What is celebrated in America is a sales promotion, not a heritage

The argument

The case against begins with a distinction between an occasion and its American version. Opponents argue that the day as kept in the United States was built largely by drink marketing, which found in it a licence to sell and supplied the imagery, the slogans and the reason to go out. On this account the thing being celebrated is not Mexican heritage at all but a commercial event that borrowed a Mexican name, and the question of whether to celebrate it is therefore not a question about respecting a culture. The mechanism opponents describe is substitution. Once a promotion establishes what a day looks like, that becomes the day for most of the public, and the heritage content it displaced has no route back. Opponents argue this is visible in what the occasion now consists of for the majority who mark it, which is an evening of discounted drinks rather than any engagement with the history or the community the name belongs to. A heritage observance that has been emptied in this way, they argue, no longer honours anything; it merely uses a culture as decoration for commerce. Opponents are careful to say that the objection is not to Mexican culture or to its public presence. It is that a culture is poorly served by having its name attached to an occasion it does not control, whose content is set by what sells and whose principal beneficiaries are the companies selling it. The conclusion they draw is that the day as it exists should not be celebrated, and that genuine recognition of Mexican American heritage would have to be built on something the community itself defines.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents reply that commercialisation is the common fate of popular holidays and has never been thought to disqualify them. Occasions of religious and national origin alike are now surrounded by promotion, and nobody concludes that they should be abandoned; the usual response is to hold the meaning alongside the commerce. They add that the premise concedes the day's reach, which is the one thing a heritage observance most needs, and that a widely kept occasion can be reclaimed and redirected by the community whose name it carries, whereas an abolished one cannot.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A promotion may have amplified an occasion it did not create, in which case the heritage content is original and the commerce secondary. [Rejecting P2] Holidays of religious and national origin have repeatedly been commercialised and then partly reclaimed, so displacement is not irreversible. [Rejecting P3] An occasion with reach can be redirected by the community it names, which is an advantage over having no occasion at all. [Rejecting C] The premises support reforming how the day is kept rather than ceasing to keep it.