Spain has a unique identity problem in the United States and to a very large extent on the international scene (outside of Europe and places they colonized such as Mexico and Philippines). That the country and its culture is non-white/non-western and is uncivilized. This is especially true in the United States where anything that is "Spanish" is automatically associated with Mexico and thus is considered inferior and non-white (even if you are Colombian or you are an Argentinan citizen with 100% European descent and whose family only arrived in the 70s).
Hell for some bizarre reason specifically in North America (including Canada), even anything Portuguese is often associated with Spanish and thus even pure blooded Portuguese Europeans are considered nonwhites and many things associated with Brazilian or Portuguese is considered inferior.
Now I'm exaggerating in the above paragraph as far as how the world views Spanish and Portuguese (especially in North America). But I'm not kidding when I say I have seen Americans and even Canadians open their mouth in complete shock when they learned the Spanish language originated in Europe and that Portuguese people are pure blooded European whites. To a lesser degree I have seen people in Africa and Asia (excluding Morocco and the Philippines) also cannot believe most Spaniards are European looking because they were so conditioned from watching American movies and TV shows to believe any Spanish speaking person is brown skinned.
Basically in the eyes of most people outside of Europe and former colonies, the notion of Spain and Portugal being former European superpowers is simply too bizarre to comprehend. Thats just how much Portuguese and Spanish culture got associated with the colonized.
So I am curious, what if it was another European superpower who managed to get South America before Cortes did? I know this is tricky because not all European colonial powers were as open-minded about spreading their culture and intermarriage as the Spanish and Portuguese were. But lets take the more liberal ones such as say the French.
If France, after defeating the Aztecs, Incans, and other local empires, decided to import their population once they realized most of the locals died from diseases and after a few generations, French culture got was spread into the region and most of the population is now a mixture of French and local Indian blood, would France's identity be as conflicted in the eyes of the international world as Spain and Portugal today?
I mean assuming everything else went as they did for the Spanish empire (France holding South America for hundreds of years and later losing it like OTL Spain, rise of America and later the Manifest Destiny), would Americans later develop such problems with French speaking peoples as a result of immigration that eventually a "Hisfrench" or some other stupid term using some French words be created to separate the mixed French-speaking people from "pure-blooded whites"?
Would French have ended up appearing not only in American mass media but also international pop media (because of Hollywood) as a language for nonwhites and thus in turn mainland France with be associated as a non-white country today?
OK I mostly used French because they were the most liberals outside of the Iberian superpowers with spreading their culture and interbreeding, but the Dutch can also qualify too. Perhaps in an with some PoD, even the Germans, Russians, Swedish, Belgians, Italians, and even British (though this is going ASB) .
I am in particular curious in an ATL in which the British Isles get associated with non-whites because of Britain takes the place of Spain in South America. I'm already laughing so hard at the concept of an "Hisenglisman" (my god what a fucking stupid term) and I already know thats ASB because of Britain's tendency tot kill every Indian peoples in places they colonized. But assuming it does happen, would Americans actually go as far as considering their mother colonizers as an "inferior nonwhite" culture simply because so many English speaking people would be brown skinned in this timeline? That Americans would actually be stupid enough to accuse any pale skinned "Scots" or "Welsh" as being mixed of nonwhite and white American because they are conditioned to believe English=inferior nonwhites (even though British immigrants are actually the real pure blooded whites, not the Americans who probably have some black or Indian blood generations ago)?
Would a nationalist movement event take place to oppose the English language because of its nonwhitness and try to even create a completely new language (much like the conflicts today over the Spanish language being used in the public esp. in education)?