Renaming the Gulf of Mexico: An Act of Arrogance and Ignorance
- TheMed
- Jan 30, 2025
- 11 min read
Updated: Jan 31, 2025
On January 20th, 2025, Donald Trump signed the Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness executive order. This executive order renamed two geographical features. Mount Denali in Alaska was reverted back to Mount McKinley and the Gulf of Mexico was renamed to the Gulf of America. The renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, unlike the reverting of Denali to McKinley, was an unprecedented act. The title of the executive order would suggest that the newly chosen names were names that had already been used to refer to these locations in times past, yet as John Sledge writes in his book The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History, since the mid-17th century the Gulf of Mexico has been the most widely recognized and consistent name for this body of water. No other name has been commonly or officially used by any other country, including the United States. As someone who has spent the majority of my twenty-eight years living on the Gulf coast of Florida, I can speak from my personal experience that besides the informal version “The Gulf” I have never heard anyone refer to the Gulf of Mexico by any other name.
So, if “restoration” is not the objective of this name change what is? Well, that seems to be fairly obvious. Donald Trump’s brand of America-first nationalism celebrates and promotes the idea of American exceptionalism (even if somewhat dimmed) and seeks to export this sentiment to the rest of the world. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico has nothing to do with tradition or a reversion to what used to be, it is a quick way for Donald Trump to make a political statement that promotes America and scores easy points with his supporters.
While I am not a Trump supporter, I am a proud American that believes in my country and her values. I would hope that every American citizen wants their country promoted. But I also think that regardless of my opinion or political leanings, decisions should be made for good reasons that take the details into account, for those are where they say the Devil is.
There is a good reason to revert the name of Mount Denali to Mount McKinley. William McKinley was an American president who fought for the Union in the Civil War, seeing combat at the battles of South Mountain and Antietam as well as the Shenandoah Valley campaign. By all accounts he was a devoted husband to his epileptic wife, Ida, who constantly needed his presence after the premature death of both of their daughters broke her irrevocably. Personally, I do not agree with many of the policy decisions McKinley made during his years as President, but as a man, as a human being I respect him. He made sacrifices for his country and for others, many times at the cost of his own well-being.
But is there a similarly good reason to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America? Arguably we should have an even better reason, after all Mount McKinley had precedent, name recognition, tradition and custom to back it up. The Gulf of America has none of those things. The most logical argument for adopting the new name becomes apparent as soon as one looks at a map. The United States possesses the majority of the coastline surrounding this body of water. This undeniable fact almost immediately makes one wonder, “Why DO we call it the Gulf of MEXICO? Why have we EVER called it the Gulf of Mexico? Have Americans been cheated out of calling it OUR Gulf this whole time?” It is when we begin to ask these questions that an inconvenient truth of American history unravels.
Lines on a map, just like names, can change. On September 27, 1821, after an eleven-year struggle with its Spanish colonial overlords, the colony of New Spain became the independent nation of Mexico. After achieving independence, the territory of Mexico stretched from the Yucatan peninsula in the south, to the Arkansas river in the north, extending westward to the Pacific Ocean, comprising all of the land which today houses the U.S. states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, most of Colorado and parts of Wyoming and Oklahoma. In short, Mexico in 1821 possessed what modern Americans know as the Southwest and Pacific Coast regions of America and the Lone Star State in its entirety.
It seemed inevitable that the newly minted nation of Mexico would find its continental neighbor, the United States of America, an earnest and compatible ally in the years to come. After all, the two nations had so much in common. Both had been colonies which had won independence only after a long and desperate struggle against their colonial rulers, both had instituted new republican governments to replace hereditary monarchy, and both were now charting their own course in a European-dominated world. The two nascent nations would need each other in the difficult days to come.
And yet, despite their many similarities, the differences between the U.S. and Mexico proved to be the decisive factor in the relationship between the two countries. In the decade following the revolution Mexico had very tenuous control of its northern territories, including Texas, as very few Mexican citizens lived in these regions. Native tribes, like the Comanche, roamed the plains with impunity and with no regard to the laws of Mexico, which did not have the resources to enforce rule of law or any amount of administration in these vast wildlands. To fix this problem the Mexican government changed its immigration policy to allow Americans to settle in Texas, hoping to attract settlers and pioneers to the region, bolstering its numbers and giving the government a presence in the area.
Despite initially promising results things went wrong quickly. Most of the Americans that came to settle in Mexican territory came from the South. They were slave owners who had come for new land to plant their crops, their slaves in tow. For the Mexican government, this was a problem. Unlike the United States, Mexico had abolished slavery. The American slave owners immigrating to Texas were directly violating Mexican law. When the Mexican government made an effort in 1829 to enforce its laws in the region the Texians nearly rebelled. In 1830 to bring the American immigrants in line President Bustamante implemented the laws of April 6, 1830, which, among other things, prohibited further immigration to Texas from the United States, increased taxes, and reiterated the ban on slavery. The settlers ignored the Mexican government completely. More American immigrants continued to arrive, now illegally. The parallels that can be drawn from this series of events to the current problems at the Mexican American border are darkly ironic.
In 1834 Santa Anna overthrew the government of Gomez Farias. In 1835 he revealed his plans for more centralized government and overturned the Mexican constitution. The Texians used this as a pretext for rebellion, which had little to do with rights or systems of government and much more to do with their ongoing effort to maintain the economic benefits of slavery and to ignore the authority of the country they had immigrated to.
We all know what happened next. It might as well be American mythology. The story goes that Davy Crockett and James Bowie died fighting at the Alamo, taking a lot of Mexicans with them and then Sam Houston finished them off at the Battle of San Jacinto. Santa Anna was captured and forced to sign the Treaties of Velasco, creating the new Republic of Texas.
The Mexican government refused to recognize Texas’ independence. The Treaties of Velasco had been extracted at gunpoint and without the consent of any other government officials. When the treaties were presented to the Mexican Congress there was an agreement that Santa Anna had offered nothing in the name of the nation. In fact, the documents were not even called "treaties" until they were so characterized by U.S. President James K. Polk in his justifications for war some ten years later, as U.S. Representative Abraham Lincoln pointed out in 1848.
Texas governed itself as an independent Republic for a decade, but then did what probably everyone on both sides of the Gulf knew was inevitable. In 1845 Texas joined the United States as the 28th state and the 13th slave state. War between the U.S. and Mexico was now unavoidable. U.S. citizens had refused to abide by the laws of a sovereign nation they had settled in, had rebelled against that nation, had been aided by the U.S. government and U.S. Army unofficially during their rebellion and now had voted to give their land, which was not lawfully theirs or theirs to give, to a foreign power.
The Mexican American War did not last long. The Mexican Army was under equipped and undertrained. American forces won a series of victories that culminated in the occupation of the capital, Mexico City, and the Mexican heartland. In less than two years Mexico was forced to sue for peace, ceding Texas to the United States and being forced at gunpoint to sell off nearly all their territory north of the Rio Grande to the U.S. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican American War Mexico gave over 900,000 square miles of land to the US, reducing her own territory to less than half of what it had been in 1821.
Though once again Americans had cloaked their intentions under the guise of self-defense and virtue, there was never any doubt what the real motivations were. As one Mexican Army officer said, “The true origin of the war, it is sufficient to say that the insatiable ambition of the United States, favored by our weakness, caused it.”
The conflict also did not sit well with many of the victors. Ulysses S. Grant, who would go on to become commander of all Union armies in the Civil War and 18th President of the United States served as a quartermaster during the Mexican American War. He was also quite certain of what America’s motivations had been, stating in his memoirs, “Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation [of Texas] was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”
The Mexican American War was a monumental step in the development of America. It marked the first time since the Revolution that America had been the aggressor in a conflict. Those who had opposed the war felt that America had turned from republic to empire. America had aspired to lead by example; to become a city on the hill whose eminence alone would inspire and bring other nations into a brotherhood of man. The war with Mexico shattered this ideal forever. America had used force and threats to wring concessions out of a weaker neighbor, an act as brutish and cruel as a Mafia boss using intimidation and violence to control a city. In doing so, America became the majority owner of the Gulf of Mexico’s coastline.
Americans may have forgotten how these events unfolded, but Mexicans have not. Later in the 19th century Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz remarked, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States!” More recently in the 2000s, the brand Absolut Vodka had a marketing campaign “In an Absolut World” which featured graphics and photos of a better or “more Absolut” version of the world. The graphic that the Absolut Vodka team settled on for the Mexican market was a photo of Mexico’s territorial borders in 1821, with the words “In an Absolut World” written across. In other words, in a better, more just world Mexico would still have the 900,000 square miles of land which America had taken in the Mexican American War.
This begs the question; how should Americans view this part of our history? Perhaps all of this talk of history and the executive order which is the subject of this essay leads us to another question that has been in politics recently: Fundamentally, how should we approach our country’s past and view its legacy? The tremendously controversial Critical Race Theory has been decried by conservatives as openly opposed to the American experiment. Yet liberals would agree that most American history courses have glossed over many uncomfortable moments in America’s past to emphasize the glory of her achievements and the uniqueness of her national character. Some middle path must be found which educators and curious Americans are willing to tread. I will not even attempt to lay out how this can be done in the American education system as a whole. In many ways I think it is simply the responsibility of individual teachers to hold themselves accountable to a higher standard of truth regardless of their personal ideological or political views, something that seems to be increasingly rare on both sides of the political aisle.
If we do not chart some middle course, we seem destined to do one of two things. Either we will coddle our supposedly inerrant forefathers and universally excuse their missteps, or we will look down upon their archaic ideas and disown them for their multitude of sins. Both of these attitudes are wrong. History and American history are riddled with success and failure. To emphasize either part at the expense of the other is to do a great disservice to the whole and more importantly, to truth itself.
Was the Mexican American War an unjust war of aggression? Yes. So was the Spanish-American War and so were many wars and skirmishes which America fought against Indian tribes. Yet the same nation that has done so much wrong has also shielded the world from great evil. It was in no small part because of the American boys who landed on the beaches of Normandy, Guadalcanal and Okinawa that the Axis powers who had brought great suffering, tyranny and oppression to this world were finally defeated. It was because of the Americans who airlifted millions of tons of supplies to their defeated enemies after the war had concluded that Europe and Japan were able to recover economically, preventing starvation and poverty from affecting millions and it was the Americans who fought in the Korean peninsula that prevented the southern half of that country from being overrun by an ideology that has brought nothing but pain, hardship and injustice to the citizens of the north and shackled them to a series of self-serving despots.
Americans should be proud of their country while at the same time recognizing the errors it has made in the past. The way in which America has treated Mexico is one of the darker sagas of American history. At best renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America is a painful reminder to Mexico of what America stole from her and demonstrative of how ambivalent Americans can be towards the darker parts of our past, at the worst it is a deliberate jab that revels in victories won at the expense and to the detriment of a neighboring country.
At best it’s an act of ignorance. At worst it’s an act of arrogance. I, as a proud American, see no good reason to call the Gulf of Mexico, that I have spent many of my days beside, by any other name. I believe this to be the wise and decent thing to do.
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