrifice them to their ambition, to their pride, or to their capriciousness. There are men who appear destined to be the whip on the people, and who nevertheless, by the grand designs of Providence, are no more than the crucible that inspires the patriotism and grandeur of nations, and all the tyrannies, whatever has been their investment, and their pretext that they invoke through law to exercise despotisms, whatever has been the mask with which they hide or pretend to hide their true face, whatever has been the epoch in which they appear, always the people take from their terrible reign lessons that are never forgotten and that drive humanity toward progress, and that are, to say it clearly, the lighthouses that mark the rocky shores that appear in the march of the people 

Napoleon had sent Mexico the seed of tyranny, which was planted here by his marshals and watered with the blood of martyrs to the nation, but instead of germinating as was hoped, the man of Dec. 2 [Napoleon’s coronation day] produced a tree of liberty. 

The fifth of May was the prologue to the grand story of the second war of independence.