AHA! So it was a reckless, unilateral foreign adventure without the approval of the United Nations. Interesting that Kerry would praise it. He was in VietNam, you know.
Does Kerry's statement even make sense? It seems to be along the line of "Today, as we celebrate the military defeat of the French, we can reflect on the fact that hispanic teens are a bunch of high school dropouts with poor health care coverage."
Good lord, where did you get THAT idea?
It was, in fact, the French being defeated by the Mexicans in 1862. No Spanish involved at all.
Interestingly it appears it really isn't that big of a deal in Mexico (Mexican Independence Day is a bigger deal there) but it's mostly a Mexican-American thing.
The French came back with a much bigger force the next year and reached Mexico City and installed a puppet emperor.
A lot of Mexican-American sites make a big deal about the Battle of Puebla delaying French control of Mexico long enough to keep Napoleon III from using Mexico as a base to aid the Confederates and thus was key to the Union winning the Civil War, but you always have to be suspicious about such things.
After the Civil War was over we sent Phil Sheridan and 50,000 Union Veterans to the Rio Grande and politely suggested to the French that they might want to stop fooling around in Mexico and started mumbling about the Monroe Doctrine, so the French left and then the Mexicans overthrew the puppet emperor. Our threats had more to do with getting rid of the French for the Mexicans than the Mexicans did, really.
The end of a long history of the French fooling around in Mexico, before Puebla the French briefly intervened to get compensation for a French Pastry Bakery being destroyed in the "Pastry War"...this is when Santa Anna famously lost his leg, and was one of the few non-embarrasing episodes in Santa Anna's military career (but, of course, it was against the French.)