I’d like to see a heat map of where people say the midwest is.
It’s interesting to see some out of Pennsylvania identifying themselves as Midwest, but having driven up I-79 there’s definitely a portion of northwest Pennsylvania that geographically feels “Midwest” to me. In fact I think I could argue (and anger many people in the process) that Buffalo, NY is a Midwest city geographically based on its proximity to Lake Erie. I’d never considered it before, but it feels like regions of US states touching a Great Lake automatically makes them part of the Midwest, except for Lake Ontario for some reason. Maybe it’s the proximity of the mountains in New York.
When early settlers traveled west they hit the Rockies and decided that was as far as they felt like going in horse and buggy, so they called it “the West” even though it was fully within the east half of the continent.
Believe me, you are not the first person to be bothered by the fact that, from east to west, the four regions of the US are “east coast”, “Midwest”, “central”, and “west”
The new world is sometimes referred to as the west and that is the middle of the continent so I guess by that logic No Mexico would be the Mid-West
