DBWI AHC screw Mexico

This is a tough challenge. The Mexican Empire is, after all, one of the most powerful nations on earth. Perhaps it's best to start at the beginning?
 
Have Jorge Bush win the 2000 presidential election. By the time that pendejo was done, Mexicans would be sneaking north instead of gringos sneaking south.
 
Impossible. Mexico is easy mode:

  • Geography: Protected from invasion by two vast oceans, and "thin" enough to manage territories along both coasts from the center without much issue. Additionally, the Mexican Caribbean historically served as a shield against European adventures, as the 1922 German-Mexican War showed.
  • Neighbors: The Southern Border with Colombia is short and the Darien Rainforest makes it all but impassable, even if Colombia and Mexico weren't BFF. The Northern Border is one of the longest in the world but on the other side there's like 7 or 8 separate countries which are weak and subservient to amount any threat, and there's little chance of North America producing a single unified power to challenge Imperial dominamce without a 1600 POD.
 
This is a tough challenge. The Mexican Empire is, after all, one of the most powerful nations on earth. Perhaps it's best to start at the beginning?

Not quite that tough, TBH, depending on the POD. The Mexican Empire was actually somewhat weak and/or unstable at several points in its history; for one of the biggest example, the country's government nearly outright collapsed during The Troubles in the mid 1950s, with the Anglo & Irish separatists in northern + eastern Tejas(some of them descended from those fleeing the collapse of American Federation of Sovereign States[1]), the Chinese in much of coastal Alta California and ethnic Germans and Austrians in Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, etc., amongst certain others, protesting for various reasons[2], as well as a majorly bad recession, and it took a massive amount of foreign aid-some from Canada but also Japan, Brazil, France, Italy and two dozen other countries, just to finally stabilize the situation, and then you had the independence movements (and the Mormon unification movements, also a bit of an issue for Cascadia too) of the '60s, all of which caused further headaches of their own.

Honestly, were it not for Empress Teresa's much needed reforms, Mexico might not be the prosperous & highly influential nation that it is today.

[1]Yes, that slavery-defending abomination of a nation. Not all of those fleeing where dedicated slaveholders, true, but even so.....

[2]Mexico was a pretty troubled place back then. It's too complicated for me to articulate all at once right now, but historian Veronica Robles helped put up a vast library of GlobeNet accessible resources at the University of Mexico City back in the late '90s. Here's the link.

OOC: To expand further, some more ideas.

[1]Broke away from the Federated States in 1871 over slavery, but dissolved in 1917 after several years of internal turmoil; three of the countries which border Mexico on it's northern flank are here ITTL-the Louisiana Free State, the Free State of Arkansas, and the Confederacy of the Four Nations, were once part of it's territory. All are democracies, Louisiana and the CFN being particularly close to Mexico.

[2]The others are the Kansas Free State, the Prairie Republic, Deseret(northern *Utah, with a few bits and pieces of what would have been the neighboring states of Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho, and Wyoming), and the aforementioned Cascadia. All are also democracies in 2018 ITTL, with Deseret being the most conservative, and Cascadia being the most liberal.
 
Last edited:
Well, there was some things to consider. I am proud of my Mexican hertiage, but man we had some close calls. Alot of the revolutionaries nearly died early on and Santa Anna is stil viewed as the goddamn lunatic that he was. If he became president, he would've weakened Mexico big time.
 
Well, there was some things to consider. I am proud of my Mexican hertiage, but man we had some close calls. Alot of the revolutionaries nearly died early on and Santa Anna is stil viewed as the goddamn lunatic that he was. If he became president, he would've weakened Mexico big time.

Indeed so. He was already a poor general IOTL, and might well have been an even worse leader; much like, perhaps, the Mexican version of Thomas McClellan(the idiot FSA president who bungled his way thru that idiotic adventure in Haiti), or Hezekiah Tillman(the Southron President who ordered entire towns razed for even being home to known unwanted elements).
 
Well, there was some things to consider. I am proud of my Mexican hertiage, but man we had some close calls. Alot of the revolutionaries nearly died early on and Santa Anna is stil viewed as the goddamn lunatic that he was. If he became president, he would've weakened Mexico big time.
Fortunately the Empire prevented him from taking power. Incidentally, a good POD could be Augustin II dying prior to the First Mexican-American War. That could be a destabilizing factor.
 
Another element would be it becoming an absolute monarchy rather than a constitutional elected monarchy. The latter served as a unique compromise to better help out the people. It definitely helped us out when the Central American Confederacy joined up with us. It's why we were able to build the canal without too much trouble.
 
I would go early as well. Mexico would need a peer opponent on the continent and to prevent the balkanization of OTL that would need an early POD. France is actually a decent possibility- they had the most powerful army in the world for a couple of centuries, were a true world empire, and had interests in North America. If they could dominate and annex the many smaller European colonies (which were incredibly isolated and quarrelsome- Lord knows the Dutch couldn't get along with anybody, as just one example) and create a similar single unified geographically large and demographically significant state to the north of Mexico, crossing the continent from the Atlantique to the Pacifique, I think that would act as a decent counterbalance. If nothing else, Mexico would at the least not become the North American hegemon that is was historically, and heck maybe New France would even be outright hostile to it.

As things were, of course, New France was practically stillborn and became just another of the small, quarrelsome North American states. But that was all largely because of policy decisions in France. It could have easily been otherwise.

As an aside, I'm not sure that you can claim that Mexico really "repelled" the Europeans. I mean, yes, those early Spanish conquest attempts were beaten off but eventually the Spanish simply moved in and built post offices, per se. In reality missions, but you get my meaning. Spain had an immense influence on the development of the Empire, particularly it's technology. In exchange for converts, the Mexica got power. Yes, they engaged in a very skillful balancing act that allowed them to retain that power and limited overt influence form the Spanish monarchy, but eventually the Imperial Bureaucracy was almost all Franciscans... :) For that matter the current heir has more Spanish blood than Mexica!

OOC: It's obvious that some writers up-thread are assuming significant Spanish influence, so I'm trying to reconcile that with the "repelled European invasions" that was mentioned early.
 
Last edited:
There was an alternative history novel about Mexico by a Mexican author, "So Far from God, so Close to the United States" that inspired this. The novel was a pretty extreme Mexican screw, but I was wondering if something could be done more historically grounded, without the magical realism.

In the novel, the Triple Alliance really ramps up the human sacrifice that sometimes did happen before the conversion to Christianity to extreme levels, pissing off the other city states. As a result, when the first group of armed Europeans -they were Castillians in this time line- arrive everyone sides with them and they wind up taking over the entire place. Mexico becomes a colony for hundreds of years, with its silver shipped off to Castille obviously but also to China for some reason. They finally get independence in the nineteenth century, but the attempt to set up a monarchy fails twice (!), and the English speaking colonists in North America unite in a super-federation that takes over several important Mexican states and generally treats the place as a pinata. In the twentieth century, after another civil war, they wind up rule by this mediocre Chicago-style political machine, which at least provides better government than they had so far in the book.

I get the POD, but I don't know how this creates the English speaking super-federation to the North. Also, I'd imagine all that silver being shipped to Castille and to China would have pretty extensive effects on European and Chinese history, but the book only covers North America.
 

Kaze

Banned
In real-life it was screwed since several events - the landing of Cortez, the losing of Texas / California, the losing of the American-Mexican War, and fighting a civil war before World War One. Changing one of these events could have disastrous effects...
 
Fortunately the Empire prevented him from taking power. Incidentally, a good POD could be Augustin II dying prior to the First Mexican-American War. That could be a destabilizing factor.

Yeah.

Another element would be it becoming an absolute monarchy rather than a constitutional elected monarchy. The latter served as a unique compromise to better help out the people. It definitely helped us out when the Central American Confederacy joined up with us. It's why we were able to build the canal without too much trouble.

Exactly.

There was an alternative history novel about Mexico by a Mexican author, "So Far from God, so Close to the United States" that inspired this. The novel was a pretty extreme Mexican screw, but I was wondering if something could be done more historically grounded, without the magical realism.

In the novel, the Triple Alliance really ramps up the human sacrifice that sometimes did happen before the conversion to Christianity to extreme levels, pissing off the other city states. As a result, when the first group of armed Europeans -they were Castillians in this time line- arrive everyone sides with them and they wind up taking over the entire place. Mexico becomes a colony for hundreds of years, with its silver shipped off to Castille obviously but also to China for some reason. They finally get independence in the nineteenth century, but the attempt to set up a monarchy fails twice (!), and the English speaking colonists in North America unite in a super-federation that takes over several important Mexican states and generally treats the place as a pinata. In the twentieth century, after another civil war, they wind up rule by this mediocre Chicago-style political machine, which at least provides better government than they had so far in the book.

I get the POD, but I don't know how this creates the English speaking super-federation to the North. Also, I'd imagine all that silver being shipped to Castille and to China would have pretty extensive effects on European and Chinese history, but the book only covers North America.

Ah, that was Alberto Villa's famous novel from 1977. One of the first pieces to blend alternate history with Romanoism[1].....although, to be honest, it didn't age all that well in some spots, and didn't exactly change all that much from real world history, at least not until the late 18th Century anyway. For one example, Mexico wasn't that much different IOTL, gaining independence in 1807 under the leadership of Bernardo de Galvez, as opposed to Montezuma the Snake(no, I don't remember the exact Aztec word he used for his last name, just the English translation of it) on Christmas Eve 1788 riding a giant dragon, and Mexico being slightly more colonized in Villa's work(including by witches, elves, and centaurs). and the United States of Cabotia ended up being rather close to a carbon copy of the real Federated States of America(and even borrowed from a certain more mainstream piece of alternate history published only a year earlier, which he acknowledged later on), only with magic and such mentioned in it's founding document, and with not a few references to a Secretary of Magical Affairs.

The AH part of the work doesn't really emerge until the early 19th Century, and even then some events are suspiciously similar to OTL, just with different outcomes and Tejas being renamed "Houston"(maybe inspired by the real-life Tennessee-born empresario who died in Alta California in 1857 IOTL?), and the Californias being split into four different states(with the northernmost bit named after Alexander Hamilton, of all people), under *Cabotian rule; hell, even Deseret made an appearance, populated by magical Mormons.....but at least he tried some interesting things in Europe, like with the Ottoman Sublime Union and the Magician's Republic of Savoia, so I gotta give him credit for that.

[1]Giuliano Romano, that is. The Italian-Canadian author and mysticalism enthusiast from Montreal who was quite famous for blending reality and magic together in his various works.
 
Somos miramos esto dialogo. Eso es un notificacion que algo de las topicas aqui son a la frontera de la ley contra insurgencia y insultas a la Familia Imperial. Gracias por su atencion.
 
There was an alternative history novel about Mexico by a Mexican author, "So Far from God, so Close to the United States" that inspired this. The novel was a pretty extreme Mexican screw, but I was wondering if something could be done more historically grounded, without the magical realism.

In the novel, the Triple Alliance really ramps up the human sacrifice that sometimes did happen before the conversion to Christianity to extreme levels, pissing off the other city states. As a result, when the first group of armed Europeans -they were Castillians in this time line- arrive everyone sides with them and they wind up taking over the entire place. Mexico becomes a colony for hundreds of years, with its silver shipped off to Castille obviously but also to China for some reason. They finally get independence in the nineteenth century, but the attempt to set up a monarchy fails twice (!), and the English speaking colonists in North America unite in a super-federation that takes over several important Mexican states and generally treats the place as a pinata. In the twentieth century, after another civil war, they wind up rule by this mediocre Chicago-style political machine, which at least provides better government than they had so far in the book.

I get the POD, but I don't know how this creates the English speaking super-federation to the North. Also, I'd imagine all that silver being shipped to Castille and to China would have pretty extensive effects on European and Chinese history, but the book only covers North America.

Namely in that the Settler mentality never really died out. Had things been managed worse, the wilderness would've been open for them while Europe would've kept beating itself up.
 

Deleted member 94708

Not quite that tough, TBH, depending on the POD. The Mexican Empire was actually somewhat weak and/or unstable at several points in its history; for one of the biggest example, the country's government nearly outright collapsed during The Troubles in the mid 1950s, with the Anglo & Irish separatists in northern + eastern Tejas(some of them descended from those fleeing the collapse of American Federation of Sovereign States[1]), the Chinese in much of coastal Alta California and ethnic Germans and Austrians in Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, etc., amongst certain others, protesting for various reasons[2], as well as a majorly bad recession, and it took a massive amount of foreign aid-some from Canada but also Japan, Brazil, France, Italy and two dozen other countries, just to finally stabilize the situation, and then you had the independence movements (and the Mormon unification movements, also a bit of an issue for Cascadia too) of the '60s, all of which caused further headaches of their own.

Honestly, were it not for Empress Teresa's much needed reforms, Mexico might not be the prosperous & highly influential nation that it is today.

[1]Yes, that slavery-defending abomination of a nation. Not all of those fleeing where dedicated slaveholders, true, but even so.....

[2]Mexico was a pretty troubled place back then. It's too complicated for me to articulate all at once right now, but historian Veronica Robles helped put up a vast library of GlobeNet accessible resources at the University of Mexico City back in the late '90s. Here's the link.

OOC: To expand further, some more ideas.

[1]Broke away from the Federated States in 1871 over slavery, but dissolved in 1917 after several years of internal turmoil; three of the countries which border Mexico on it's northern flank are here ITTL-the Louisiana Free State, the Free State of Arkansas, and the Confederacy of the Four Nations, were once part of it's territory. All are democracies, Louisiana and the CFN being particularly close to Mexico.

[2]The others are the Kansas Free State, the Prairie Republic, Deseret(northern *Utah, with a few bits and pieces of what would have been the neighboring states of Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho, and Wyoming), and the aforementioned Cascadia. All are also democracies in 2018 ITTL, with Deseret being the most conservative, and Cascadia being the most liberal.

Sigh... you are almost SINGULARLY bad at crafting DBWI posts; it is absolutely not entertaining to walk into a thread expecting some collaborative world building to which one can contribute and instead find you here, spamming out extremely detailed posts that no one in-universe would ever write and which include so much background as to make everyone else’s participation irrelevant.

Please stop, and start considering how to write as you would if you lived in this TL.
 
Have the Southrons fight them in a war and have the Southrons win.

Yeah. One particularly scary scenario I can think of is one where the Red River Crisis goes south in 1882/83 and actual war breaks out; the Mexican Empire had recently started going thru financial troubles, and there was already significant unrest in Tejas and certain other parts of the northern area of the country going on; perhaps if Manuel I hadn't chosen Alejandro de la Torre to be his Minister of the Interior.....
 
Top