zompist wrote: ↑Fri Nov 04, 2022 12:47 amOK, but Cuban origin only accounts about 26% of Florida's Latines.
If Palmera's as prosperous as the US, I think it'd attract a lot of Latin Americans (and probably give you a number of headaches).
It's a fair question. The Latinx population in 1983 is about 4.5% of the national total and most of it derives from people extant long before the 20th century. Latinx immigration at this point only accounts for about fifty thousand people.
Many of the assumptions I built into that model involved a more restricted "hinterland" comprised primarily of Afro-Latinx immigrants, for the same reasons cited viz. Cuba. This was rather broadly done and it's certainly possible that it's too restrictive; OTOH I did want immigration history to reflect a certain global anxiety about "Black-majority" countries, even a prosperous one. (There's also red tape from the Palmey side of things, to be clear; it's not all just about the Latines conveniently "choosing" to go elsewhere.)
That's fine, though I'd note that most of your political arrangements wouldn't be out of place in Europe. At the same time, almost every European country has some serious problems or fractious politics.
Oh, I certainly wouldn't say Palmera is without serious problems or fractious politics. That's honestly most of what the TL consists of. Hard to have much drama without it.
That's easier to see outside the culture test as it presently exists, though. A lot of what's involved isn't top of mind from the "man in the street" perspective unless you're an investigative journo, a political operator or a student activist.
For example:
BTW, in this timeline is the US just as interventionist in Latin America? If so, how do the Palmeys deal with that?
Yes; and there's nothing much they can do about it, really. Palmera's main latitude for operation is in the former British sphere in the Caribbean and (to some extent, later on) the African continent. There's no percentage in poking the bear, although Palmeys go out in the street and protest the latest outrage in Latin America or other places much as people do elsewhere.
The only time Palmera has ever flirted with defying the Monroe Doctrine has been
Haiti, and that in a very limited sense and decades in the past.
This actually fuels one of the deeper tensions in Palmera: there's always a certain fraction of the political landscape that's either uncomfortable with, or notably defensive about, the extent to which Palmera is an adjunct to a wider and noticeably White-dominated Western order. That's something that probably could be more visible in the culture test, even as an aside. It wouldn't be an uncommon thing after the Sixties in particular to have kids come home from university suddenly full of interest in (or alternatively, outraged about) subjects like "secondary empire" and "post-hegemony."
The other major tension (which encapsulates simmering macro-political and macro-economic issues) is that the "Rainbow Nation" and "Black Zion" visions of Palmera are
coming into conflict as the latter Twentieth Century progresses (see items 52 and 57 at that link):
- "Rainbow Nation" advocates thought "whyrah" was relatively harmless so long as it didn't put Black voters in charge of the whole country, but now think the concept of "whyrah" is ill-defined and outdated and that the nation's growth and prosperity would be better served by embracing diversity as a mission.
- "Black Zion" advocates think maintaining a Black voting majority in the country is key to ensuring its position of leadership in (and alliance to) the Black world in a global sense, that maintaining "whyrah" and restricting other forms of immigration is perfectly defensible in pursuit of this goal, and that the "Rainbow Nation" slogan has become a stalking horse for undermining that majority and the trade unionism and progressive economic policies it tends (on balance) to favor.
The mutual incompatibility of those views--both of which hold elements of truth but mask deeper disagreements and power plays that tend not to get much public exposure--is about to become a problem. They might seem like disagreements over mere details of trade or immigration policy, but to the parties driving them, they're existential, a new version of a kind of conflict that has played itself out several times before. Nobody involved, however, wants to admit this in public (and in some cases, even to themselves). They're still supposed to be related and complementary versions of the national mission.
[The central public fiction of Palmey life in the early Eighties is that everything is basically cool and the advent of a true Black majority a few decades back is
not about to culminate in a backlash fueled by an affluent and fearful White minority. That backlash can't take the brazenly supremacist form in Palmera that it might take elsewhere, but it can certainly fuck up a generally prosperous and relatively peaceful status quo. As fractious politics go, the possibility of such an event in some form is the constant backdrop of Palmey life and what fuels the ambient background paranoia seen even when times seem relatively good. The meta-textual reason for choosing 1983 as a snapshot point and a book setting is that it's an inflection point for this conflict really coming into the open.]
Let's try this again.