HOUSTON — President-elect Donald Trump raised some eyebrows when he talked on Tuesday about changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico.
“We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring, that covers a lot of territory,” he said. “The Gulf of America. What a beautiful name … and we’re going to be announcing, at a future date pretty soon. We’re going to change because we do most of the work there and it’s ours.”
This proposed name change has a lot of people asking if he can make such a change to the name. We went to the experts for that answer and the short answer is yes, at least within the U.S. In fact, one Congresswoman is already drafting a bill to make that happen.
“Of course, the United States is free to call it whatever it wants to call it and Mexico is free to call it the Gulf of Mexico,” said Tony Payan, Ph. D., the director for the Center for U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
“It’s not gonna make a difference,” he said. “Different bodies of water in the on the planet can be labeled different things by different countries.”
The International Hydrographic Organization — of which both the United States and Mexico are members — works to ensure all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. There are instances where countries refer to the same body of water or landmark by different names in their own documentation.
So while Trump may not be able to name the body of water for the world, the U.S. can change what it’s referred to in the country.
It can be easier to change the name of a landmark or body of water is within a country’s boundaries. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama approved an order from the Department of Interior to rename Mount McKinley — the highest peak in North America — to Denali, a move that Trump has said he wants to reverse.
Just after Trump’s comments on Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said during an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson that she would direct her staff to draft legislation to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, a move she said would take care of funding for new maps and administrative policy materials throughout the federal government.
“Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) directed her staff on Tuesday to begin the legislative process of changing the name of the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ to ‘Gulf of America,’ Greene confirmed to Breitbart News.” pic.twitter.com/Cj2sDgZrl6
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) January 8, 2025
According to the Texas State Historical Association, the Gulf didn’t have a name until the 1540s and was considered part of the Atlantic Ocean. The Spanish name most commonly used after that was Seno Mexicano, although some maps and documents called it Golfo de Nueva España or Golfo de México,. For more than 150 years after it was discovered by Europeans, it was called the Spanish Sea in English. After that, the Gulf of Mexico.
Yes. In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a bill to rename portions of the gulf that touch that state’s beaches “Gulf of America,” a move the bill author later referred to as a “joke.” That bill, which was referred to a committee, did not pass.
Two years earlier, comedian Stephen Colbert had joked on his show that, following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it should be renamed “Gulf of America” because, “We broke it, we bought it.”
KHOU 11’s Matt Dougherty was in Galveston Tuesday, asking people what they thought. You can see their reactions below.
There’s a long-running dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan among Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, with South Korea arguing that the current name wasn’t commonly used until Korea was under Japanese rule. At an International Hydrographic Organization meeting in 2020, member states agreed on a plan to replace names with numerical identifiers and develop a new digital standard for modern geographic information systems.
The Persian Gulf has been widely known by that name since the 16th century, although usage of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in many countries in the Middle East. The government of Iran threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the company’s decision not to label the body of water at all on its maps.
There have been other conversations about bodies of water, including from Trump’s 2016 opponent. According to materials revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of her campaign chairman’s personal account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 told an audience that, by China’s logic that it claimed nearly the entirety of the South China Sea, then the U.S. after World War II could have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”
