> Yup. I don't really know where Cinco de Mayo awareness begins in terms of geography, but at *least* New England down to Virginia is largely unaware of this holiday, and I believe that unawareness extends down to Georgia (don't know about Florida) and into the midwest as well. This is possibly because there are very few Mexicans in this chunk of the country.

As a longtime Floridian, I can pretty much say that no one here really cares much about Cinco de Mayo. True, we have a lot of Mexicans, but on that token we also have a lot of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other types of Hispanics. That's not to mention Afro-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and of course the quintessential Caucasians, making Florida perhaps the most melting-potish state of the fifty. The ethnic groups are fairly well divided, though, as the crime-and-poverty-ridden streets of Miami are vastly different from the urbane manicured lawns and iron-gated mansions of Sarasota, for example. And then you've got college towns, swamplands, forests, beaches, metropolises, and ghettos strategically placed in the middle of nowhere. Throw in a major tourist/snowbird industry and you've got a very broad mixture. But I digress. Back to my main point...

Nobody I've ever known has been familiar with Cinco de Mayo. I've heard the term on TV before but never knew what it was, so I had to go on the Internet to find out. Oh, it sounds like an interesting part of history. I never had any idea that people actually *celebrated* it though. What do they do? Barbecues? Just get drunk and tell stupid jokes? Hmm. It sounds a bit like Mardi Gras. It seems to me that battle reinactments would be a tad more appropriate for the occasion.

Keep in mind that I'm natively from Michigan (very few people, you see, were actually born in Florida) and nobody up there really knows about Cinco de Mayo either. So that should add a little perspective to our geographic mapping of the holiday.

As far as the Kentucky Derby, yeah, most people here know what it is but as far as I'm concerned no one really cares about it. I live outside of Ocala, the "Horse Capital of the World," but I think the ranchers around here are more interested in horse shows and rodeos than races. As for me, I really have no personal interest in horses (though I think they make a great hobby for other more outdoor-inclined individuals).

-useless"I thought Mayo was the stuff you put on turkey sandwiches"ness