OXNARD : Cinco de Mayo Festivities Are Held at College

To historians, May 5 is the anniversary of the Mexican army’s triumph over invading French forces in 1882.

But to some Mexican-American students at Oxnard College, the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration is a chance to reminisce about their homeland.

“It brings me memories of Mexico,” 19-year-old Gloria Arredondo said as she sat on the college lawn watching the school’s Grupo Folklorico Mestizo dance to traditional Mexican music.

Besides Grupo Folklorico, the daylong event Thursday included performances by mariachi and quebradita dance troupes, and a chance for youngsters to break a toy-filled pinata.

“It’s just like having a little bit of Mexico right here,” said 21-year-old Salvador Hermosillo, who moved from Mexico to Oxnard five years ago.

A member of the MEChA club that sponsors the college’s Cinco de Mayo festivities said the main purpose of the event is to remind Mexican-American students where they come from.

“We’re being assimilated further and further from who we are,” said Demetrio Silva, president of the student government and a member of the college’s Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA. Through Cinco de Mayo, “we can identify with our cultural roots.”

But some people at the event wondered whether certain performances truly represented Mexico’s cultural roots.

Toward the end of the afternoon, about a dozen young people dressed in jeans and T-shirts packed the small stage for a quebradita dance, a sort of fast-paced version of country-Western.

“I like it,” said Ingrid Munguia, a student who sat with her two young children near the stage. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate for Cinco de Mayo. It’s a modern kind of dance.”

But Enrique Luna, one of the leaders of the dance troupe, said the quebradita is a very old dance that was once popular among farmers in Mexico’s poor rural areas.

The dance had been dying out until recently, Luna said, when it became trendy among young people in Mexico and the United States. And the revival of the quebradita shows, Luna said, “that our roots are not dying.”