The Occidental French

It's been awhile since my most recent ethnicity, and [as of 11/29] I've been struck with a few days of something that's never happened before: writer's block. I honestly have no ideas to run with, at least for anything particularly new or interesting...

...but I do see some big, glaring things that need filling in. Like the UCNA's population, for instance. Where the hell do they all come from? Some are Arabs, many other are Moors, some are Mozarabs... but they have to come from somewhere. Who are they? How do they interact with each other?

Of all the ethnic groups of the UCNA, though, none has vexed me quite so much as the elephant in the room: the Catholic French Andalusians. Until tonight, I haven't written anything significant about them. Until tonight, anyways, when I named them the Occidentales. This is their story.

New World Carolingian literature

"There are but three matters," says a poet, "that none should be without: the matters of France, of Britain, and of great Rome." That poet may not even be born in Andalusada, and I can't assume that the three matters are going to arise the same way, coming as they do at least two generations after the point of divergence. For the sake of the discussion, I'm going to assume that the chansons de geste do in fact turn out rather similarly; if that assumption changes, expect this post to be invalidated with a later one.

Up until the 19th century (or so says Wikipedia), the Carolingian cycle was as familiar as Arthurian legend is to us now. (Part of why it's become less so is because in the Anglophone world a lot of writers have revisited the Arthurian mythos in the 150 years.) In Andalusada, where the large area we call "the United States of America" is an officially Hispanophone Gallo-Moorish state and the Anglophone world is correspondingly a fair bit smaller, that equality is still going to be real.

And in the Umayyad Caliphate in New Andalusia, a country that I'm benchmarking as 55% Muslim/35% various sorts of Christians/a generous 10% other, where that familiarity is going to cause problems and create a solution.

Cider and liquor in the continental UCNA

"In Brittany," says Wikipedia, "crêpes are traditionally served with cider." Which brings us to the other important thing about foodways: alcohol.

 Iberia is part of the wine belt of Europe, and always has been. That survived the Moorish conquest (Andalusis quickly developed a pan-Islamic reputation for being lush); it survives to the present day IRL. Presumably, given that Moorish civilization survives that long too, Moorish drinking tastes are going to favor wine; there are distinct beer regions in the New World, but the UCNA's not one of them because beer is more associated with its immigrant population. And since most of the New World is not historic wine country, and wasn't until very recently, that shortage of wine (along with the shortage of fresh olives) is going to be a big feature of the New World Moorish diet. Presumably Khalwati Sufis are going to rejoice in this, which will establish the archetype of "dry wineless al-Aqsain" even more firmly.

The Montagnards

One of the truly enormous things with alternate history is that if you change it far enough back, you start getting ethnicities that don't exist IRL. Have Catholicism be slightly less successful in the Balkans, and suddenly there's no Croatia, only a Greater Serbia. Change the political careers of guys you've never heard of in Central Asia, and you wind up with a lasting Moghulistan. Change colonial histories, and you get a Japonicized Taiwan*... or a Lusophone Philippines* instead of a Hispanicized one... or Yevanic surviving in Greece because there was no Sephardic expulsion. (I have all of these.)

It also means that some ethnicities wouldn't exist. Even if there's a similar blend of peoples meeting up, there's no reason to think that they'd become Melungeon. On the same note, it's reasonably certain that "hillbillies," prevailingly Scotch-Irish, don't exist. (I'm not sure the Scotch-Irish, or their parent stock the Ulster Scots, exist either; the Plantations aren't set in stone here.) Some of the territory is originally French; even if there's the same external circumstances, the change in the parent stock would lead people to, at best, convergently evolve.

Fortunately for me, somebody has. They're called the Montagnards.

Music of the UCNA

What does music sound like within the UCNA? It depends a bit on who's there to compose it.

The Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia is not a nation-state. In terms of its self-identity, it falls somewhere between the USA and a very lucky Habsburg Empire. Rather than establishing a national folk music corpus to assert its nonexistent common roots, the UCNA's musical voice is going to evolve as organically as its identity.

And at heart, that identity is formed from the intersection of the following groups:

• The Biladi core: The arbiters of high culture aren't from the Moorish diaspora; they're former khassa families of Seville, the equivalent of White Russian émigrés. They're extremely conservative, and have the money and connections to establish themselves as the arbiters of haute couture; preserving the old ways just so is all-important to a lot of them. Nonetheless, that kind of traditionalism is going to be another big ingredient in what comes out.
• The Maghrebi periphery: Independent of the Andalusis, there's also a fair number of Maghrebis. At its height, imperial Seville did achieve its historic destiny, completely controlling the Strait of Gibraltar and building an empire in northwest Africa. It is NOT wealthy, and NOT the arbiter of culture, but it's still an influence. Perhaps more importantly, that influence is also going to extend to West Africa - and may include the blues scale.
• Former French America: In addition to the Louisiana Purchase, France also controlled more of what IRL was the Anglophone Deep South. I'm not sure what this is like culturally, because while some of this is Guisard* and quite conventionally French (if from different regions thereof), other parts could very well be Farrellite. And French Farrellitism brings with it many cultural details that are uniquely its own - including, quite possibly, polyphonic singing.
• The Moorish diaspora: With the 19th-century implosion of Seville's empire, the UCNA is continually reinforced by immigration from across its diaspora. Most of the Iberian New World, Portuguese or Sevillan, is unstable at best, and there's a steady flow of refugees and guest workers who are sending money home to form a melting pot.
• Aboriginal populations: The UCNA isn't founded with manifest destiny in mind; it's founded as an exercise in reactionary pique. As such, the idea of supplanting the aboriginal populations isn't really on their agenda, so much as neatly subordinating them into the tapestry of Andalusian society. (In the beginning, in particular, the UCNA is quite happy to support the aborigines, to keep the European subjects from dominating the political landscape. It's cheaper to pay off the Cherokees than the French.)
• European (and Europeanizing) neighboring states: The UCNA has a lot of borders. I have only the vaguest idea what it's been exposed to in the Caribbean. On its southern border, it has Axamalia, a Hispano-Baltic Texas (a lot of Güntherites flee there after the Baltic crises of the late 18th century; they're why the G.P. of Mexico arose at all, and a second wave after the "Burning Thirties" leads to a successful war of independence in the early 1840s.) In the northeast, there's a Dutch-Anglo-Scottish confederal republic (on the model of the United Provinces) that congealed out of earlier turbulence. Up north is the big worry in the form of Canada*, including New Ireland (the Saint Lawrence River Valley; as Gaelic here as it is Francophone IRL) - oddly enough, a likely place to produce something recognizably akin to modern country music, if considerably more Celtic. Simply by convergence, osmosis, and cross-border exchanges of ideas (and immigrant populations), this is going to be the random element in the recipe.

So what does this blend into?