This is a follow-up to my previous question.
If California, New Mexico, southern/western Texas (if not all of Texas), and possibly southern Arizona had kept their language after the U.S. acquisition (similar to how Quebec retained French as the predominant language), and America had official bilingualism like Canada - how would the U.S. and world be different today?
Would these states be less developed because of the language barrier, possibly similar to Puerto Rico?
Would English's role as the global lingua franca or "default" language be changed, given that America's second-largest city would be Spanish speaking? Would it still be the second largest city in this alternate timeline?
Could "California separatism" or other movements become more influential? How would it affect English-speaking Americans' view of the Spanish language?
Could Spanish possibly be more influential worldwide? How would this affect the 20 Spanish-speaking countries today?
But they do continue speaking Spanish. Your question is a false premise. This was gone over pretty thoroughly in your other post as well.
Well no they don’t
They recently started spending Spanish
Most Mexican/ Latin American immigration to the Southwest occurred after 1945
Uh. The area was literally part of Mexico until the 1840s. Spain before that.
Most people were obviously native but the common language was Spanish after the conquests.
"Chicano" is the word you are looking for, and they've been here all along.
It was very unpopulated. The vast majority (90%+) of people in 1940 in the southwest were white Americans.
Border of Texas is functionally Mexico already in OTL. California and Texas already have tens of millions of people speaking Spanish. A more interesting counterfactual is what if these states stopped speaking Spanish.
I meant what if those states were fully Spanish-speaking, i.e. if Spanish was the language of government, business and education in these states. Sort of like Quebec is with French.
Maybe English would still be a common secondary language in these regions, like it is in Quebec.