WI: California Decides to Stay Independent After Mexican-American War?

The Philipines is more an exception than Hawaii. If the US had not established territorial status then some other nation would definitely have made the Philipines a colony.

Germany, Great Britain and Japan being the three most likely.

At least this way the Philipines had some degree of preparation for independence and achieved it earlier than most European colonies.
 

Keenir

Banned
"We will lend California all the assistance due a Sister Republic." -Polk(?)
yes, that was in OTL.
 
There's a major difference between doing something like that to what was then considered a tribe of savages and doing that to a recognized nation state, which is what the California Republic would be in this proposed scenario. The U.S. has no history of doing that to nation states, so your original statement is still invalid, even if what you say about the Creeks is true.

Just because we didn't do it on a large scale historically doesn't mean we wouldn't do it in this case.

Item 1: California doesn't have a national identity, since it only just came into existence
Item 2: California is sparsely populated
Item 3: California is very prime real estate
Item 4: California is filled with Americans, many of whom are going to want the Bear Republic to be annexed by America
Item 5: The annexation of California was supported by American citizens

There's plenty of reasons to do it, and no real good reason to let California free without major changes.
 
However, none of this means an independent hispanic California would end up with the world's 9th largest economy in 2009. This never happened anywhere else in Latin America and it's hard to imagine that, without the influx of American settlers and capital, California would be anything other than a much smaller, less populated, and more impovershed version of Mexico.

More than a little condescension and smug superiority in this assumption.

Fact is, California did not become the wealthy and populous state it did until the boom caused by WWII. Los Angeles was a much smaller city as recently as the 1930s. (Heck, some people would still say it isn't so much a city as a collection of suburbs joined together by growth.)

Has there ever been a POD written up with a largely Latino California during the Gold Rush? Or how a Gold Rush would affect a Mexico that had not lost its territory during the US Mexican War?

I think it'd be interesting to see how it would play out since Spain and Mexico practiced assimilation (often very violently) of its Indians rather than the genocide and widespread enslavement of Indians that was carried out by Anglo invaders during the Gold Rush.

We might look at how the history of Sonora played out in Mexico for an example. Sonora holds the same place in Mexican popular culture that the Old West did for Americans during the greatest popularity of Westerns.

You would see a period of boom for the state no different economically than during the US Gold Rush, both in wealth and population. There'd still likely be violence vs Asian immigrants since Mexico has its own periods of hysteria about the "Yellow Peril."

I can't see a Californian independence though.
 
I wonder if the best way to make California independent is to grant the same to Texas; without the obvious connection, I doubt it would fall under American influence.
I came to a similar conclussion, although I was working from a different starting point. (WI Oregon Country became an actual country (Cascadia)?) I don't see a way that any one independent nation can form on the west coast without the US being weakened. The problem I was having in developing a TL is that while having the US bogged down in civil war with the Confederacy seems to be the most obvious way to give the western nations an opportunity to assert and establish their independence, the Civil War happened 20-30 years after Cascadia/California/Texas were/would be declaring their independence.
 
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