What if the Viceroyalty of New Viscaya was created?

That actually makes a lot of sense. I didn't stumble across that when I was looking into this at first. But the problem that I see, Would it have its own cultural identity when the revolts against Spain happen around 1810, or so? If it did, it would be a very poor country to Mexico's north and to the US's south. Proverbially, between a rock and a hard place. Less than a million souls with serious internal security issues with hostile tribes like the Apache and the Comanche, both of whom made life difficult for Spain in the 18th century and Mexico in the 19th.

You'd have a nation with worse security and more of a need for the American settlers who Mexico invited in during OTL. I'm not saying it's pre-ordained or the like, just that given all the possibilities, it would be highly likely.

Alternately, it could just as easily get absorbed by the newly independent Mexico.
Might not get independence, although I can see more autonomy from Spain. In my opinion it's a 50/50 chance of whether or not New Viscaya would secede.
 
Likely outcomes to my mind are either Napoleon gets the whole shooting match and sells it all to the US or else Mexico gets it all in independence. Both have lots of butterflies.
 
Here is something I was toying with just at a very low level of knowledge.

Trying to administer Texas and the Mexican Cession as one unit is just as impractical as lumping it in with Mesoamerica. I think if we push the date back a century or more for this proposal there is a good chance of better development in the region. There was a converso jewish fellow that tried to make a pretty good go at ethically administering what I've marked out as Rio Grande. Let people like him have a shot at running the area and I think we can get some decent development which is able to hold off raids from the Prairie Tribes. So now you have a settler population, maybe Criollo but probably Mestizo, expanding towards the Louisiana Territory, and you're probably not going to need to have Anglo settlers come in to fort up the area. But this culture is going to be making its money on ranching, farming, and commercial work akin to New England I think.

California has a much different reality though, and it really needs a different, independent leadership. Still I don't think California is going to be able to attract much colonization or settlement before the 1800s.
 

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You have the problem of dividing New Mexico along the Rio Grande which makes no sense considering the Rio Grande valley was the heart of the colony. Nuevo Mexico and Tejas were pretty similar regarding the mission system, the need for defense against the Plains Indians (and others), and economic activities. I'd put the border at the Continental Divide, leaving Northeast Mexico governed alongside Nuevo Mexico and Tejas while leaving Northwest Mexico with California and the Mexican Cession west of the Continental Divide. Using modern US/Mexican states, Sinaloa, Baja California, and Sonora would be assigned to a new "California" viceroyalty, also consisting of half of Colorado and New Mexico and all of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California, while the other one would be Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas, Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosi, and Tamaulipas plus most of New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas. Louisiana might be attached to it, but it's best if it's governed from the Caribbean as Spain did OTL since the region was so economically linked to the Caribbean anyway.
 
The US went west with the Louisiana Purchase. So the starting point is keeping LA in Spanish hands. OTL, they returned it to France for a swap that was never completed. It's hard to say how willing the swap was. Charles IV was a simpleton easily duped, and Godoy wasn't much better, while the true boss of the country, Maria Louisa, didn't have much of a head for ruling, and mostly was happy as long as she was getting laid, so it's easy to seem them being quite willing to do the swap. On the other hand, Spain was under the thumb of Napoleon, so they may not have had any choice. I'm thinking the return of LA to France and then a sale to the US goes on pretty much as OTL.

One would have to assume that if Spain went a head with the vice royalty, they would also increase efforts to settle it and make it into something. resumption of mining in new Mexico would be a start. estabilish a port on the east side for the vice royalty would have to be either Tampico, or a port in Tejas, meaning more build up there.

I see this repeated a lot but people don't really bring up many examples of why they think this. What supremely incompetent thing did these 3 people do and what's the evidence that Maria Louisa was the true head of the country?
 

raharris1973

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I’d assume the boundaries would be those of the Provincias Internas

1280px-Provincias_Ynternas_Nueva_España_1817.jpg
Wow, the borders of the Provincias Internas are apparently an odd blob that includes a lot of north-central Mexico and excludes California. The shapes are different from some of the others I've seen.

Do we have any more definitively stated of mapped versions of the borders of the Provincias Internas?
 
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