How long would it take to Anglicize Mexico/how would you do it?

Ok. One POD: Mexican American War; the US conquers Mexico. How will you get them largely anglicized, to the point at least of how Louisiana was Anglicized OTL.

POD 2: No major war, the US takes advantages of mexican instability and foments a collapse and annexes the republics, then fills them with white americans. spanish speaking whites become americanized. mestizoes and natives immigrate to the great plains decreasing their numbers in mexico. How would you anglicize them? how long will it take?
 
I imagine if there's a Civil War, the Mexican population would take the opportunity to quickly rebel against the Union and declare independence from the Americans. Anglicization would take a very long time, it could happen in the north because it was sparsely populated but it's very unfeasible once you start going south.
 
Star Warrior why the obsession with an English-speaking Mexico?

Anyway, POD 3: Columbus sails for England, reaches Newfoundland like Giovanni Cabotto did in OTL, keeps following the Coast South in later voyages and claims the Caribbean and Mexico for England.
 
Given how resistant latin america is to any attempts to even make friends with America I think it would be a long ardous process with a lot of killing on both sides. A bit like Ireland but with sombreros.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Mexico has too many people to be as Anglicized as Louisiana. The Cajuns had no powerful friends in North American, so the USA benign neglect worked well. The Cajuns settled in low quality, largely empty swamp land and cause no problems, the USA largely ignored them, and over a few centuries, they were largely Anglicized.

If the USA had taken more of Mexico such as Sonora or Baja California, it would be as Anglo as Los Angeles is today. The problem is the higher population density areas such as near Mexico city. There are enough people there to maintain a separate identity for centuries. Now the USA and Mexico being merged would make the culture near Mexico more like the USA, but the USA would also be a lot more "Mexicanized" too. Some changes compared to OTL assuming their is not multi-decadal war in Mexico.

1) The USA is a three party system. The two America parties plus at least one Mexican party. This will have profound impacts on American history. At some point, the Greater USA will have a Mexican President. Also, with the Senate fillibuster, Mexican Senators will be required for most major pieces of legislation such as the slavery compromises, women given right to vote, civil rights bills, etc. The only possible way to anglicize Mexico is to get them into our system. Excluding most of them on some pretext means never ending war. Also remember in around 1850, the Sioux defeated the USA, so the Anglo will not have the military power to rule without the support of many Mexicans.

2) If you by Anglicized you mean speak English, this is very likely by now. There will be real benefits to all Mexicans to speak the dominate language of the country. Now this language will be different from what we speak in OTL. It could easily be different enough from British English to qualify as a separate language instead of a dialect. Imagine the current American English where 25% of the words are replaced by unconjugated spanish words. A sample sentence.

I quiero some agua with ice, please.

I solitar for a job manana.

3) Some of the Mayan speaking areas might prefer Anglo rule over Spanish rule, depending on how the USA treated them.

Mexico could never be Anglicized to the point that Mexico is a bunch of American states with people who act like Americans in OTL, but Mexico could have formed a single national identity if the first few hard decades are survived and at some point the Anglo treat the Mexicans as full citizens.
 
I imagine the white Spanish elite would be Anglocised in a similar way to the French in New Orleans, but probably bilingual for longer and with more pride in their Spanish lineage.

There would be too much racism in the United States to give millions of Native American Mexicans full voting rights. They would like be disenfranchised either via Jim Crow style property laws/literacy requirements or by the forming of a huge Indian reserve in the Mexican highlands. This area would probably have numerous insurrections, terrible poverty and a heavy military presence that would drain resources from the United States. Identity-wise, they would identify with their own group, and not integrate to the American mainstream for a long time.

It's also likely these Mexican Indian communities would set up settlements around major American cities, causing social tension and ethnic conflict. Plantations and later industrialists would use them as a cheap source of labour, causing further resentment from poor whites. After slavery was abolished, Indian-black tension would likely exist in a big way too.

Eventually they would have a civil rights movement of their own, and probably achieve it. A generation or so later some members would join the middle class. They might even get a President.
 
3) Some of the Mayan speaking areas might prefer Anglo rule over Spanish rule, depending on how the USA treated them.
The Maya seemed to be fully aware of how the US treated native peoples. And they were fully willing and ready to fight them if they tried to take over. They decimated a unit of marines that went there after all.
 
Let's say Spain needs $, sells land like the French did in the Louisiana Purchase

Mexican territory most easily could have been sold at the time of Spanish colonial rule had they needed the money more than they wanted the land, but they had found silver in Mexico and just lost out on the Gold in California. A successful, organized independence movement is not considered in this scenario.

Assimilation would be very analogous to Mexicans in New Mexico who try to relate to their Spanish ancestry, and also analogous to Tejanos in Texas. Cultural differences like in Louisiana or Hawaii would exist, but pretty much just like any other State with a high percentage of Hispanics (see Illinois and Colorado in addition to the southwest). Not exactly a big difference except that of course in reality Spain did not sell before independence and there was a treaty with Mexico after the Mexican-American War that already took a huge chunk of territory from Mexico in its terms.

It would take 20 to 50 years for predominant assimilation to be completed (children & grandchildren would grow up assimilated), and full civil rights would be restored by the 1960's Civil Rights Movements.

On the other hand, if Mexico had taken over the US and Europe, like the Muslim Berbers took over Spain (or how the Spanish took over Netherlands?), I would venture to say that Mexicanization would be quicker due to stricter laws from attitudes originating from the Spanish Reconquista and Conquest of Aztec/Mayan culture. Civil Rights would take longer due to these long history of social class distinction in favor of Spanish/Criolle and wealthy Catholics, with some intolerance (especially religious, but also otherwise) in its past.
 
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Well now, suppose the USA somehow acquired political control of all of OTL Mexico; I can hardly see how that could happen much earlier than the OTL War With Mexico.

I don't see the cultural assimilation of Spanish-speaking Mexico in total to even the largely Hispanicized "Spanglish" speaking scenario; Spanish-speaking populations would largely hold out longer until countervailing political and social trends give them some leverage to persist and come back.

For instance, slavery was abolished in Mexico by the 1840s; presumably Anglos, whose immigration and hegemony might be largely Southern, would seek to re-impose it, meanwhile taking advantage of established relations of peonage and the like to spread their hegemony over Mexicans. But this would be resented! Say the biting off and chewing of this vast empire delays the Civil War some decades; I still suspect that eventually there will be some new coalition party a la the OTL Republicans who champion abolitionism, and I suspect there is a good chance the coalition winds up capitalizing on Mexican resentment of the greater slavocracy to recruit lots of ethnic Mexicans to the alt-Republican banner; when the nation splits into civil war the secessionists fail to keep control of much of Mexico which sides with the Union analogously to West Virginia--but with a strong Spanish accent! Assuming as I would tend to do that when the dust settles you have a Unionist, nominally abolitionist, victory--certainly if they are going to not only emancipate but enfranchise African-American slaves, they can enfranchise large sweeps of Latino populations while they are at it, as part of consolidating the Reconstructionist Union. After that, while the social and cultural fortunes of Latinos might fluctuate downward again in reactionary eras, I doubt they can sink so low in their demographic strongholds as African-Americans were forced OTL, and they might well indeed serve to check many of the excesses of Jim Crow, certainly on historically Mexican soil. Toleration, even embrace, of Latino culture might become part of the package of typical American progressive, pro-labor politics and Latinos an indispensable part of any progressive coalition. Meanwhile, there are reactionary Latinos a-plenty; the conservative parties would learn to value them too.

I'd expect you'd wind up with a strongly bilingual USA, with bastions of essentially "pure" Spanish-speakers and not much larger, demographically speaking, "pure" English speakers, but with the broad sweep of the population speaking a whole spectrum of "Spanglishes."

Actually there is a wild card here--how thoroughly Hispanicized, in language and cultural transformation, were Mexico's Native "Indians" as of say 1840 OTL? If actually a significant part of the population had largely held out against Spanish language and culture as of that point, possibly ITTL they would never pick up any more of it, as with the Philippines where the limited depth and breadth of Spanish acculturation leave modern Filipinos as much or more influenced by American society as Spanish. I guess that it would be harder for a diverse bunch of Indian languages to be broadly accepted and spread throughout the melange society of the USA and so linguistically that might tip the balance more strongly toward English.

But only if as I suggested above, there are countervailing trends to the expected Anglo bigotry!

If political and social trends of inclusion fail to materialize, either we'd wind up with some dystopic white-supremacist authoritarian empire and the splitting off of large sections from the Mexican "Raj" both north and south, or it would be wracked by separatist insurgencies and an eventual hotbed of radical-leftism that might lead to some kind of federation of North American People's Republics. Or the dystopian fascist empire above, forming at a later date rather than continuous with the original "slavocracy/patron" regime.
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As for the suggestion that the English might have gotten the jump on the Spanish and been the initial European conquerors. well first of all I'm not sure how logistically plausible that might be. Say the English wind up conquering the Aztec/Maya zones but the Spanish manage to get South America.

Even as one of two rival Empires of the Indies, English history is going to be massively butterflied! I'd think that with an early lock on Mexican gold and other profitable tribute goods, the English monarchs would never go Protestant, they'd be so powerful within European councils that they wouldn't want to let go of their influence on the Catholic Church, dynastic schemes to wind up Holy Roman Emperor or controlling the Papacy or so forth. Would that divert them from their OTL path of developing an unrivalled Royal Navy and merchant marine, then being one of the founding nations of modern industrial capitalism?

Meanwhile in America, I'd think that English demographic expansion would be diverted far to the south; you'd wind up with more or less Anglicized Mexico, but someone else would lay claim to the North American Atlantic seaboard while the English were preoccupied to the south. Possibly they'd be able to deny other powers a base there, with an eye to keeping their Gulf Stream eastward trade route back to Blighty open, but probably then neglect or at least delay to settle there.

I'd think there would be a good chance we'd wind up with an England that resembles OTL Spain in historical trajectory and social makeup, and an American Anglosphere that corresponds socially to OTL's Hispanic-dominated but heavily Native-influenced and economically limited Mexico, and either North America would have a status comparable to Africa OTL, or more likely some other European settler colonies (but who?) wind up grabbing that coastline.
 
I want to point out that 490 years after Cortez -- There are Villages in Mexico that still speak Natquial [Native] instead of Spainish.
 
I think the Criolos and the Native Americans need to be segregated in order for Mexico to anglicize and America should integrate Criolos and protect the Native Americans in Mexico.
 
I want to point out that 490 years after Cortez -- There are Villages in Mexico that still speak Natquial [Native] instead of Spainish.
Nahuatl. And there are about 6 times as many Mayan speakers, though a lot of them are in Guatemala and other countries, but I'm sure most are in Mexico. Anyways, for all attempts at destroying native cultures, the Spanish were rather ineffective. Even in the 1800's, the creole elite learned Yucatec as a second language rather than having the Maya learn Spanish. Christianization also didn't spread as much as the Spanish would've hoped, the natives had a tendency to disguise their gods as Catholic saints, one well known example being Maximon. In a way, Christian prayers became a ward against the influence of the European oppressors.
 
Just for reference, the grand majority of Mexicans didn't speak much of Spanish in the nineteenth century. It was Nahuatl and Maya, not really Spanish, that was spoken by your average Mexican peasant. Spanish was back then the language of the urban European-descended political elite and clergy. It would be far more interesting to see how the United States is able to absorb a population with millions of Amerindian people.
 
Mexican territory most easily could have been sold at the time of Spanish colonial rule had they needed the money more than they wanted the land, but they had found silver in Mexico and just lost out on the Gold in California. A successful, organized independence movement is not considered in this scenario.

Assimilation would be very analogous to Mexicans in New Mexico who try to relate to their Spanish ancestry, and also analogous to Tejanos in Texas. Cultural differences like in Louisiana or Hawaii would exist, but pretty much just like any other State with a high percentage of Hispanics (see Illinois and Colorado in addition to the southwest). Not exactly a big difference except that of course in reality Spain did not sell before independence and there was a treaty with Mexico after the Mexican-American War that already took a huge chunk of territory from Mexico in its terms.

It would take 20 to 50 years for predominant assimilation to be completed (children & grandchildren would grow up assimilated), and full civil rights would be restored by the 1960's Civil Rights Movements.

On the other hand, if Mexico had taken over the US and Europe, like the Muslim Berbers took over Spain (or how the Spanish took over Netherlands?), I would venture to say that Mexicanization would be quicker due to stricter laws from attitudes originating from the Spanish Reconquista and Conquest of Aztec/Mayan culture. Civil Rights would take longer due to these long history of social class distinction in favor of Spanish/Criolle and wealthy Catholics, with some intolerance (especially religious, but also otherwise) in its past.

By Anglicize Mexico of course I took the indirect route through Spain selling land to the US. British rule would be similar, perhaps even more efficient in Mexico at establishing government and economic management that is long-lasting and provides for a high quality of life. Assimilation, however, would be similarly quick as in the earlier scenario indicated. Britain may easily have made a deal with Spain and/or France in exchange for some diplomatic or financial return to end up with the territorial management rights.
 
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