Google Maps will change Gulf of ‘Mexico’ to ‘America’ in US
Google Maps will change the name of the “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America” once it’s officially updated in the U.S. Geographic Names System.
It’s official: The Gulf of Mexico is no more (at least in the United States, anyway).
Workers at the federal Board on Geographic Names have formally changed the name to the Gulf of America per one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders. The change doesn’t affect what other countries call it, and Mexico’s president has promised to ignore it and asked others to do the same.
Trump on Sunday flew in Air Force 1 over the Gulf while attending the Super Bowl, and declared the day as the “first-ever Gulf of America Day.” Traveling with the president, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum shared on social media an official USGS map image showing the new name.
While some U.S agencies immediately began using the new name upon Trump’s Jan. 20 order, it’s now effective across all the federal government because it’s been changed in the centralized Geographic Names Information System.
Google has also updated its maps. Apple ignored a request for comment for whether it would honor the change, and had not swapped in the new name by 5 p.m. on Monday.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo joked that she’s going to start calling the United States “Mexican America” in retaliation. International practice is to use whatever place name is preferred by the country a specific geographic feature belongs to, but the gulf touches Mexico, the United States, Cuba and several other island nations.
There is precedent for different names for the same places: A contested chain off islands off the coast of South America is known by the British as the Falkland Islands, while Argentina, which also claims the islands, calls them the Islas Malvinas. Argentina invaded the islands in 1982, sparking a vicious two-month battle won by the British.
Also changed is the name of tallest mountain in North America, which is again Mount McKinley to the federal government. While Alaska officials long deemed the mountain Denali, it wasn’t called by that by federal officials until President Barack Obama aligned it in 2015.
Trump called Obama’s action an “affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements, and his sacrifice.”
In renaming Denali, Trump specifically highlighted McKinley’s use of tariffs ‒ a Trump favorite ‒ and his “expansion of territorial gains.” McKinley, a Republican, added Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii to the United States in various forms.
Trump has said he wants to annex Greenland, suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, and threatened to invade Panama to take back the Panama Canal.
Although the mountain has been renamed, the national park that encloses it remains the same: Denali National Park and Preserve.