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Mexico joins the United States...in the 1990s?

I do not think that is an accurate representation. When I do a Google search with the keywords "Republicans" and "statehood" and "Puerto Rico", the top recent hits relate to Republicans being reluctant.

The above article notes how a Republican representative from Alaska has broken from a Republican consensus critical of Puerto Rican statehood, arguing that there is no reason to assume it must be Democratic-leaning.

This article notes how Republicans generally, if not uniformly, base their opposition to Puerto Rican statehood on fears that the state will learn Democratic.

This article notes how, in a poll, Democratic respondents consistently were twice as likely as Republicans to favour statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington D.C.

Well, specific to what I was saying:

We support the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted to the Union as a fully sovereign state. We further recognize the historic significance of the 2012 local referendum in which a 54 percent majority voted to end Puerto Rico’s current status as a U.S. territory, and 61 percent chose statehood over options for sovereign nationhood. We support the federally sponsored political status referendum authorized and funded by an Act of Congress in 2014 to ascertain the aspirations of the people of Puerto Rico. Once the 2012 local vote for statehood is ratified, Congress should approve an enabling act with terms for Puerto Rico’s future admission as the 51st state of the Union.​

The Republican Party might say it favours Puerto Rican statehood, but in actual fact its membership has demonstrated itself very reluctant. The unspoken but real subtext, of the Republican Party being skeptical about admitting to the Union a populous island full of Hispanics who can be expected to be Democratic-leaning, is real.

I'd agree with this, but I think it's important to note the GOP of today is very different from the one of 20-40 years ago. In 2004, for example, their candidate would manage to win 44% of the Hispanic vote; concerns over the partisan leanings of Mexicans wouldn't be as extreme in the past as they are today. For further evidence of that, going back all the way to the Nixon years:

The United States of America is witnessing a growing Latin American voting demographic, and many might be surprised to learn that the first “Latino” President was, in fact, Richard Nixon. In 1969, his first year in office, he established the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People.​
Throughout his Presidency, he appointed more Latinos than any preceding President, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He remained unsurpassed in those numbers until Bill Clinton’s Presidency in the 1990’s.​
Over four decades ago, Hispanics in the United States found themselves exercising more power in a Presidential campaign that at any other time in American history.​
Seeking re-election, President Nixon reached out to the Latino community by discussing his strategy for funding education, health, small businesses and other programs in Latin American communities in areas like Texas, California, and in the Southwest. Some called it the Nixon Hispanic Strategy.​
Nixon received 40 percent of the Latino vote, by most estimates, in the 1972 re-election.​
Nixon was often joined in his campaign by some of his most prominent Latino appointees, including Cabinet Committee Chairman Henry Ramirez, U.S. Treasurer Ramona Banuelos, and Office of the Economic Opportunity head Phillip Sanchez.​

The self-marginalization of California Republicans because of their perception as a political faction hostile to California's single largest population is ephemeral. California has stayed republican in format, for instance, has remained a polity with competitive democratic elections and referenda, has kept key institutions of governance and law since the state's foundation, and so on. Immigration has not changed that; California's institutions, if anything, have provided a matrix for immigrant integration.

I think you've confused me saying "character" as me saying "structure"; obviously California has kept all of that, but its character has certainly changed comparing, say, the 1950s to the 1980s or today for that matter. Most obviously, it went from a Republican leaning state to a firmly Democratic one.

The massive annexations of Mexican territory that you are talking about are wholly different. If Republicans are reluctant to bring into the Union a Puerto Rico already deeply integrated into the US, with millions of American citizens and a high-income economy, how much less likely will Republicans—even Democrats—be to bring into the US much poorer and more populous states with no history of deep integration?

For one, by taking into consideration these are not static parties forever set one way on an issue, that they are both malleable to sufficient public/private pressure and, finally, define deep integration?
 
Recall though that in this scenario Mexico is also in the middle of a devastating civil war.

Allow me to clarify better on that, because an all-out civil war is not what I meant:

This has the effect of massively driving down oil prices from 1985 onward, at a time Mexico was struggling with its own debt crisis. The collapse in oil prices would deepen this by removing the main Mexican export, to make repayment impossible without greater austerity which would obviously undermine the PRI regime. An OTL example of this in action, funnily enough, is the crisis of the late 1980s in the East Bloc. So by 1988 you have increasingly declining living standards due to austerity and an overall collapsing economy just as the PRI has to blatantly steal an election. Once that occurs, it's likely the situation spirals out of control with widespread violence and civil disorder making Mexico ungovernable. Such a situation, by default, would be intolerable for the United States because of the risk of violence spilling across the border, waves of refugees and the fact Mexico completely defaulting on its loan repayments would create a 2008-style crash in the Banking Industry, creating an intense political need to do something and do it now. This would likely require some sort of intervention, as the ruling PRI-regime is discredited but the opposition would not offer a meaningful alternative at this point, at least from U.S. interests.​
Rather than roving armies and bitter fighting Yugoslav or Syria style, I'm talking more in terms of what you saw in the East Bloc as they collapsed at the end of the cold war but with the proliferation of groups like the Zapatistas as well being part of the general conflagration; the Italian years of lead, Mexico in 1968, etc in that regard.
 
On a general note, I took a step back from this because I wanted to conduct some more research on it given the vigorous disagreements it provoked. To that end, I would like to share what I have so far learned and allow the evidence to be reviewed by everyone.

First, there was questions raised about Este Pais itself; I was able to find the New York Times article from when they first started in early 1991 which gives some context into its foundations and initial responses to it within Mexico itself. The Times article also shows this political development was receiving serious international focus, which is further shown in the coverage the polling data itself found, including in Foreign Affairs. So, for what it is worth, even then the outfit of Este Pais was seen as worthy of international coverage and its findings were likewise.

Specific to the polls themselves and their relevancy, Blood, Ink and Culture by Roger Bartra includes the essay The Malinche Revenge: Towards a Postnational Identity, which was part of the first issue of Este Pais as a commentary on the findings of the polls from Mexicans themselves. Finally, I acquired a copy of In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Mexico by Joseph Contreras, who was Newsweek’s editorial bureau chief in Mexico City during the 1980s, and then was made their Latin America regional editor in 2005. To quote directly from his book:

During the PRI’s long hegemony, the orthodox gospel preached by Mexico’s political and cultural establishments championed the country’s lower classes as the purest repository of national character. “The lower the station,” wrote one film scholar, “the more genuine the Mexicanness.”39 But as market research firms would later discover, the country’s lower classes have never fully shared the elites’ penchant for anti-Americanism—and over time, the chest-pounding nationalism that typified PRI politicians throughout most of the party’s reign became increasingly out of step with the evolving viewpoints of ordinary Mexicans​
That was documented by a series of opinion surveys that uncovered surprisingly benign views of the United States among the population at large. A poll published in the magazine Este País in 1991 asked people whether they would support a political union of the United States and Mexico if that would improve their living standards, and fully 59 percent answered yes.40 Nine years later an almost identical percentage of Mexican respondents answered the same question in the affirmative. During the decade that witnessed the beginning of the NAFTA era, the percentage of Mexicans who endorsed greater economic ties with the United States rose significantly, from 57 percent in 1990 to 63 percent ten years later.
In the aftermath of another collapse in the value of the Mexican peso in 1994, the firm Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) asked respondents whom they blamed for the country’s latest financial debacle. Nearly half held their government responsible, 18 percent pointed a finger at the leader of the recent Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, another 7 percent mentioned unspecified “foreign investors”—and only one in twenty blamed the United States.41 When a third poll asked people which country would they most like Mexico to resemble, the United States topped the list. “The idea of a fervent nationalism and anti-Americanism has been exploited by the Mexican government [in the past] to enhance its negotiating position,” said MORI pollster Miguel Basañez. “It’s a myth. . . . It has been a weapon used by Mexican governments time and again, but is not supported by the facts.”42​
Further:

As we shall see in subsequent pages of this book, not all Mexicans view these policies as a positive development. But the implications of Salinas de Gortari’s policy shifts for official and unofficial perceptions of the United States were vast and are still being felt years later. “Nationalism and sovereignty were redefined so that the United States became an ally rather than the enemy,” wrote the Mexican American political scientist Rodolfo O. de la Garza.46 The sociologist María García Castro agreed, stating that “in the last few years the State has begun erasing the nationalist discourse.”47 In the process, Morris writes, the Mexican government has redefined its role as one “of a far less activist State, relieved in a sense of the burden of having to mobilize to defend the nation against U.S. influence or to create and assert nationalist identity.”48​
Recent polling data have revealed some striking similarities between American and Mexican views of democracy and foreign policy issues. A 2004 binational opinion survey sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and two Mexican nongovernmental organizations found that an overwhelming majority of Mexicans (81 percent) and Americans (75 percent) regarded international terrorism as a critical threat to their vital interests. Nearly two-thirds of both Americans and Mexicans disagreed with the notion that rich countries play fair in trade negotiations with poor nations. A majority of Americans and Mexicans agreed that the United States should not play the role of world policeman and believed the United Nations should be strengthened, in part by giving the U.N. Security Council the right to authorize the use of force in the face of various security, political, and humanitarian crises. Mexican and American participants said they had generally favorable opinions of each other and also held positive opinions of Canada and friendly European countries. Solid majorities among both nationalities expressed support for a quid pro quo agreement that would give Mexicans more opportunities to work and live in the United States in exchange for a greater effort by Mexico to reduce illegal immigration and drug smuggling across the border.49​
 
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Allow me to clarify better on that, because an all-out civil war is not what I meant

Your first post said "The easiest PoD is probably to have the 1988 election directly spiral into a Second Mexican Civil War, which was actually pretty close to happening IOTL", that absolutely would be taken by people as meaning an all-out conflict
 
I don't want to be too aggro here but it's frustrating to have a thread start with a specific POD that was a civil war, but then when that's a barrier for people it becomes retroactively a Years of Lead situation, instead of "okay but what if it's a Years of Lead instead of all-out civil war". Discussions can change the PODs.
 
Your first post said "The easiest PoD is probably to have the 1988 election directly spiral into a Second Mexican Civil War, which was actually pretty close to happening IOTL", that absolutely would be taken by people as meaning an all-out conflict

That was in the context of talking about the easiest PoD, and in reference to the TL I cited with a hyperlink. As I stated later on:

The easiest PoD is probably to have the 1988 election directly spiral into a Second Mexican Civil War, which was actually pretty close to happening IOTL. For various reasons, I'll look at another PoD which indirectly causes the above via Saddam's Iraq and its war with Iran in the 1980s.​
I'll take my lumps for being imprecise/not being more clear, and I apologize.
 
So, after a year of researching and talking with various academics around North America, I finally got access to CIDE's 10 years of polling data about Mexican societal attitudes. To explain what their project is:

Mexico, the Americas and the World is a research project of the International Studies Division of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE), which studies the social attitudes and political culture of Mexicans regarding foreign policy and international relations. The project began in 2004 and consists of a biennial survey, based on representative samples of the national population and groups of leaders. It is a rigorous instrument to collect original and reliable information on the opinions, attitudes, evaluations, beliefs, interests, aspirations, feelings, social values and behavior of citizens regarding international issues.​
The central objective of the study is to provide empirical, objective and rigorous information in a strategic area for Mexico and Latin America, where independent and reliable data are scarce and scattered. Precise knowledge of citizens' perceptions of how the world works and how it should work is an indispensable instrument for evaluating the degree of legitimacy of the institutions, norms and actors of the international system and the government's performance in matters of foreign policy. Therefore, this information provides inputs for academic research and decision-making by actors and organizations (both public and private).​
The greatest strength of Mexico, the Americas and the World is that it is a key instrument for strategic decision-making, the formulation of democratic and effective public policies in the international arena, the government management and conduct of foreign relations, the communication and transnational social bonding, bilateral, regional and international cooperation and scientific, educational and cultural research.​

It's not merely a magazine poll, CIDE is one of the top think tanks in Mexico, and is highly rated in its field globally. Here's what I found:

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The initial link in this post takes one to the entire collection, which will enable one to dig through the entire Spanish language collection. This graph, and the following text citation, comes from the English language review paper they did covering the data in broad strokes, with context, etc. With that said, here's part of the reports finding:

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@raharris1973 hope it interests you as much as it did me.
 
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