Even before entering the White House, Donald Trump has been making aggressive, imperialist announcements about the United States' neighbors and supposed allies.
Alongside territorial claims to Canada, Greenland and Panama, the announcement that he intends to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America constitutes a toponymic declaration of war against Mexico and, more broadly, against the Central American states.
Admittedly, the announcement plays on the potentially inclusive reference to America as a continent and not as a state, since the habit of calling the US "America" doesn't correspond to any official toponym. However, the context of this statement – framed by the slogan "Make America Great Again," widely used by Trump during his election campaigns – leaves no doubt about the imperialist intentions it conveys.
Another dimension of this announcement, just as serious politically and culturally, lies in its neo-colonial stance. The idea is to replace a pre-Hispanic reference – Mexico – with a European one – America. "America" is a name given by European chroniclers in the 16th century, in reference to the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), who undertook several voyages to the continent, including Mexico, on behalf of Spain and then Portugal. The term "Mexico" also refers to the state that bears the name of its capital, whose indigenous name is Mexihko in the Nahuatl language.
Supremacist intent
The symbolic violence of this supremacist desire to return to a toponymy of European origin is also evident in the new president's announcement of his intention to reverse the renaming of Mount Denali. The highest peak in the US, located in Alaska, its original indigenous name was officially reinstated by Barack Obama in 2015, replacing the name Mount McKinley, which honored an American president from the early 20th century [William McKinley (1843-1901), 25th president, assassinated by an anarchist].
The Trump administration would reinstate this exogenous name for the mountain. This intention echoes the recent "toponymic cleansing" initiative of Argentina's new president, Javier Milei, who removed the indigenous Mapuche name from Lake Acigami and gave it back the colonial name of Lake Roca, named after a military officer and former president involved in the violent colonial conquest of the so-called "desert" lands of the South.
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