[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]n elementary school on the border our Cinco de Mayo festival was the biggest day of the year. Each grade, kindergarten to sixth, presented a musical dance number in full costumes, usually ballet folklórico or zapateadas, on a stage set up on the school’s playground. We had a tradition of selling egg shells filled with paper confetti. For one day a year, this would turn our vast playing field into a sea of wind-whipped bits of colored paper far into the evening, after the kids spent hours running around to smash the eggs on each other’s heads.
In high school it was the same thing, Cinco de Mayo was a big deal. Our campus chapter of MEChA organized an assembly and the entire school attended: we presented folklórico dance numbers, poems, Aztec-inspired dancing, and political speeches. We raised funds for the club by selling Mexican food plates.
As Cinco de Mayo approaches in 2019, these kinds of memories no longer seem as banal and normal to me as they once did. For a long time I had never met anyone who didn’t have a lavish Cinco de Mayo event at their school. It was just what you did. But today, with white supremacists setting policy inside the White House, remembering and embracing these mexicanish traditions seems like an almost radical proposition.
Fact is, generations of people in communities with large numbers of Mexican descendents — that means anyone, that means you — know that Cinco de Mayo is a cornerstone of public/social life in American-Mexican identity. When you subtract the corporatism, the consumerism, the stereotypes, and the alcohol, this gringo holiday is one of the building blocks of who we are, for better or worse.