Skip to Main Content

Cinco de Mayo: History and Information Guide

Learn more about the history behind the Cinco de Mayo holiday and its origins.

OneSearch with Tips for Searching for Books

OneSearch

   

 

  • To find books located in the CSU Stanislaus Library or in digital format, change the dropdown menu on OneSearch from “Everything @ Stan State” to “Books & Media @ Stan State.”
  • Books and media items available on campus will have a location designation of  "CSU Stanislaus Library." A librarian or library staff member can help you find books in Library Research Help Desk.
  • To find additional resources available in all California State University Libraries, change the dropdown menu to “CSU + and Beyond."

CSU+ is an online borrowing system available to all faculty, students, and staff at CSU Stanislaus. Books will be delivered to the library at Turlock or Stockton in 2-3 days.  More information about CSU+ can be found here.

Librarians are skilled at helping students find books and articles needed for research. If you are not finding what you need, ASK!

Browse Some of Our Library's Books on Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo

This picture book tells how a Mexican family celebrates this national holiday and of its significance in history.

Viva Mexico!

A biography of the Zapotec Indian who grew up to become the President of Mexico and lead his country in a war for independence.

Stories of Mexico's Independence Days and Other Bilingual Children's Fables

This collection of six bilingual children's stories takes a regional and historical emphases. Sixteen provides the background of September 16, Mexico's day of independence from Spain, and places it in a present-day context with which children can easily identify. "The Little General" teaches children about Cinco de Mayo through a young boy who helps save his village from the approaching French army. The remaining four stories are fables that impart important moral themes to young readers. In "Sweetie, the Lion that Thought He Was a Sheep," children learn to respect different backgrounds and abilities. "A Parrot for Christmas" demonstrates the friendship children can share with animals and "Orlando, the Circus Bear" emphasizes the importance of compassion toward animals. "A Horse Called 'Miracle'" teaches the value of helping others in need. Each story is followed with discussion questions to help children recall the story's key details and suggestions for classroom activities designed to stimulate curiosity and expand knowledge of historical events.

Juarez

Benito Juarez (1806--72), Indian-born (Zapotec) founding father of modern Mexico, championed a newly independent, largely non-white nation at a time of aggressive European supremacy. His brand of liberalism broke with the Indian and Hispanic pasts, curbed the power of church and army, and promoted federalism and civil supremacy. He outmanoeuvred the conservatives in a bitter civil war (1858--61), and, as President, frustrated Napoleon III's imperial ambitions by defeating -- and executing -- his Habsburg puppet, the unfortunate emperor Maximilian. This is a major study of an extraordinary career, with resonances far beyond Mexico itself.

Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico

In this new and masterful synthesis, Wasserman shows the link between ordinary men and women preoccupied with the demands of feeding, clothing, and providing shelter and the elites desire for a stable political order and an expanding economy. The emphasis in this book is on the struggle of the common people to retain control over their everyday lives. Concerns central to village life were the appointment of police officials, imposition of taxes on Indians, the trustworthiness of local priests, and changes in land ownership. Communities often followed their leaders into one political camp or another and even into war out of loyalty. During wartime, women acted as the supply, transportation, and medical corps of the Mexican armies. Moreover, with greater frequency than has been known, women fought as soldiers in the nineteenth century.

Porfirio Diaz

The fall of Porfirio Diaz has traditionally been presented as a watershed between old and new: an old style repressive and conservative government, and the more democratic and representative system that flowered in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Now this view is being challenged by a new generation of historians, who point out that Diaz originally rose to power in alliance with anti-conservative forces and was a modernising force as well as a dictator. Drawing together the threads of this revisionist reading of the Porfiriato, Garner reassesses a political career that spanned more than forty years, and examines the claims that post-revolutionary Mexico was not the break with the past that the revolutionary inheritors claimed.

El Cinco de Mayo

Why is Cinco de Mayo--a holiday commemorating a Mexican victory over the French at Puebla in 1862--so widely celebrated in California and across the United States, when it is scarcely observed in Mexico? As David E. Hayes-Bautista explains, the holiday is not Mexican at all, but rather an American one, created by Latinos in California during the mid-nineteenth century. Hayes-Bautista shows how the meaning of Cinco de Mayo has shifted over time--it embodied immigrant nostalgia in the 1930s, U.S. patriotism during World War II, Chicano Power in the 1960s and 1970s, and commercial intentions in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, it continues to reflect the aspirations of a community that is engaged, empowered, and expanding.

Books

eBooks