Cinco de Mayo, 1862. In Puebla, a ragtag Mexican army faces a far more numerous force of imperial French troops marching from Veracruz to Mexico City. The outcome of the battle will have a profound effect, not only on Mexican nationhood but on the raging U.S. civil war.
    The French are in Mexico to expand the empire that dictator Napoleon III is creating for the manufacturers and financiers who really control France. He has already brought North Africa and Indochina under French rule. Mexico, Central America, and the U.S. South are next on his agenda.
    With the South’s slave-produced cotton, French capitalists can dominate world textiles. But the Southern slaveowners can win their rebellion only with the aid of French arms -- shipped across the Rio Grande.
    In Puebla, the French march arrogantly at the Mexicans strongest point, as if to push them aside. But the French are repulsed -- not once, but many times -- until they retreat in disarray. The shocking defeat gains crucial time for both Mexico and the U.S.
    A year later, reinforced, the French army seizes Mexico City and installs Austrian archduke Maximilian as “Emperor of Mexico.” The Mexican president, Benito Juarez, retreats northward, fighting a guerilla war. He sometimes holds only a half mile along the Rio Grande, but Mexican forces stop the French from getting to the Southern slaveowners.
    Juarez is in touch with Abraham Lincoln, the embattled U.S. president. Without the time gained by the victory at Puebla, Lincoln might have been forced out of Washington by a French-equipped Southern army. Riding with Juarez is Lincoln’s ambassador to Mexico, the only senator who voted against the Mexican-American War.
    That war was fought to expand U.S. slavery into Mexican territory -- after Mexico had abolished slavery in 1830. Now the wars in both countries will end slavery forever.
    Without French arms, the Southern armies retreat before superior force. U.S. troops break through to the Rio Grande and mass along the Mexican border, threatening the French. Tens of thousands of U.S. muskets cross the Rio Grande to arm the Juaristas.
    Both the Southern slaveocracy and the French imperialists are defeated. Lincoln frees the slaves. Napoleon III calls his troops home. His bogus “emperor” dies before a Mexican firing squad.
    Cinco de Mayo commemorates all this. Because it is important to our historic freedoms, it should be celebrated by the working class in both the U.S. and Mexico. But it will have to be a people’s holiday, because the capitalist powers that be do not want Mexicans and North Americans to recognize their common history -- or their common interests.
    Today, as in 1862, the struggles of both peoples are one. And the lesson of Cinco de Mayo is that together we can win. Against all odds, we can win.

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New Book: Teatro Chicana, A collective Memoir and Selected Plays,
profiles seventeen women in the Chicana Movement in the early 1970s.
Laura Garcia wrote a chapter and is available to speak through
Speakers for a New America.

Signed copies of the book are $25 plus $4 postage.
Call 800-691-6888 or mail check to Speakers for a New America,
c/o Tribuno del Pueblo, PO Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654.








Women from the Teatro Chicana speak at the
Cross-Cultural Center at the University of California,
San Diego. The event is part of UCSD’s month-long
celebration honoring labor leader, equal opportunity
advocate, and humanitarian César E. Chávez.

This article originated in the People's Tribune
PO Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654, 773-486-3551, info@peoplestribune.org.
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