Updated May 12, 2024 at 5:40 p.m.*
–OpEd–
BUENOS AIRES — Of all the various geographic oddities that President Donald Trump has come up with since taking office earlier this year, one stands out as particularly senseless: changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.”
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If we’re not delving into the issue of who gets to decide on geographical names and how this is done, the idea of changing the name of a geographical feature from the country that happens to be closest, to that of the continent that, well, engulfs it.
It may seem amusing at first. But that would be a mistake: Because for Trump (and most of his compatriots, if not the vast majority of Anglo-Saxons) the word “America” does not refer to the continent stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego — which is what we learned at school, here in Argentina — but instead to one nation: the United States of America.
That effectively wipes the rest of us off the map and deprives us of the undoubted right to be called “Americans,” which is indeed what we are. It chimes in perfectly with the nationalistic outlook that pushed Trump to say — as a spoiled, tantrum-prone child would — that this gulf is “mine, mine, mine.”
And now, just a few weeks after this rebranding controversy, Trump is now considering forcing U.S. maps to change the name of the Persian Gulf to the “Arabian Gulf” or the “Gulf of Arabia.” The suggestion has drawn the ire of virtually all Iranians, regardless of politics or religion, for whom the name has historical ramifications and is a matter of national pride.
Who sets geographical names?
This raises a basic question that goes beyond pointing out Trump’s notable ignorance: who sets geographical names and how? Though these names have formed and changed over history, and not without controversy — some of it violent and even bloody —, they ultimately arise from an obvious fact: seas, mountains, and rivers do not have names on their own; we know them by the names we assign them. And that “we” changes over time.
For instance, Argentines call the Bermejo river by that name, but the Guaraní (an ancestral nation of that part of the continent) once knew it as Ypitá. Thus, names have changed over time, in keeping with shifting power arrangements and their territorial repercussions.
If we were to revamp the map of Argentina today and replace all place names with those from the 16th century, nobody would understand a thing.
If we were to revamp the map of Argentina today and replace all place names with those from the 16th century, nobody would understand a thing. In modern and more globalized times, certain names caught on and became “naturalized,” like those of oceans, continents and major geographic features that are either very large or shared by several countries.
So what happens when a geographic feature lies within a single state? In that case, the authorities of that state decide the names of places, and even compile long formal lists to give them official and somewhat permanent status.
Worldcrunch 🗞 Extra!
Know more • Ahead of his three-day trip this week to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested he might be using the term “Arabian Gulf” or “Gulf of Arabia” instead of “Persian Gulf.”
Although he said that he still hasn’t made a finaly decision, and didn’t want “to hurt anybody’s feelings,” this did little to abate widespread anger in Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reportedly responded to the proposal by saying: “The name is woven into our history, our poetry, our very soul,” and altering it would “bring the wrath of all Iranians,” Forbes reported.
The debate over what to call this body of water has been a longstanding source of friction between Iran and its Arab neighbors. Although many Arab states favor the name “Arabian Gulf,” “Persian Gulf” has been the internationally accepted term for centuries. Major global institutions — including the United Nations and the International Hydrographic Organization — use “Persian Gulf” in their official records. — Bertrand Hauger (read more about the Worldcrunch method here).
The open seas
When it comes to the open seas, these belong to nobody, with states owning nothing but a strip off their coastlines, termed territorial waters. Their names derive from a tradition without an owner.
In that spirit, the Gulf of Mexico’s name comes in part from the Aztec empire — or more specifically the Mexicas who forged it from the 14th to the 16th centuries. To the Spaniards who arrived in this part of the world in the early 16th century, this was the “sea of the Mexicas.”
Whether you look at it on a map or on a computer, you’ll see that the Gulf of Mexico is more or less rounded in form, with narrow outlets onto the Atlantic Ocean. Going clockwise, it follows the coast of the Yucatán peninsula toward the coast of eastern Mexico and northwards along the southern coast of the United States (or America!), stopping at the southern tip of Florida.
An old and beloved name
There we have the narrow opening to the Atlantic, after which comes the coast of Cuba and then another small outlet before the gulf rejoins the Yucatán. It spans a vast area of 1.5 million square kilometers, and as this description shows, is not the property of the U.S., or Mexico, or Cuba, because it’s not an inland lake. It is an open sea, unowned and free for all to navigate.
We might, somewhat nonsensically perhaps, divide the stretch into three sections, with a line linking the tips of the three states (and roughly coinciding with the 25th parallel) and let each country name its section as it pleases. Trump could then have his patriotic or national Gulf — at least until some lackey or sycophant of his decides to rename it after the unhinged president himself: the Trump Gulf!
While the rest of us have been calling this stretch of the seas the Gulf of Mexico for 400 years or now, the Trump administration is asking — demanding? — that we call it a different name to comply with the megalomaniac whims of the senile president of the world’s big superpower. Some websites, in a fit of servility, have already done it.
No, let’s keep and defend an old and beloved name. Beyond geography, common sense and respect for others — two qualities that have received a beating of late — will one day thank us for it.
*Originally published May 7, 2025, this article was updated May 12, 2024 with updated details about Trump’s plans to rename the Persian Gulf the Gulf of Arabia.
