On Cinco de Mayo and the Gentle Art of Cultural Mending
It is a peculiar thing, is it not, that we may raise a glass more fervently for a story not our own, than for the sagas that lie nestled in the folds of our ancestral coat? Such is the case with Cinco de Mayo, a date that, in Mexico, passes with a nod of historical acknowledgment—commemorating the unlikely victory at Puebla in 1862—yet in the United States is observed with festivity, margaritas, and maracas, often with little reference to the very people whose forebears bled on that field.
There is, I admit, something both charming and troubling about this. It is, in many ways, the embodiment of that ambivalent space we explored in On the Quiet Power of Radical Hope, where the old meanings have been forgotten or disfigured, and the new meanings have not yet arrived. The American celebration of Cinco de Mayo is less an act of remembrance and more a ritual of projection—a yearning for festivity, color, and some faintly exotic kinship that might soothe the aching separations of modern life. It is, perhaps, hope misplaced. Or, more gently, hope not yet rightly placed.
But before we rush to chastisement—as is fashionable in the age of moral instantaneity—let us pause to consider. Might this misdirected holiday be an invitation, however clumsily worded, to friendship? As I reflected in On Mending the Fabric: Friendship and the Restoration of a Fractured Society, repair rarely begins with perfect understanding. It begins, more often than not, with the awkward reaching across a table, the mispronounced name, the offer of something—however small—that signals, “I see you, even if I do not yet know how to love you well.”
If we are to tend this fragile social fabric, we must learn the art of curated closeness—not cultural appropriation, but cultural approach. What if, rather than abandon the American Cinco de Mayo as a garish pastiche, we saw in it a seed? A small act of culture, planted in ignorance perhaps, but still capable of flowering into something more fragrant and true. We cannot, after all, ask a people to love what they do not yet know, but we can ask them to know better what they already claim to love.
And so I return to the gentle theme of On Tending the Small Garden: How Ordinary Acts Sustain a Dying Culture. Let us take this day—Cinco de Mayo—and rather than dismiss it or deride it, tend to it. Let us learn the true story of Puebla and the deeper history of Mexican resilience. Let us read aloud the poetry of Sor Juana, cook mole with reverence rather than irony, and remember that a people’s spirit cannot be consumed with lime and salt.
Yes, the American celebration of Cinco de Mayo is a muddle. But so, too, is any attempt at cross-cultural kinship. The only unforgivable thing, I think, is not the muddle—but the refusal to move through it toward clarity. Hope, as ever, must remain radical. Friendship must be chosen again and again. And culture, if it is to be anything more than decoration, must be tended like a garden: with patience, humility, and care.
And so, my friends, if you must raise a glass this May the fifth, raise it not only to the echo of cannons at Puebla, but to the possibility that celebration itself might become an act of knowing, of mending, of radical, unlikely, blooming hope.
