As you say, a more populist government in the late 19th Century would probably favor the
real.
I don't really follow your reasoning about what would lower or raise anyone's inflation rates in any particular time frame. OTL the stagflation of the 1970s was a disease of the whole capitalist world (perhaps Japan riding it out with the least overall disruption, but there is a whole lot I don't know about the details of the Japanese economy). But of course while all nations suffered to some extent or other, some were merely having a bit of irritation, while others were coming pretty much unglued. The latter I suppose were countries with weak and unstable bases for general prosperity and the former were the richer and perhaps more soundly based.
Now the whole charm of the TL people here want you to continue is that Mexico does better; among other things it is bigger, and contains some particularly desirable real estate that OTL we Yankees grabbed; that land includes substantial mineral resources but also is host to the modern OTL USA's second city that played a particularly important role during the post-WWII era, having already established itself as a dream capital of the world via Hollywood. If Mexico has this and half the Bay Area too, and also other sites like coastal Sonora that might do better if
el Lobo feroz del Norte is much farther away and not sucking the Colorado River dry, then broadly speaking we might suppose the whole country ought to be doing better than OTL in any given era.
Vice versa, the USA here has suffered twice in the mid-19th Century, first gaining little from the attack on Mexico compared to OTL, and then suffering the permanent loss of the secessionist states. Ergo it might reasonably be expected that whatever the symptoms of disease in world capitalism are in any decade after 1860, the ATL rump USA will be more likely to show them than OTL. So, yeah, lower inflation of the
peso or
real, higher of the dollar.
But management, governance and policy have a lot to do with it too. I frankly didn't really accept that the USA in your TL would fail to recapture the secessionist states. OTOH that they would leave Mexico alone after one tussle made fair sense.
Unless one assumes capitalist global developments are zero sum games, I didn't see why Mexico's gain must be at the USA's expense. Except of course in the obvious sense that the sweeping territories the
Yanquis grabbed OTL must mostly or entirely remain in Mexican hands. But the territorial balance is by no means the whole storiy, and half a century or more after a conflict over it, particularly one that proves to be mostly a push territorially, the relationship between the nations may be much better. Or even worse of course!
Anyway you've told us this particular TL is not going forward, instead a new one based on an earlier POD. In that TL, which North American countries are winners, which losers, is all up in the air again. I would guess that once again the United States fails to wrest as much territory from Mexico as OTL, but the circumstances might be different--say, instead of starting a war and doing less well, the two nations might avoid ever coming to blows by behaving with mutual correctness. Or vice versa the two might be at each other like rabid weasels, and this might prove better for Mexico if the Yankees go off half cocked, prematurely--it might force the evolution of suitable institutions and habits in Mexico early on, before the Yankees can muster overwhelming strength. Good government might lead to periods of darkness and regression, bad government might eventually lead to the phoenix-like rebirth of one nation or another in a much more suitable form.
A funny thing by the way--you tell me the
real was the coinage of the poor majority, and the choice of the
peso instead was part of what turned the masses against Diaz OTL. Well and good-- but doesn't the word "
real" mean "royal?"
According to Google Translate it can, though a meaning similar to the English word appears to take precedence. So the coin, assuming modern Mexican Spanish in the ATL evolved as OTL, would have a name that resonates both with "truth" and "royalty, king."
It would be most natural to have this coin in a kingdom then. A republic, particularly a plebeian populist one, might find it a bit dissonant to keep that name, though it also has the connotation of being "solid, reliable."
The easiest situation would be if there were a monarchy that had strong populist roots, which is hardly a contradiction in terms. In his famous "Brumiare" essay on the seizure of power from the French Second Republic by Louis Bonaparte aka "Napoleon III," Karl Marx asserted that when the majority of the working class public remains as an agrarian peasantry, not concentrated in large masses in big urban/industrial settings but scattered in small settlements across the land, populism can only practically take the form of superposing an all-powerful dictator taken to be the champion of these rural masses. This is a rather dogmatic claim he makes of course, but it certainly helps us understand why pre-industrial mass democracy would be rare and unstable and of brief duration, easily overlooked completely, and also gives insight into the power of a monarchy.
Seen in that light we can identify for instance how the Romanov Tsars of Russia were able to maintain their position; proverbially among the Russian peasantry, the Tsar was their champion, their "Little Father," and the various miseries of the tyranny they lived under were attributed to corrupt local magnates that they had to deal with every day. The assumption was that if only someone could inform the Tsar of the abuses the common people suffered, he would of course swiftly and firmly rectify them immediately, but alas the Tsar was far away and the local oppressors shrewd and vigilant to safeguard their evil corruptions.
Similar attitudes developed in the time of Stalin in the USSR--that problems, when they were not to be attributed to saboteurs in the thrall of the foreign bourgeoise, stemmed from unworthy "Little Stalins."
And again in the Third Reich many people assumed their problems stemmed from "Little Hitlers," and again if the true Fuehrer only knew or weren't tied down by a million distractions, he'd set things right again.
It is then a common situation.
So perhaps there could be a Mexican Napoleon, a leader that the common people believed was drawn from their ranks and was in sympathy with their interests. In reality such a figure would probably actually give real priority to much more elite strata of society, in fact favor proto-
cientifiguos, but since to make Mexico effective in the modern 19th century it would often be necessary to reform these ranks which would probably make him controversial and disliked in those circles, the popular perception would be that he is a ruler of the common people and their champion; it clearly is not too hard to pull off this myth.
It would be helpful if this person were truly the Napoleonic figure Santa Anna fancied himself to be. Such a leader in ascendency between 1830 and 1860 would perhaps be able to hold off Yanqui aggression, and such a crisis would clearly tend to cement the power of such a dynasty were it effectively run, on the battlefield and in enabling an evolving industrial system in Mexico.
As long as the myth held, it would be quite natural to elide the two connotations of the Spanish name of the
real coin; royalty meaning this populist dynasty and "real" in the English sense signifying the solidity and trustworthiness of the coin.
Now the trouble is, that if such a figure were to found a dynasty resting on a populist myth but actually enabling the liberalization of Mexico, in the sense of opening it up to developing capitalism, as the masses are proletarianized the myth will start to lose its tarnish, as class consciousness rises and polemical attacks on the regime root and branch become more and more common and popular. If Mexico later undergoes a truly populist revolution, the "
real" name would be discredited. This might merely require that the name of the coin be changed, to something suitably republican, though it is highly likely that amid the turmoil of such a revolution it would also plummet in value and need to be replaced completely once the new regime can stabilize itself.
Another possible path is that Mexico never produces quite so dashing and mesmerizing a figure, and instead a rough and ready, flawed but progressing democratic ethos develops gradually and Mexico never gives itself over to royalism in any form.
I can imagine, by analogy, that in the British American colonies over the early 18th century, a British coin called "the crown" becomes dominant, that with decent financial management it displaces the hodgepodge of mostly foreign coinage in circulation OTL, including "dollars" (derived from the German word "
thaler") so that when events run otherwise as OTL, and the Patriots have their day and eventually win republican independence for the former colonies, nevertheless even people with strong Patriot credentials cling to the idea that a proper currency is called "the crown" and after the financial crises of the Articles of Confederation period, the new Federally backed money under the 1787 Constitution is called "the American Crown" despite the obvious and grating dissonance with Patriotic republicanism and anti-Tory sentiment.
But of course this is a very far long shot; it seems far more likely that if late Colonial sentiment puts much store by the British Crown, that the revolutionary states and Continental Congress will, despite the hotness of the crisis, institute state and Continental "Crowns" and then the inevitable crises will tarnish and eventually damn the half-baked units, and the new Constitution will usher in a brand new coinage with a fully anti-royalist name and decimal organization; if the ATL fails to provide a neutral, pragmatic seeming term such as "dollar," the young federal republic would introduce some rather high-flown and inspirational name just as the later French revolutionaries discarded the "
livre" (like the Spanish
Peso or the British Pound, the name alludes to a weight in the range of a pound) and eventually arrived at the patriotically named "
franc." By and large European coinage tends to conservative names, going either for very traditional medieval derived money names, or for royalist ones ("
kroner" for instance) so revolutionary, chauvinist national names are the exception. If the young USA were denied the option of a neutral, sensibly traditional name I suppose the new unit, named with patriotic fervor, might be something like "columbine" or "columbian," which would carry over the letter C from Crown, maybe adopt a version of the "franc" as say "frank." Or of course just use something like "dollar" or "penny" or something like that.
Maybe--to carry off the coup of the USA "crown," the Revolutionary and Articles era governments forthrightly refuse to mint or accept "crowns" and the fancy new or old alternate names are in vogue, and it is these that suffer from desperate and half-baked policies, and they tarnish the reputation of alternate currencies, and so the pro-Constitution faction also champion the establishment of a solid, reliable new US currency--which as part of their general conservative inclinations in the American context, the "Crown" is re-established on republican terms by the new 1788 government under Washington. (The coins and banknotes bear images of Columbia wearing a crown, to establish that no mortal, not even the great Washington, actually wears the crown).
Now if the
real is truly loved and respected in Mexico, its name might perhaps weather an anti-royalist crisis, and as the initial revolution against Spanish rule drops into the past and no new Mexican dynasty seriously threatens to establish itself with any stability, even a possible Napoleon expy being limited at most to republican titles such as "consul," then the traditional aspect of the coin would tend to gradually dilute any royalist overtones, and financial reformers seeking to decimalize the coinage in the name of the welfare of the republic might not blink at basing it on the respectable and stable
real.
I don't know, the name still seems too darn unrepublican to me to last into the 21st century.
If Mexico is a successful monarchy then there is no problem at all, of course. I'd feel a bit queasy about that myself, but as a
Yanqui I don't suppose anyone is asking me.
