Had Spain kept its empire in the 1800s, North America would be a very different place.
If you vacationed on the beaches of Florida, you would be on Spanish land. If you lived in San Francisco, California, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, you would be a resident of New Spain.
Texas cowboys would be Spanish-speaking vaqueros, Lousiana crawfish would be a Spanish American dish, and the bison of the Great Plains would run on Spanish land. Dorothy, the Kansas girl in The Wizard of Oz, would have called New Spain home; so would Bill Clinton of Arkansas.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Spanish America was much larger and older than the United States. It included not only much of what is now the United States, but all of Mexico and Central America, along with most of South America and the West Indies.
