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.”
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