The UCNA, ash-Shamal and aboriginal politics

The UCNA has neither a manifest destiny nor a Wild West. It has ash-Shamal: "The North."

ash-Shamal is a concept that's as old as Moorish civilization itself. Spain stabilizes on the Tagus, with Christians to the north of it and Moors to the south. (And Toledo, which changes hands several times.) In  between is ash-Shamal,"the North" - the edge of the Moorish world, where the borders are permeable, fluctuate, and are defined by a certain amount of lawlessness. (Think of the Anglo-Scottish Border Marches and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it can be like.)

700 years later, that spatialization of the world is entrenched enough to transition to the New World. The heart of the Moorish New World, during the golden age of the empire, was in Mexico, defined by its northern border with France-Outremer and various aboriginal nations; after the fall of the empire, the UCNA (rising in what was formerly France-Outremer) has a clearly defined southern border (claimed by Mexico) and a very nebulous northern border.

The UCNA is extremely expansionist, but it claims no God-given mandate to do so. Also unlike America, its identity doesn't have a hugely ethnic national component; Moorish racial taxonomy is rather different from the historic Spanish casta, and even if it wasn't the experience of Maghrebi diversity left the Moors used to being a plurinational state. As long as they learn to speak Moorish and behave themselves in public, tribes are actually rather cute.

The one sticking point is the tribes in The North.

ash-Shamal in New Andalusia diverges from ash-Shamal in one critical respect: it's a lot less static. As far as the Moors are concerned, a certain amount of low-intensity warfare is typical and acceptable in The North; the only problem is that the location of The North is going to change over time, and the Shamali tribes aren't necessarily going to agree with changes in psychogeography.

There probably won't be a Trail of Tears in the UCNA. But a conscious collapsing of the southern bison herds? I wouldn't rule it out.

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?