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Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist, and feminist whose work over six decades unflinchingly addressed power, identity, injustice, and the fierce human impulse to keep going regardless. She won the National Book Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Medal of Arts — the last of which she famously refused from President Clinton in protest of U.S. policies. She was not interested in comfort. She was interested in truth, and in the people who keep showing up to do the necessary work of the world without recognition or reward.

The Battle of Puebla was not supposed to be won. The Mexican army was outnumbered, outgunned, and facing one of the most formidable military forces in the world. They won anyway — not through extraordinary power, but through extraordinary will. Rich's poem captures exactly that spirit: the people who, age after age, refuse to accept that destruction is the final word. Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of resistance, of the stubborn human insistence on reconstituting what has been torn apart. Rich spent her life writing about those people. This is their quote.