Yes, Black Folks Can Celebrate Cinco de Mayo

by Ken Oswald "__yak" Vann, Jr.

Tuesday, May 05, 2026

Before Cinco de Mayo became a happy-hour poster, it was a battlefield. Puebla was Mexico telling France, “Not today.”

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Black people don’t have to ask permission to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

Not because it’s an excuse for tacos and tequila. That’s the watered-down American version. I mean the real reason.

Cinco de Mayo is about the Battle of Puebla in 1862, when Mexico beat back the French army under Napoleon III. And this wasn’t just some random European beef happening south of Texas. France was trying to build an empire in Mexico while America was busy fighting the Civil War. Napoleon’s interests lined up with the slaveholding Confederacy, which means Mexico holding the line at Puebla mattered to the future of Black freedom in North America.

So when Mexico resisted France, they weren’t just defending Mexico. They were disrupting the political fantasy of a slave empire with international backing.

That part matters.

This is the part they don’t put on the Cinco de Mayo decorations: Black refuge, borderland survival, and freedom south of the line.

And then there’s the part we almost never get taught: Mexico had already become a refuge for Black people fleeing slavery. Black Seminoles, escaped enslaved people, and other freedom-seekers crossed south into Mexico because Mexico represented something America refused to offer them: legal freedom. Benito Juárez’s Mexico also gave land to anti-colonial Black Seminoles, tying Black liberation directly into Mexico’s own resistance against empire.

Now, I’ll say this carefully because history deserves respect: the exact records around Black freedmen and escapees at the Battle of Puebla are not as clean as the meme version makes them sound. But the broader story is absolutely real. Black freedom-seekers were part of Mexico’s borderland defense history, Afro-Mexicans were part of Mexico’s national story, and the victory at Puebla helped slow an imperial project that would have strengthened slavery’s reach.

The story didn’t end at Puebla. It kept riding, singing, cooking, praying, remembering.

So yes, celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

But celebrate it correctly.

Don’t just drink to Mexico. Drink to resistance. Drink to people who ran south when America told them freedom was impossible. Drink to a country that stood between empire and slavery. Drink to the fact that Black history has never been contained by the borders they drew around us.

Because once you understand what Cinco de Mayo really was, it stops being “their holiday.”

It becomes another chapter in the same old story:

Somebody powerful showed up thinking the math was settled.

And somebody outnumbered said, “Nah.”

Black history has never been trapped inside American borders.