Within a few days of his January 20 inauguration, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order that the Gulf of Mexico should be known as the Gulf of America from now on.
There’s several problems with this order, aside from the fact that Associated Press has refused to do so, and has been punished by the Trump administration with curtailed access to federal news events.
For starters, the United States has no authority over the international waters of the Gulf, which has been known and designated by cartographers all over the world as the “Gulf of Mexico” for hundreds of years since the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the claim of Texas in 1519. Spanish colonists quickly spread to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, and southern Louisiana and Mississippi.
The name America is derived from the Italian explorer and cartographer, who first realized that the lands discovered after Columbus in 1492, had nothing to do with India and the Far East, but were part of separate and far distant continents. Vespucci didn’t apply his name to the new continents – that was done by a German map-maker in 1507, referring to the coast of Brazil, which had been explored by Vespucci.
Through the 1500s, more and more map-makers started using “America” as a way to designate the New World, or to designate North and South America. Ironically, Vespucci never reached any part of North America and Spain resisted the “America” name for 200 years, because Spain wanted Columbus recognized instead.
Now let’s look at what British colonists were doing. Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607, and Plymouth, Massachusetts, was founded by the Pilgrims in 1620. Compared to New Spain, they were late to the party. Anglo-Americans didn’t reach Texas in significant numbers until 1821 – 300 families recruited by Stephen F. Austin. At that time, there were 22 states in the United States.
Fast forward to this week, when Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of eastern Colorado got upset that Democrats were making fun of Trump’s designation of “Gulf of America,” even though Amerigo Vespucci never had a thing to do with North America. Boebert threatened to bring up a bill to change Washington, D.C., to America, D.C.
So George Washington, leader of the Revolution and first president, might get demoted and Vespucci promoted?
Kind of a stretch.
