Cinco de Mayo 2025

Today is Cinco de Mayo, a day that celebrates Mexico's victory over the Second French Empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. It is celebrated in the city of Puebla with festivals, but is a much more popular holiday in the United States than in Mexico. It became popular in the U.S. in the 1980s thanks to major advertising campaigns by beer, wine, and tequila companies, and is now considered a celebration of Mexican-American culture. Here in Denver, it was celebrated this past weekend at Civic Center Park in downtown Denver, where I took the photograph on the left.

This festival had three stages featuring traditional dances and both traditional and modern music. Perhaps too modern, after watching a performance by Micky Ricon, known for his "urban Latin rhythms," which to me sounded like Mexican rap. In any case, the group in the photograph on the right are part of Folklorico de Colores, an organization that teaches traditional Mexican folk dance to youths age 4 to 13. This was much more suited to my taste. As far as I am concerned, when you go to a festival like this, you want to see and hear traditional music and dance, not rap, whatever language it happens to be in.

And, of course, Denver's Cinco de Mayo festival featured booths selling all kinds of goods, as well as all kinds of Mexican food, including that traditional Mexican favorite, Giant Turkey Legs, as seen in the photograph on the left. Of course, they sell Giant Turkey Legs at other festivals around here, too, such as the Denver Chalk Festival, Denver Oktoberfest, and Breckenridge Oktoberfest. I sometimes wonder if they just simply freeze the leftovers at the end of each of these events and reheat them at the next festival. What doesn't sell at Oktoberfest in September will show up next May at Cinco de Mayo. Yum. They also had Chihuahua Races at the festival, which I think would have been fun to see, but which I unfortunately arrived too late to witness. Of course, there is always next year, as Chicago Cubs fans are fond of saying.