The Fifth of May

As a native Californian for me the fifth of May is Cinco de Mayo. It is generally thought of in the circles in which I move as “Mexican Independence,” and so comparable to the 4th of July. In fact this secular holiday is something more like St Patrick’s Day, originally a relatively minor celebration in Ireland, but becoming a celebration of Irish culture among the expatriate community largely here in the States and eventually making it’s way back to the mother country as something big. Just about exactly the same thing happened with Cinco de Mayo.

I don’t know how things are going right now what with the enormous and unsettling nativist resurgence here in the U.S.. But in my California childhood, Mexican culture was observed as part of the pageant of Californian history. And those community celebrations provided my first literal tastes of the Mexican border foods that now, pushing sixty, I consider “comfort food.”

I suspect there’s much to unravel out of that statement…