When Google announced it was complying with US President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, many Mexicans responded with a laugh and a long, exhausted sigh.
At her daily press briefing on Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum largely shrugged off Google’s move, noting that Trump’s order only applies to the US continental shelf, suggesting that her country would not abide by it.
“The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.
Many of her fellow Mexicans have been similarly dismissive.
On social media, users shared images poking fun at what some called Trump’s “obsession” with their country and the unorthodox nature of his decision. Some soccer fans suggested sarcastically that Trump was paying tribute to the popular Mexican football team, Club América.
But not everyone is laughing. In an editorial for the Mexican newspaper El Universal, legal expert Mario Melgar-Adalid advised the country to push back.
“Mexico must firmly oppose this interference, otherwise the next step could be that instead of the United Mexican States (Mexico’s formal name), as established in our Constitution, they will begin to call us Old Mexico,” he wrote.
In the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz, which borders the gulf, Governor Rocío Nahle rejected Trump’s move. “Today and always … for 500 years it has been and will continue to be our rich and great ‘Gulf of Mexico,’” the governor wrote on social media last week.
Juan Cobos, a former resident of Veracruz who now lives in Mexico City, called it “absurd,” saying hundreds of years of history could not be erased by a pen stroke.
“You can’t change something overnight, what we’ve grown up with – history, geography, all that. You can’t be so authoritarian that you can change it from one day to the next.”
Google said on Monday its move was in line with its “practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.” The company noted that the change would be applied only in the United States. Users in Mexico will continue to see the “Gulf of Mexico” on Google Maps. The rest of the world will see both names.
Trump, in his executive order last week, said he directed that the body of water be renamed the Gulf of America “in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our nation’s economy and its people.” The order calls for all federal government maps and documents to reflect the change.
He also ordered that the nation’s highest mountain, Denali, change its name back to Mount McKinley, in honor of President William McKinley. Google said it would also update the name of its maps when the Geographic Names Information System, a government database of names and location data, is updated.
Sheinbaum responded with ridicule at the time. At a press conference, she presented a 1607 map that labeled parts of North America as “Mexican America,” and dryly proposed that the gulf should be renamed as such.
She said: “It sounds nice, no?”