Cinco De Mayo Brought To You By Coors

Leave the tequila behind and head for the mountains if you want to celebrate a traditional Cinco De Mayo. We all wonder where these holidays come from, but this has to be the most narcissitic one I have seen for a long time.

If you do not have time to read the excerpts, here it goes. Coors pisses off Mexicans and is looking to find a way to get the college students to drink more beer in May. They create the Cinco de Mayo holiday even though Mexican Independence Day is in September.

Add a strong dose of marketing dollars, a little bit of hubris, and you have given the hoard of bar owners, radio DJs, and booze salesman a bonanza. If I was Mexican I would be a little bit pissed.

In the 1960s, Chicano activists in Colorado promoted a boycott of Coors beer in response to employment discrimination against Latinos at Coors breweries. Coors had two problems. They had to fix their image with Latino consumers, and they had to figure out some way to get college students to drink more beer in May. The solution: start sponsoring Cinco de Mayo! Thus, even though Mexicans in Mexico celebrate their independence day on September 15th and 16th, Mexican-Americans are more likely to celebrate the May 5th anniversary of the Battle of the Puebla, which is not even commemorated with a national holiday in Mexico. In fact, the Battle of the Puebla was a skirmish in the Pastry War, a French intervention in Mexico that began because a French chef demanded several thousand pesos to compensate him for Mexican military officers looting his pastry supply. via MetaFilter.