Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Ahhh...Cinco de Mayo. The day we Americans celebrate Mexican Independence Day by throwing parties, quaffing margaritas, tequila or Modelo beer and enjoying a fun super tasty South of The Border feast.

But that's not entirely correct. There's lots of fun parties and the alcohol does flow freely. The food is always marvelous and super tasty.

Yet Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican independence day. That's September 16th. Cinco de Mayo is in fact, more of an American holiday than a Mexican one. And one that deserves more recognition than it gets.

Cinco de Mayo's roots begin during the French occupation of Mexico. Mexico at the time was in a real mess. They had 15 years of wars (The Mexican-American War, The Mexican Civil War and The Reform War) and everybody was getting tired of it. Finally in 1861, Mexican President Benito Juarez told Britain, Spain and France to hold off on their debt collection for these wars for two years until they can financially reorganize and get the country back on track.

They sent armies to confront Mexico and collect their debts regardless. Britain and Spain negotiated and backed off. But the French, under the rule of Napoleon III would not hear of it and another war began. Napoleon III wanted to turn Mexico into a French territory and since the Americans at the time were in an ugly civil war, he thought he could establish a strong enough foothold in Mexico, which he could then use to invade America (which was still a very small, very rural country at the time.) By using the Confederate South as proxies.

Napoleon sent 8,000 troops to attack Mexico's 4,500 troops at Veracruz. But on May 5, 1862, the much smaller Mexican army sent the French into retreat. The news reached the border communities of America where people celebrated the news.

While there would be more fighting, a major turning point had begun. Had Napoleon III defeated the Mexicans at Veracruz, the Civil War could have ended very differently.

So Cinco de Mayo is very much an American holiday. (More on Cinco de Mayo)

It was the expanding Latino communities that brought the holiday across America. But it was beer companies in the '80s that helped bring Cinco de Mayo into the American mainstream.

Because if there's one thing everyone LOVES, it's to party.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Taco Bell, 1970s

Merry Christmas From History's Dumpster!

Colonel Sanders' Tijuana Picnic

I didn't know where to categorize this. Under Food, Restaurants or Music. Well, it's a little of all of the above.

Could you think of two things that could be more further apart than Herb Alpert-like brass music and Kentucky Fried Chicken?

Before these unholy Taco Bell/KFC combo restaurants started popping up everywhere (do these corporations even know that when you're really in the mood for Original Recipe, the LAST thing you want to smell is greasy tacos and vice-versa?) and bizarre things like chipotle started showing up on KFC's menus, such a union meant automatic BANKRUPTCY to whoever was serving it. And rightly so. Leave the fried chicken and the faux Mexican food to the specialists. And keep them separate.

Of course some whiny corporate suck-up will say "But think about it; let's say mom and dad wanted KFC food and the kids wanted Taco Bell food. Wouldn't it be great if they could each have what they want under one roof?"

And then people wonder why kids are so spoiled today. Because when I was growing up, eating out was a TREAT. And a RARE treat at that. We NEVER argued or complained about where we were going to eat because ANYTHING was better than ANOTHER night of meatloaf.

I could sympathize with the Colonel when he said two years before his death in 1980 that he wished he never sold Kentucky Fried Chicken. I wish he hadn't either. You just don't know heartburn until you had just eaten strips of Extra Crispy and chipotle sauce in a gummy tortilla, no matter how much lettuce and cheddar cheese shreds they put in it.

But let's go back to the late '60s and this vinyl gem. I don't know how exactly it was distributed, but seeing as it was on Mark 56 Records (a company that specialized in producing custom albums for businesses to be sold cheaply or just given away as a loss leader for another product) it was probably given away with a bucket of chicken or sold for 98¢.

It's a generic album of trendy Tijuana Brass knockoffs (that sound was HUGE in the '60s) that corporate America was pushing on every supermarket sound system and FM radio station they could for middle class suburban moms of the late '60s who wanted to be hip, but didn't want anything to do with pot (and ended up alcoholic instead.)

I especially love the liner notes the Good Colonel wrote on the back of this album. Who would've known he was as much an expert on Latin-tinged pop jazz as he was pressure cooking chicken?

Actually, he wasn't. They were ghost-written. But he sure knew how to sell Kentucky Fried Chicken.....

Here's a sample:

YuMex: Yugoslavian Mexican Music of The '50s

"In 1948, the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (May 7, 1892 - May 4, 1980) broke up with the Soviet leader Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Dec. 21, 1879 - March 5, 1953). Yugoslavia was suddenly between the two blocks (in the making). Tito's regime imprisoned many Soviet sympathizers (real or just suspected). Russian films were not so popular anymore.

Yugoslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment. 

They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?

Emilio Fernández's Un Día de vida (1950) became so immensely popular that the old people in the former republics of Yugoslavia even today regard it as surely one of the most well known films in the world ever made although in truth it is probably unknown in every other country, even Mexican web pages don't mention it much.

The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays."

- http://www.mihamazzini.com/ovitki/default.html