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David Hayes-Bautista
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2012, 304pp., $28.95,
ISBN: 978-0520272132 (paperback)
Who knew that David Hayes-Bautista, renowned medical researcher and pioneer of Latino health research, was meant to be a historian? This admirer of Dr. Hayes-Bautista's paradigm-setting research on trends in Latino health and health research began to read this, his latest book, indulgently. He would not be the first scholar to reach a certain stage of his career, and resting on well-earned laurels and the comfort of tenure and elite academic status, undertake a dilettantish foray into uncharted disciplinary terrain. It is rare that the fruit of such a venture is as remarkable as El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition . It is a wonderful book that rather than seeming like a departure for Professor Hayes-Bautista, makes one wonder whether he rather should have been a historian in the first place.
The book is an impressive tour de force historiographical study of the genesis and growth of the Cinco de Mayo holiday in California in the mid-nineteenth century. Building on his 2004 book, La Nueva California (UC Press), a health-oriented history of Latinos in the Golden State, Hayes-Bautista here definitively puts on a historian's hat and vividly recounts the production of a pan-Latino identity in the gold camps and ranchos of recently post-Guadalupe-Hidalgo California. Having grown up in California in a time when the history discussed here was completely jettisoned from official K-12 curriculum (similar to...