‘América Mexicana’: Mexico’s president responds to Trump with renaming of her own
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Claudia Sheinbaum joked about renaming the entire continent in retort to Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ comments. Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, has responded to Donald Trump’s proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America with a counter-proposal to rename North America.
![['Why don't we call it Mexican America?': Claudia Sheinbaum hits back at Trump – video]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/46a072d227b69ff9a4c93d4b06d8957484edbed7/0_0_1920_1080/1920.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Standing before a global map in her daily press briefing, Sheinbaum proposed dryly that the continent should be known as “América Mexicana”, or “Mexican America”, because an 1814 founding document that preceded Mexico’s constitution referred to it that way.
“That sounds nice, no?” she added with a sarcastic tone. She also noted that the ocean basin bounded by the US Gulf coast, Mexico’s eastern states and the island of Cuba has been known as the Gulf of Mexico since 1607. Trump, who will be sworn in for a second term on 20 January, said on Tuesday he planned to rename the Gulf as “the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring”.
“It’s appropriate. And Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country,” he said. He also claimed that the US’s southern neighbour was run by drug cartels, to which Sheinbaum gave a terse response: “In Mexico, the people rule.”.
The exchange has started to answer a larger question lingering over the bilateral relationship between the two regional powers: how would newly elected Sheinbaum handle Trump’s strong-handed diplomatic approach, as well as promises of mass deportations and devastating taxes on trading partners like Mexico?.
