Some things you might want to know about Cinco De Mayo:
1. First of all it is not the Mexican Independence day. Mexico's independence day is called Grito de Dolores and it happends to be celebrated on September 16th. It commemorates the declaration of war with the Spaniards in 1810. What, you may ask, does Cinco de mayo have to do with that? Ah, that would be absolutely nothing.
2. So while Cinco De Mayo is not a Mexican Holiday, it is an American one. Few people celebrate the holiday in Mexico, but it is a time when Americans can go out an get significantly wasted on Mexican beer and stuff themselves with all manner of burritos, and thenlike, for no other reason than boredom.
3. Cinco De Mayo was promoted by the Island of Malta (no, it is not associated with Mexico) that produces Corona Extra. It seems that Corona felt that it was an ingenious marketing scheme to promote Cinco De Mayo, and it has worked out marvelously for them.
So basically here, Cinco De Mayo is an completely American holiday which has very little, if anything, to do with Mexico. It all began in the 1980's when foreign beers were becoming rather trendy here in the U.S. Personally, I was just stating out in the Navy back then and going to parties you would always find guys slamming back Moosehead, Fosters or even a stray Grolsch lagers. Anyway, Corona decided they wanted in on this rather lucrative market so they started marketing themselves in America. But American beer companies worried about cheep suds coming North across the border and interfering with their grip on the market. So a distributor of Henieken started a rumor that the FDA found traces of human urine in Corona and spread false reports that Mexican workers had been observed peeing into the beer at the bottling plant, allegedly.
Corona's reputation was pretty badly damaged and even though they had proven the rumors to be outright lies and even won a lawsuit, they needed something to regain their losses in the beer market. Being a rather ingenious group, they struck on wn ould be a brilliant strategy. What they needed was a specific holiday in which people wouldn't want to drink Canadian, Australian, German, or even U.S. beers but only Mexican brew. The logical choice was Mexico's independence day, September 16th, but there was a slight problem. It seemed that Seis de Septiembre was just too ethnic and hard to pronounce for most Americans and its official name Grito de Dolores was just too confusing and hard to explain. Corona decided to look around and soon found Cinco de Mayo, the very name just rolled off the tongue and didn't cause fear among U.S. beer drinkers, it even sounded fun.
And so with a heavy marketing campaign Corona started promoting the Cinco de Mayo holiday around the U.S.. Americans, who have never been very shy about celebrating any holiday that involves dancing, eating and especially drinking, embraced the new holiday even though they had no idea what it was that was supposedly being celebrated. Before long this fictional holiday quickly began spreading outward from the border states it is now is a party all over America. It's just one more on a rather long list of strictly made up holidays like Earth Day, April Fool's day, Kwanzaa, Ground Hog Day and any number of others all created for no other reason than to have a party or to celebrate some idiotic cause. But hey, far be it from me to rain on anybody's parade. So lets go out and PARTY. The country's goin to SHIT, so we might as well get drunk!
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