Captioned Photos # 4 – Cinco de Mayo

Captioned Photos # 4 – Cinco de Mayo

*

Pictured Left : “Upholding the Constitution, Poetry  for Legal Military and Law Enforcement”

Available in Kindle Unlimited

Original poetry celebrating the people who defend our right to live by the rule of law: police officers, service personnel, firemen, and yes, even lawyers. 😉

A constitution is an articulated document defining how a group of people have decided they are live by.

May all the people who strive for a life of peace and fairness and opportunity, whether in Mexico, the U.S., or anywhere else int he world, benefit from their own constitution as they originally desired.

***

“the intent of this blog is to incrementally build a body of thought that works toward integrating various topics, yoga, fitness, and the arts – it’s a process…”

---

Fitness ** Arts ** eBooks

***

Captioned Photos # 4

Cinco de Mayo

**

*

Cinco de Mayo, when a small Mexican army defeated the French in 1862, is quite a festive event and time here in my native home of Texas.

The Wikipedia article linked to above has an extremely interesting segment of the threads of history this battle on May 5th had for the Americas, saying in part :

“…since the Battle of Puebla, no country in the Americas has subsequently been invaded by any other European military force.”

“‘Public memory of the Cinco de Mayo was socially, and deliberately, constructed during the American Civil War by Latinos responding to events and changes around them,’ says historian David E. Hayes-Bautista. ‘The Cinco de Mayo is not, in its origins, a Mexican holiday at all but rather an American one, created by Latinos in California in the middle of the 19th century.’ ^[49] The key events were taking place in Mexico in response to a French invasion.’”

*

But this is also usually a mixed, pensive time of review for me.

Being a second generation American, I grew up fully assimilating the culture and beliefs my grandparents risked their lives leaving Mexico, to provide for all of us who followed.  My wife, ironically, is also second generation American, with her grand folks coming from Canada.

It’s nice we met up and clicked with such common essential histories from such disparate other cultures.

But we recognized an intense similarity of values within each other.

And that may be the true and final meaning for me from Cinco de Mayo : there is some essential core in all people that makes us more alike than different.

And the challenge, it seems, is accepting and enjoying our differences, while retaining our essential similarities.

Choking off any people’s freedom in their peaceful pursuit of happiness, whether in another land or within one’s own, has not proven to be an enduring or acceptable answer.

Thus, we celebrate victories that return us to that state of freedom we seem to have been born with.  Something our own constitution, here in the United States, recognized from the beginning.

*

The image above, of my Dad (viewer’s left) and his best friend, an uncle of mine, was a difficult one for me to choose for this holiday – though not as difficult, apparently, as seen in the image, of his soon-after decision to move us from the valley in Texas to Houston.

Freedom brings opportunity and choices.  Not all of them are easy, even if desirable.

I will always be grateful for the doors he made available for myself and my brothers and sisters to choose from and open, by moving us to Houston.  Much as my Dad himself was grateful, I believe, via things he told me when I was a young child, for the doors his own parents, my grandparents, gave him, by coming to the United States.

And whatever the problems were that led my grandparents here to Texas from Mexico, with their own lineages to both Spain and the native Indian cultures in Mexico, I have no doubts that the victory of freedom on the Cinco de Mayo, with its promise of the opportunity to live a better life, was a vital seed in the development of my grandparents’ own sense of freedom and opportunity, and thus their decision, to leave Mexico, and merge into this vast culture I am so very glad to be an integral part of.

Happy Cinco de Mayo all 😉

*

Related articles

• Captioned Photos # 3 – National Physical Fitness and Sports Month! (felipeadanlerma.com)
• The Day I Wed My Kids’ Step-Mom … Original Poetry by Felipe Adan Lerma (felipeadanlerma.com)
• Happy Father’s Day Dad, Original Poetry (felipeadanlerma.com)
• “Grandma” – Original Family Poetry (felipeadanlerma.com)