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5 May 2002 - The San Diego Union-Tribune
Hijacking Cinco de Mayo

By Jim Gogek

‘Nuestra Cultura No Se Vende’
(Our culture is not for sale)
Jovita Hurtado and other San Diego community activists had just begun planning a new kind of Cinco de Mayo festival when she got a call from a marketing manager at a major American brewery. He offered Jovita $10,000 to help with the festival, as long as the company could set up a booth and advertise its beer with banners and other fanfare. Jovita said no thanks, because this was an alcohol-free event. "He was surprised," she said. "He said, 'but this is Cinco de Mayo!' Then he wanted to take me to lunch and talk about it. He said this kind of event would be very hard to raise money for, except from the beer industry. He said his company could help take a load off our shoulders."

Jovita told him no. No, no, no. This festival was not Cinco de Mayo. It was Cinco de Mayo Con Orgullo – Cinco de Mayo with Pride - - one of a small but growing number of holiday events trying to buck the alcohol industry's exploitation of Latinos and Latino culture. Most people think of Cinco de Mayo as a drinking holiday, because that's what it's become. The heavy marketing of alcohol around May 5 is as American as chips and salsa. Finally, though, some people are getting sick of it, and of the catastrophic toll of alcohol abuse in the Latino community.

The effort began in 1997, when a group of Latino health and prevention advocates met in Oakland to begin the liberation of Cinco de Mayo from the alcohol industry. Today, about a dozen alcohol- free Cinco de Mayo events are celebrated around the state, the largest in San Diego, a parade and festival held yesterday in Logan Heights and Chicano Park. The battle cry of these groups is "Nuestra Cultura No Se Vende – Our Culture Is Not For Sale," which is exactly what this holiday has been for many years.

Carnage of alcohol abuse
Jovita Hurtado used to be one of the party girls drinking in the packed bars around Old Town every Cinco de Mayo. Her favorite drink was a potent liqueur marketed to Latinos; the ads drew her to the bars, she said. But the bartenders soon starting pouring shots of tequila, and then the drinking contests began. Bartenders knew that contests were a big thing for Latinos, she said. It's not just the breweries and distillers that exploit Latinos and Cinco de Mayo, it's the bars, restaurants and wholesalers, too.

Cinco de Mayo parties ended predictably, Hurtado remembered, in fights, drunken driving arrests, girlfriends getting beaten up by boyfriends. Violence often plagues these festivities. The giant party in San Jose has had problems for years. In Los Angeles, the SWAT team had to be called out when a drunken riot broke out at one Cinco de Mayo festival. Eighteen years ago, Hurtado's fiancée died in a drunken driving car crash after partying on Cinco de Mayo night. She stopped drinking shortly after that.

The carnage caused by alcohol in the Latino community is truly startling. Such loss of life and health by any other cause in any other community would be labeled a crisis and politicians would make it a major issue. But the alcohol industry is strong and the Latino community is politically weak, so nobody says much about it. There may be a few alcohol-free Cinco de Mayo events, but the vast number of celebrations are still Drinko de Mayo.

But consider this: The death rate for cirrhosis of the liver is 2.5 times higher for Latinos than for whites, and it's apparently even higher for Mexican and Mexican-American men than for Latinos in general. Homicides and violent crimes are the fifth-leading cause of death among Latinos, the 15th leading cause for whites. Several studies show that alcohol is linked to about half of all murders. Meanwhile, alcohol advertising aimed at Latinos is rising. In 1996, the top three domestic brewers spent a total of $26 million advertising to Latinos. By 2001, each one was spending nearly that much.

Booze marketing bonanza
Cinco de Mayo has been pumped up by alcohol advertising into a major holiday. But, in fact, it's not a major holiday at all in Mexico. It's mainly celebrated in the state of Puebla, where it commemorates the Mexican army's defeat of French invaders on May 5, 1862. The Mexican Independence Day on Sept. 16 is far more popular in Mexico, but not in American saloons.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicano Movement in the United States began heralding Cinco de Mayo as emblematic of the struggle for equality and social justice against oppression, mirroring the civil rights struggle by African Americans. When the movement diminished in the 1970s, Cinco de Mayo transformed into a cultural holiday with folkloric entertainment and Mexican food.

As these festivals grew larger, organizers began looking around for sponsors to help pay the costs. At about the same time, the alcohol industry was discovering a vast new market. The Latino population was young, a median age of 22 in the 1980s, and growing fast. A few years from now – if it hasn't happened already – Latinos will be the nation's largest minority group, with an estimated purchasing power of nearly $200 billion a year. For the alcohol industry, this rich pool of drinkers had to be tapped.

Today, few people know or care about the Battle of Puebla. And La Raza? Chicano movement? Social justice? What does that have to do with half-priced beer and margaritas? Cinco de Mayo has turned into one of the top sales periods of the year for the alcohol industry. However, the total amount of alcohol advertising aimed at Latinos today is almost impossible to tally. New direct marketing strategies are being unveiled all the time.

But then there's the indirect marketing, such as beer companies' sponsorship of Latin music festivals and low-rider car shows. And there are alcohol displays in grocery stores and convenience stores designed with Latinos in mind. There are humanitarian and sports causes, such as Budweiser's millions of dollars in donations to the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, Coors' funding of videos and literacy classes for recent Mexican immigrants and Miller's sponsorship of the Mexican National Soccer Team and various educational programs. Meanwhile, many alcohol companies readily hire and promote Latinos, and are consistently listed among the most Latino-friendly industries by Hispanic magazine. And there's the direct donations of millions of dollars to prominent national Latino organizations.

The insidiousness of all this alcohol industry money aimed at Latinos is disturbing if you think about it, although most people don't think about it. But the blatant stereotyping and perversion of Mexican culture in many ad campaigns is flatly disgusting. A tequila ad shows a blender making margaritas on top of a Mayan pyramid at Chichen Itza, which is akin to using the Western Wall in Jerusalem to sell liquor. A beer ad shows half-naked models wrapped in bandoleras and other symbols of the revolutionary struggle, which would be like inserting half-naked women into an illustration of the Declaration of Independence signing and using it to sell whiskey.

Once, in the United States, a small brewer tried to market Crazy Horse beer, with a Sioux warrior as its marketing image. An ensuring uproar over the exploitation of American Indians drove it off store shelves. But nobody complains about using Indian pyramids to sell tequila and beer, as long as they're Mexican pyramids. Nor does anybody complain about demeaning ethnic images such as a parrot dressed in a sombrero and serape squawking "the Drinko for Cinco" above a beer logo.

Bill Gallegos, a veteran alcohol prevention advocate in the Latino community, is among a small group of activists who does complain.

"Latinos are already either virtually invisible in mainstream media or they're portrayed negatively," said Gallegos, one of the founders of the Cinco de Mayo Con Orgullo movement. "For kids searching for a sense of identity to have one of their few acknowledged holidays hijacked by the alcohol industry, so that the overwhelming theme of your culture is not the fight against social injustice but partying and getting drunk... They take our symbols and our traditions and use them purely for the sake of market share. It's really, really bad. They shouldn't be doing this to anybody."

An alcohol epidemic
But even worse than the cultural exploitation is the sheer cost in lives and health. Studies show that on a per capita basis, Latino men consume more alcohol than white or African American men. Heavy binge drinking and drinking at an early age is higher among Latinos, particularly among Mexican and Mexican-American men.

The rates of liver cirrhosis and violent deaths linked to alcohol are staggering. While recent studies showed that Latino death rates from cirrhosis are more than twice as high as for whites, one study 25 years ago at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center found that cirrhosis accounted for 52 percent of all deaths of Mexican and Mexican-American men there. The percentage of Mexican-American drunk drivers has been going up, while for whites and African Americans, it's going down. For Mexican-Americans, 65 percent of all motor vehicle deaths were alcohol related, compared to 46 percent among whites. And more than 12 percent of violent deaths of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans occur in bars, compared to 2 percent for whites and African Americans.

What's the reason for all this? Admittedly, the problems of Mexican immigrants adapting to a new culture play some role. Without the natural protections of their native culture, particularly the social and family support networks, Mexican immigrants are learning Americans' bad habits very quickly.

At the same time, these same immigrants – and young Mexican- Americans – are being targeted by the alcohol industry because of their attractive demographic profile. Representatives of the alcohol industry don't dispute that, but they insist it doesn't cause the alcohol-related health problems.

"An ad can influence a decision about what someone will drink, what brand he will drink," said Jeff Becker, president of the Beer Institute, a lobbying group for breweries. "But what ads can't do is encourage overall consumption or encourage people to drink more than they should. There's a variety of studies out that show exactly that."

Marilyn Aguirre-Molina, a professor of public health at Columbia University and a long-time expert on Latino alcohol issues, calls that the alcohol industry's "biggest lie". "Alcohol advertising is about creating new markets, attracting new people to markets. It's about new users. Look at the ads, they're aimed at young people," she said. "Believe me, the alcohol industry knows how to develop strategies to capture the Latino community. They get it. They even hire the best Latino ad firms who know all about the culture, the right portrayals of characters in ads and all the nuances. "I only wish the public health community understood Latinos half as well as the alcohol industry."

"Blood money"
Unfortunately, while a few Latino community groups may be willing to fight back against alcohol abuse and industry exploitation, public health departments, politicians and, most regrettably, establishment Latino groups aren't interested. Research on Latinos and alcohol is very limited. Very few government-sponsored alcohol prevention programs exist on local, state or federal levels.

But most depressing is the silence on alcohol issues by mainstream Latino groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). These two organizations, whose mission is civil rights and ending discrimination, began during the Chicano movement that once revered Cinco de Mayo as a holiday celebrating social justice. But like the holiday itself, these groups and others such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) receive truckloads of money from the alcohol industry.

The three biggest domestic beer companies – Anheuser-Busch Cos., Coors Brewing Co., and Miller Brewing Co. – give millions of dollars in donations to major Latino groups. MALDEF's Los Angeles headquarters is called the MALDEF Anheuser-Busch Nonprofit Center due to the brewers's generosity. LULAC's annual conferences are festooned with beer company banners, a quid pro quo for donations to fund the conferences. Some of these organizations do address health matters such as diabetes and AIDS – but not alcohol abuse.

The director of the California Hispanic Healthcare Association, Arnoldo Torres, who's the former executive director of LULAC, calls these donations "blood money," and accuses prominent groups such as his former employer of ignoring an epidemic in the Latino community. But the organizations say they can't turn down alcohol-industry donations because nobody else is so generous.

Hope in Chicano Park
Obviously, the prominent Latino groups are not going to stand up against the alcohol industry's saturation of Latino neighborhoods, or lift a finger to fight the epidemic of alcohol abuse in the Latino community, unless pushed very hard to do so by activists such as those behind Cinco de Mayo Con Orgullo. Nor will state and federal policy-makers do anything until Latino groups and voters make it a serious political issue. It will take a lot more people like San Diego's Jovita Hurtado to bring the alcohol industry to heel and reduce the death and destruction alcohol abuse causes in the Latino community.

Maybe the Cinco de Mayo Con Orgullo festival yesterday in Chicano Park offers the only real hope. This fledgling grass-roots movement could represent a new social activism in California's Mexican- American and Mexican community, like the Chicano movement of decades ago, but this time focused on the exploitation of a culture and the health crisis it has caused.

Maybe the prominent Latino organizations can be convinced by the people they represent to stop taking money from the alcohol industry and start paying attention to alcohol-related problems in the community. And maybe public health officials and politicians in California will finally take notice and be moved to protect the fastest-growing and most ignored constituency in the Golden State.

Maybe. But so far, there's no sign that anyone beyond a few activists really cares.