US President Donald Trump on October 19, 2026 called on social media for New Mexico to be renamed “New America” immediately. His stated reason: “We are not Mexico, we are the United States of America.” He also claimed the new name would add “tremendous value and prestige” to the state, pushing up home prices and incomes.
It is not the first time Trump has reworked a name. The United States has already renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario on the US-Canada border “Lake America.” Observers see the series of renamings as an extension of the “America First” narrative. This time, by targeting a state’s name, the controversy has moved from geographic labels to questions of identity.
A state name rooted in the Mexican-American War
New Mexico sits in the southwestern United States. It borders Colorado to the north, Arizona to the west, Oklahoma to the northeast, Texas to the east and south, and Mexico to the southwest. Its capital is Santa Fe. The state covers about 315,000 square kilometers — roughly the size of three Zhejiang provinces — but has only about 2.13 million residents, making it a classic sparsely populated expanse.
The “Mexico” in the name is no accident. The region once belonged to Mexico. After the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, the United States acquired nearly 2.3 million square kilometers of land, including California and the New Mexico territory. The state’s name is thus a legacy of that territorial shift, not a simple directional label.
Dry land, rich resources
New Mexico’s climate is arid and its natural environment harsh, with a small population. But its natural resources are considerable. Oil and gas account for about 65% of the state’s total mineral value, and it ranks first in the US for uranium and potash production. That mix of few people and abundant resources gives the state a place in America’s energy and mineral map — and makes any policy change touching the state easy to read as a bigger signal.
Competing readings of the rename proposal
Supporters tend to see the rename as a symbolic gesture, arguing that emphasizing the “American” label helps build a shared identity. Trump himself ties rising home prices and incomes to the name change, trying to turn a cultural issue into an economic expectation. Critics ask more directly: can a president rename a state with a single sentence? Who bears the administrative costs, the updating of legal documents, and the break with brand and historical memory?
More notable is that such proposals keep recurring. The real effect may lie less in the rename itself than in generating话题 and reinforcing the “America First” narrative. From the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Ontario to New Mexico, naming rights are being used as a tool of political expression.
A state’s name carries history, geography and residents’ identity — hard to measure in “value and prestige.” Whether the rename proposal can move forward is unclear, but it has put a question on the table: when place names become part of political language, where is the boundary?
Source: Zhihu https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2097705006287812030?utm_medium=openapi_platform&utm_source=b38f6831b176
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