Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum is asking Google to reconsider the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, per the executive order President Trump signed his first week in office.
In a letter to the company, Sheinbaum said "[The name change] could only correspond to the 12 nautical miles away from the coastlines of the United States of America” because that’s as far as a nation’s sovereign territory extends from the coastline, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
President Sheinbaum showed the letter to reporters Thursday saying, “In the case of Mexico, where are we completely sovereign? In the area established as 12 nautical miles from the coastline, and this applies to all countries worldwide.”
“If a country wants to change the designation of something in the sea, it would only apply up to 12 nautical miles. It cannot apply to the rest, in this case, the Gulf of Mexico. This is what we explained in detail to Google.”
Referring to a previous counterproposal she made to Trump to rename the US, Sheinbaum added, “In the end, we requested that when someone searches for ‘América Mexicana’ in the search engine, the map we previously presented should appear.” That map, from 1607, labeled parts of North America “Mexican America” and was shown during a press conference earlier this month. (CNN)
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Google announced Monday it would honor the name change once the Geographic Names Information System makes the update.
"We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources," the News From Google account wrote on X. "For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. When that happens, we will update Google Maps in the U.S. quickly to show Mount McKinley and Gulf of America."
Google noted, however, that it is "longstanding practice" at the company that when there is a dispute between countries over names, "users see their official local name" on maps though "everyone in the rest of the world sees both names."
"That applies here too," Google noted.
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