After President-elect Donald Trump’s January 7 announcement that he intended to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, I received a stream of texts, emails, and phone calls conveying the equivalent of eye rolling over yet another Trump extremism. My daughter texted with classically succinct Gen Z speak, “god what a donut.”

Perhaps. But the Gulf has not always been the Gulf of Mexico. The Maya likely called it Nahá, Great Water. An unidentified European mapmaker from the early 16^th century named it Seno de Mejicano, meaning Mexican bay or gulf. Around the same time, the Italian-born explorer Sebastian Cabot issued a map with the designation Golpho de la Nueva España, and a Portuguese cartographer chose Sinus Magnus Antiliarum, a somewhat geopolitically neutral variant that translates to “large, round bay.” Still, as conquest driven as they were, European powers never seemed to have contested the sea’s cartographic association with Spain or Mexico or the name that finally stuck: Golpho de Mexico. 

Trump’s proposal is chauvinistic and politically motivated. It’s an outfall from his frustration with the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico, for which the U.S. is not blameless, and the millions of people he claims Mexican officials “pour into our country.” Of the promised retitling, he said, “it’s appropriate. It’s appropriate.” That might be true geographically speaking. The Gulf is a North American sea, and the three countries that border it—the U.S., Mexico, and Cuba—are part of North America. 

But Trump’s actions follow an old trope of renaming a place to claim authority over it and to repel potential rivals. That was common among European nations that were carving up the New World, imposing names on new places that were actually old and often sacred places bearing Indigenous names. A prime example is North America, which many Native peoples called Turtle Island, the place where life began. 

Until now, the U.S. has never objected to the Gulf’s given name, although it has a deep history of engaging in diplomatic gamesmanship over the sea. When Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon, he was equally interested in acquiring New Orleans as he was the vast territory of the West. Controlling the Mississippi River was essential to controlling commerce through the heart of the continent and retaining free access to the Gulf of Mexico and the sea lanes of the Gulf Stream. He encouraged James Monroe when president to remove Spain from the gateway to the Gulf by acquiring Cuba, which would “give us over the Gulf of Mexico” and “fill up the measure of our political well-being.” Spain said it would rather see the island “sunk in the Ocean” than sold to the U.S. (words a more restrained Denmark has yet echoed in dealing with Trump’s lust for Greenland). 

What the Gulf needs is not a new identity but foresight in dealing with the challenges the sea and its 64 million U.S. residents face in this climate-change century.

Spain had already lost Florida after General Andrew Jackson illegally invaded the territory to stop enslaved people from escaping to sanctuary among Florida Seminole. Despite his actions inciting vociferous objections in Congress and from the international community, the public cheered him on, and the U.S. gained 1,350 miles of Gulf waterfront once Spain ceded its possession. The country added another 367 when it annexed the Republic of Texas, which had secured its independence upon U.S. settlers defeating Mexican General Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Dead 20 years, Jefferson would have raised a glass of his favorite French wine to the victory. “Techas,” he had predicted in a letter to Monroe, would be the “richest State of our Union.” Today, U.S. Gulf-front is roughly equal in miles to Mexico’s and Cuba’s together. 

Expansionist impulses have not been favorable for the sea, however. The U.S. has packed the Gulf with shipping traffic and oil wells (five of the nation’s ten busiest ports are on the Gulf, and some 90,000 wells have been drilled since 1938). It has overexploited aquatic resources and overtaxed the natural systems creating those resources by overbuilding on the shoreline and flushing effluent down rivers from as far away as the Canadian border, destroying vital estuarine environments and creating one of the largest offshore dead zones in the world. It has, one can argue, Americanized the sea.

What will the U.S. or the Gulf gain from a name change? (Think of the logistical nightmare that would create for the tourist industry alone.) Will Mexico, the international community, or the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names even recognize a new designation? 

What the Gulf needs is not a new identity but foresight in dealing with the challenges the sea and its 64 million U.S. residents face in this climate-change century. The Gulf Coast is the nation’s most vulnerable to sea-level rise (primarily from the melting Greenland ice sheet, where Trump’s objective is to seize natural resources). Hurricanes are ramping up in intensity and frequency, yet construction cranes thrive, inviting people to come live in harm’s way. After joining together to restore vital estuarine environments following the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act and more recently with BP settlement money, we are backsliding by a renewed laxity in controlling pollution and habitat loss. The dead zone is growing larger, and our daily impact on the Gulf environment surpasses the devastation of the BP oil spill. 

Renaming the Gulf assumes U.S. ownership of it, but in truth, no one owns the Gulf. It belongs to nature, and nature is most generous to us when we align ourselves with its balances, or what Jefferson called the “workhouse of nature.” Instead of changing the sea’s name, we should change our relationship with it. Instead of viewing it as exploitable property, we should recognize it as a community to which we belong and owe an ethical responsibility. 

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