Mexico retains SoCal, US gets everything else

Mexico also gets to keep several large oil fields and their resulting economic windfall.

Mexicans, or maybe Californians? Baja California was a Mexican territory until the 1950s. At the time of the U.S. - Mexican war, Mexican identity in California was weak and many missions flew imperial Spanish flags for years after Mexican independence. The U.S. was able to capture California in part due to the apathy of many Hispanic locals.

Maybe...

The U.S. sponsors an independent California (Baja and a part of upper) as a means to counter balance Mexico?
 
Yeah, you might not have Hearst Castle in your timeline as a lot of Hearst's wealth came from Mexican oil and timber, mining too, so they'd almost certainly be far less rich to build San Simeon.

San Francisco originally has the Gold Rush but so much of it's growth is as the primary U.S. port serving the Pacific and Asia, through the Pacific Coast Mail Steamship line particularly...so think about all of the trade from and with Hawaii, Alaska, Japan China, Korea, Vladiovostok and Dalian, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Phillipines, etc. and that's a tremendous growth engine. The Mexicans would be better positioned to compete for that trade when tariff policies and rates were much more significant...might even trigger a Mexican ship-building industry at San Diego or Long Beach to serve the Pacific Trade which again would be a big economic building block for Mexico and not that big of a hurdle in that transition era of wooden ships and sidewheel steamers that it would be a few decades later.

Disney came to California from Kansas City which at that point was only behind NYC as the animation capital of the U.S., maybe he'd have stayed put. Maybe he'd have hired Harry Truman or Robert Heinlein there in Kansas City, Truman becomes the studio boss and Heinlein invents and adapts camera and special effects technology with that Annapolis degree.
Just about anyone in old Hollywood would take some different turns but especially the ones who grew up in Southern Cal in OTL (if they existed at all!)

Invasion of the West Coast by anybody requires a logistics train that no one had except perhaps the Soviets in the Cold War (getting the Soviet Pacific Fleet across anywhere but Alaska without having fatal trouble with SAC bombers, Rickover's subs, and our carriers and land-based aircraft would have been unlikely...Meiji Japan, Chiang Kai Shek's slice of China, Mao, Stalin...easier pickings far closer and again, just not the navy or merchant fleet.

I wonder about Asian immigration to Mexican California. The U.S. was treating especially the Cantonese Chinese workers very harshly and had them there as extremely temporary "guest workers" for the most part and the Japanese didn't get much better treatment until long after 1945, while the sparse population accumulated by Spain and Mexico in Southern Cal over 200+ years would encourage allowing Asian immigration there, especially skilled labor, trading and shipping office branches, banks, smelters/refineries, shipbuilding/repair, etc. a hundred years ahead of the U.S.'s discovering the impressive human capital it had been overlooking. That'd draw a lot more Pacific trade in itself, San Diego might indeed become the dominant city on the West Coast of the Americas as a result.

It's really intriguing the more we kick this around.
 
The US electrical industry would likely develop in a slower, more disjointed fashion without Southern Arizona's (Bisbee et al) dollop of copper. Also, if Mexico retained Texas to the Nueces, its agriculture might benefit substantially from being able to divert the bulk of the Rio Grande's waters for irrigation.
 
i thought i'd revive this thread instead of making a new one for this little question

there was earlier mention that Vegas probably wouldnt be a major city, and thus wouldnt be the gambling capital of the US. in this case, what does everyone think would/could be the rough equivalent? my first thought is Atlantic City, New Jersey--which is also only a short distance from a number of major population centers, much like OTL Las Vegas. however, another one (mainly from me mixing up the names at first) is actually Atlanta, Georgia

thoughts?
 
however, another one (mainly from me mixing up the names at first) is actually Atlanta, Georgia
Is there any reason you think this'd be the case? It could really go anywhere, since one principal thing it depends on is the friendliness of the state legislators. That could be highly vulnerable to flocks of roaming butterflies, so I don't think we could really make any predictions.
 
like i said, the reason Atlanta came to mind is because i had initially gotten the names mixed up. i was basically thinking like "What's that East Coast city that has all the gambling? Atlanta? ...no, no, that's not it, Atlanta's inland. Atlantic City, that's it!"

looking at a modern map of the area, Atlanta seems to be a major crossroads in the region, so that could make it a sort-of ideal place for a big attraction like that to be
 

corourke

Donor
More than any of that, you need a state poor enough to decide it's worth the increased crime to legalize gambling. Nevada re-legalized gambling in the face of a budget crisis due to decreased agricultural and mining output. I imagine any small, western state could more or less fit the bill. Maybe Oregon.
 
a fair point. i could always relocate it to some western state thats closer to the mississippi

Reno anyone...

since the development of Las Vegas was initially started by investment from West Coast Mob bosses..

Since San Francisco is that much more influential They are primarily centred there instead.
 
you raise a VERY good point (i think, due to butterflies, reno may well be located in california ITTL, based on the border changes ive made)
 
Just a thought... if you had British intervention, exactly what form did it take, and why did the Mexicans not stick by there own proposal for a border at the 36th parallel from the Pacific to the Rockies across the entirety of Alta California Norte. That was the opening position OTL.
 
i havent developed/decided exactly what form british support takes; the border change is more due to butterflies than anything else. you could probably justify that the mexicans really want to hold onto SoCal (perhaps the sea of cortez is really important ITTL and they dont want to lose any of their shores there to the US) and thats where most of the british support (economic and military) goes; mexican retention of nueces is probably a consequence of a different end-treaty, because iirc that's one of the bigger reasons that mexico went to war in the first place

as a note, it occurs to me that the US damming up the colorado river would cut off alot of water to mexican so-cal (as it does to mexico IOTL). anyone think that that could eventually lead to another US-mexican war?
 
once again, i figured it would be wiser to revive an old thread rather than start a new one

i've been doing alot of work on Anglo-American Rivalry recently, especially in working out a hypothetical geography (it would be adjusted later on to match up with whatever is actually written for the TL). particularly, i've readjusted the political geography of Texas (which has most of its "maximum" territory as an independent republic), both Californias, San Diego & Tijuana as a city-state (much like Hong Kong/Macau, as suggested earlier in the thread), and a few other differences which aren't relevant to this thread

one thing comes to mind, though: the Utah Territory. what does everyone think would become of this region in a Mexican SoCal+American NorCal scenario? i imagine that the region would still be pretty heavily settled by Mormons, but would it eventually be divided into Nevada and Utah? and since OTL Colorado is divided by the panhandle of Texas, would it even become its own state or would it become part of the states around it? one potential difference is eastern Colorado being combined with OTL Wyoming and parts of Nebraska and South Dakota into a state unlike one from OTL
 
There's also the possibility that buying L.A. or Tijuana might be feasible; maybe eventually ending up as an American Hong Kong or Macau of sorts(personally, I'm leaning more towards Tijuana here.)

I don't see why, the main reason the U.S. wanted California was because of the Deep Water Ports, and while Sandiego is on of them, with the rest of California they'd have several and thus have no need for Southern California, heck you could expand the area controlled by Mexico up to what's now the border of the Southern 10 counties and still have that apply.
 
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