The grito de independencia is supposed to be a moment of national unity. Every September 15, at 11 p.m., the President of Mexico steps onto the balcony of the National Palace, rings the same bell Father Miguel Hidalgo rang in 1810, and shouts "¡Viva México!" to a crowd of thousands packed into the Zócalo. The crowd roars back. It is a ritual of belonging, a collective exhale.
This year, something was different. And not just in Mexico.
Across the border, in American cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to San Antonio, Mexican Americans gathered in parks and plazas to reenact the grito. But the mood was not celebratory. It was defiant. And that should worry anyone who believes in the American project.
The grito is not just a Mexican holiday. It has become, for millions of Americans of Mexican descent, a way of saying: we are here, we are not leaving, and we will not be erased. That is a legitimate sentiment. But the way it is being expressed increasingly carries an edge—a rejection not just of assimilation but of the very idea that America is a shared home.
I watched a livestream from a plaza in East Los Angeles. A young woman in a folklórico dress led the crowd in the grito. Between "¡Viva México!" she added, "¡Viva la raza!" The crowd cheered. No one said "¡Viva Estados Unidos!" No one said anything about the country they actually live in, pay taxes in, and whose laws protect their right to assemble.
This is the quiet crisis of American civic life. We have stopped asking people to love this country. We have stopped teaching them why they should. And in the vacuum, ethnic pride has filled the space—not as a supplement to American identity, but as a replacement for it.
The grito is a beautiful tradition. It commemorates a priest who stood up to colonial tyranny. It is not, in itself, anti-American. But rituals take on the meaning of their context. When a community gathers on American soil to shout for another nation's independence and says nothing about the nation that shelters them, something is off.
Sociologists call this "segmented assimilation"—the idea that immigrants and their children integrate not into the American mainstream but into a permanent ethnic underclass. That was once a fringe theory. Now it is the lived reality of millions. We have created a country where you can live your entire life in Spanish, marry within your ethnic group, work in an ethnic enclave, and never once feel that America is yours. That is not diversity. That is balkanization.
And it is not just Mexican Americans. Every immigrant group has its own version of the grito—a moment of nostalgia that becomes a substitute for patriotism. St. Patrick's Day, Lunar New Year, Diwali. These are fine as cultural celebrations. But when they become the primary way people express collective identity, the American idea withers.
The grito de independencia is not the problem. The problem is that we no longer have a grito of our own—a shared ritual that says: this is our country, all of us, together. We have holidays for every subgroup but none for the whole. We have pride for every heritage but shame for the one that binds us.
So go ahead. Shout "¡Viva México!" this September. But ask yourself: when was the last time you shouted for America? Not out of jingoism, not out of denial, but out of genuine love for the flawed, striving, unfinished project that is this nation. If you can't remember, that's not a Mexican problem. That's an American one.