Cortez gets whacked

North America in a world where the Aztecs survived, by killing C. while they had the chance, by unifying their allies and convincing some enemies that the Europeans were bad for everyone, by picking up quickly on how to use the horse, by converting at least nominally to Christianity (Catholic, Anglican, or Calvinist, depending on who was asking), with the aid of British and later Dutch pirates, and with a lot of luck.

The 16th and 17th centuries were just a matter of bare survival and keeping society afloat in spite of massive population losses from plague, the only real military efforts being in support of Mayas defending themselves from fairly half-hearted Spanish entradas into the Yucatan: only in the 18th would there be enough of a recovery to begin expansion out of their central Mexican core areas. Expansion first was into the desert north, which had been little explored and uncolonized by Europeans: later, in the early 19th century, the Aztecs and the Maya allies [1] would join forces to take advantage of a Spanish empire in revolt and disarray to push the Spaniards out of most of their Central American footholds.

Baffled in efforts to take central America, the Spaniards had expended more effort to the South and North: Brazil occupies rather less of South America in this world, while along the north shore of the Caribbean the Spaniards successfully challenged the French for control of the mouth of the Mississippi and established a scattering of settlements from Florida to what would never be called the Rio Grande in this world.

By the mid-1800s further expansion north and east was blocked by an independent Hispanic “greater Texas” and to the north and west by the Russians, which in the absence of Spanish competition had made a rather more determined effort to colonize California.

Although the Tenochca Empire had successfully challenged the New Galicians for control of the Puebloan peoples, they were not up to taking on the Russo-Lithuanian empire (as a result of butterflies, the Polish-Lithuanian Empire had broken up and a dynastic marriage rather than war gave the Russians back SW Russia). However, the Columbians were.

The fast-expanding, English-speaking parliamentary state avoided an equivalent of our civil war, so much of the best slave territories being under Hispanic control: it instead fought difficult wars against exterior powers, first against Spain and then the Galicians in the 1810s and 1820s for control of the interior of the continent, and then in the 1870s with the Russians for access to the west coast. The Tenochca joined in, and were rewarded with what in our world is southern California. Russian America was split in two widely separated halves, an “Alaska” and the Yurokski Governorate, [2] which had too many inhabitants for the Columbians to feel comfortable with either assimilating them or driving them into the sea.

Columbian-Tenochca relations in 1900 remain a bit prickly: native Americans rank racially a bit higher in this world’s racist discourse, and they were allies in the last war, but they still are brown-skinned people that follow a dreadful mish-mash of Christian and native beliefs: at least they mostly wear European-type clothes nowadays rather than cloaks of feathers and nose-plugs. They also are seen as somewhat suspicious because of their practice of easy immigration for oppressed Amerindians from other countries, which is a pleasure for Americans wanting all of their Indians gone, but a source of suspicion for the conspiracy-theory minded. (You thought people are silly about the Aztlan stuff in our world, you ain’t seen nothing).

Incidentally, the high-minded immigration policy is becoming an annoyance for many Mexicans, since an awful lot of the “Amerindians” moving to the Empire turn out to be dirt-poor Spanish-speaking Catholic Mestizos who retain about as much of their ancestral culture as your average 2010 our-world Ainu.

The Tenochca do not have a religion, but a mess of them. A nativist reaction in the late 17th century put a stop and partly reversed Christianization, and the faith of most is an odd mix of native and Christian beliefs: they worship Jesus, but also a bunch of local “spirits” which are essentially the old Gods in new clothes, carry out massive, bloody animal sacrifices (which they justify by pointing to the bible) and although human sacrifice was stamped out (twice) a long time ago, a lot of people in the back woods occasionally kill themselves in odd, ritual ways when their families or people or nation seem in a pickle, and the cops usually just call it suicide and hush it up.

A lot of people follow purely native religions, sometimes with a little Christianity mixed it: there are quite a few Catholics, mostly immigrants, and a small but noisy Protestant minority. There is also a growing Jewish community, which is happy that European anti-Semitic tracts seem to just bounce right off the Tenochca – at least, so far.

In 1900, the Empire has about 27.6 million inhabitants, and is growing fast, but it is still a fairly minor power, ranked internationally somewhere between Brazil and the Balkan Confederation. Not until the 20th century would the Tenochca come to play a major international role…

[1] The current Maya autonomous role within the empire wasn’t really formalized until quite recently as of 1900, under the big drive for organization and modernization under Emperor Tlacaelel II, and some Maya aren’t entirely happy with the situation.

[2] Like Massachussets and Illinois in our world, named after a local and now mostly gone local tribe.