Cinco de Mayo

"Nothing to show but this brand new tattoo

But it’s a real beauty

A Mexican cutie

How I got it, I haven’t a clue”

    “Margaritaville,” Jimmy Buffet

For Cinco de Mayo (fifth of May) son Dave performed “Margaritaville” on Facebook and received over a hundred likes or comments.  I told him that while he nailed it, “La Bamba” (popularized by Ritchie Valens, Trini Lopez, and Los Lobos) would have been my choice.  The traditional Mexican folk song originated among African slaves imported into Veracruz who were referencing the MBamba peoples of Angola. “Margaritaville” was also appropriate, however, given that the unofficial holiday was popularized during the 1980s by beer companies and sales supposedly surpass even those during Superbowl weekend.  Cinco de Mayo commemorates a Mexican victory over a much larger French force at the 1862 Battle of Puebla under the leadership of General Ignacio Zaragoza.  After President Benito Juarez declared a moratorium on Mexico’s foreign debt, Napoleon III had used the default as an excuse to invade the Central American country at a time when the U.S. was unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine due to the Civil War. After Zaragoza’s death, Mexican forces suffered setbacks, Mexico City fell, and Napoleon III installed a Frenchman, Emperor Maximillian, as his puppet. By 1867 the ill-fated Maximillian was ousted and President Juarez back in power. Historians have speculated that without the Mexican victory at Puebla, the French probably would have recognized the Confederacy and the American Civil War might have had a different outcome.

Tom Wolfe’s novel “A Man in Full” (1998) takes place, for the most part, in Atlanta, and the African-American mayor bears a large resemblance to Mayor Maynard Jackson, who served between 1974 and 1982 and again in the 1990s. Both were members of the city’s black elite, graduates of Morehouse State and members of the same fraternity.  Jackson, son of a preacher and a university professor, is credited with expanding Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport into the nation’s busiest and establishing affirmative action guidelines that led to more minority policemen and other municipal workers. As I learned from the “Atlanta Child Murders” documentary, however, the vast majority of Atlanta’s black residents found the quality of their lives, if anything, deteriorating in the past half-century as a result of gentrification and the construction of freeways that destroyed viable black neighborhoods.

Wolfe’s most appealing, albeit tragic, character is blue-collar worker Conrad Hensley.  His parents were old hippies who raised their son in a squalid domicile that reeked of pot and unwashed dishes piled high in the sink.  A high school teacher convinced Conrad to attend college, where a prof poked fun at a bourgeois lifestyle that sounded idyllic to Conrad.  Forced to quit school when a Catholic girlfriend got pregnant and refused to abort the fetus, he went to work for a food conglomerate, filling out meat orders in a refrigerator car dubbed “the suicide freezer unit.”  The job conditions were deplorable, but the pay adequate.  He was saving toward a down payment on a house in the suburbs when laid off on the very day he saved a coworker’s life – one of the many self-described crash ‘n’ burners.  When the flunky assistant night manager delivered the news, the man whose life Conrad had saved told him:
    Who’s the shit fer brains, Nick?  You’re laying off the best man in this whole fucking Place?  He was gonna buy a condo, Nick.  He’s got a wife and two kids!  He’s worth more’n the whole buncha you fuckin’ neckties put together!”
No matter. The die had been cast.

In an HBO documentary the great Studs Terkel claimed he didn’t consider himself an oral historian but rather an intimate interviewer and conversationalist.  Blacklisted while hosting a successful TV program during the McCarthy Red Scare for failing to say he had been duped into signing petitions against racism and economic inequality that had the endorsement of the Communist Party, he went on to have a 45-year career on a Chicago radio station and write acclaimed books on American history from the bottom up on the Great Depression, World War II, and many other subjects.  When a school board attempted to censor “Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do,” he attended a jam-packed school board meeting and convinced the board to change its position.  He told one critic he was interested in understanding why someone would read a 700-page book simply looking for so-called dirty words. Born in 1912, the year, he said, that the “Titanic” sank and he rose, he died at age 96 and expressed the wish that his epitaph read: “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”