MENDOCINO CO., 9/16/26 — Most celebratory months start on the first. Hispanic Heritage Month started Tuesday, Sept. 15. It is Independence Day in five countries. And it’s the night Mexico starts celebrating its own.
Five countries and a church bell
On Sept. 15, 1821, leaders meeting in Guatemala City signed the Act of Independence of Central America, breaking from Spain. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua still mark the day as their national holiday.
Mexico’s date is next on the calendar. Around 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 16, 1810, a parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo had the church bells rung in the town of Dolores, gathered his congregation and urged them to rise against Spanish rule. That call, the Grito de Dolores, started a war that ran 11 years.
Mexico now celebrates it the night before. Around 11 p.m. on Sept. 15, the president steps onto the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City, rings the same bell Hidalgo rang, calls out the names of the heroes of the war and finishes with three shouts of “¡Viva México!” to the crowd in the Zócalo, the capital’s main square. Sept. 16 is the national holiday.
Chile’s independence day is Sept. 18. Belize’s is Sept. 21. Oct. 12, the anniversary of Columbus’ 1492 landfall and Día de la Raza in some Latin American countries, lands inside the month too.
How Congress set the dates
In June 1968, Rep. George E. Brown, a Southern California Democrat, introduced a resolution asking the president to proclaim the week including Sept. 15 and 16 as National Hispanic Heritage Week every year. Congress passed it. President Lyndon Johnson signed it Sept. 17, 1968.
Twenty years later, Congress stretched the week into a month, and President Ronald Reagan signed that in August 1988. It has run Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 ever since.
Who’s celebrating here
About 25,000 people in Mendocino County are Hispanic or Latino, close to 28% of the county, according to the Census Bureau’s 2020-2024 American Community Survey. The law says Hispanic. The Census asks about both words. Here they mean nearly the same people.
Nine in 10 trace their roots to Mexico. That makes Sept. 16 the big day here.
The rest are smaller communities, and they’re here too. The survey counts a few hundred residents with roots in Central America and a few hundred more from South America, plus Puerto Ricans, Cubans and about 1,400 people in the survey’s “other Hispanic” group, most of whom said Spaniard or Spanish. Salvadorans and Nicaraguans are the largest Central American groups. For groups that small, the survey’s numbers are rough.
Spanish is the language at home for about 16,000 county residents, nearly one in five people age 5 and older. Most of them told the survey that they also speak English very well.
Where to celebrate
Fiesta Latina enlivens downtown Fort Bragg, from 3 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26, on Franklin at Laurel streets. The listing promises music, Latin American food, folklórico dancing and a salsa contest with prizes for the best salsa makers. The city is putting it on, with Flockworks, a Fort Bragg arts group, as a partner.
The fiesta started in 2024. Last year the Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund and the Latino Coalition of the Mendocino Coast helped run it, and more than 850 people came, Flockworks reported in its newsletter.
Ukiah scheduled its celebration earlier. El Periódico Al Punto, the Spanish-language newspaper, and Ukiah Vecinos en Acción, a Latino civic group, set a free Fiestas Patrias celebration on Sunday, Sept. 6, at Alex Thomas Plaza, with food from local vendors and music and dance by local performers. The Redwood Coast Regional Center was one of the sponsors.
Then what is Cinco de Mayo?
Cinco de Mayo isn’t Mexico’s Independence Day. May 5 marks one battle, the 1862 Mexican victory over French troops at Puebla, and it isn’t a federal holiday in Mexico. Sept. 16 is the real deal.
Towns across Mexico and Mexican consulates abroad run the same script as the president: a bell, the names of the heroes, three shouts of “¡Viva México!”, the national anthem and fireworks. In Mexico City, the fireworks go off to traditional Mexican music.
The dish of the season, made in August and early September when pomegranates ripen, is chiles en nogada: poblano chiles stuffed with picadillo, a mix of minced meat, fruit and spices, under a white walnut sauce and scattered with pomegranate seeds. Green, white and red, the colors of the flag.
When Johnson proclaimed that first week in 1968, the reason for the dates went into the proclamation itself: “our five Central American neighbors celebrate their Independence Day on the fifteenth of September and the Republic of Mexico on the sixteenth.”