Hours after taking office, President Trump declared that the name of America’s tallest mountain be changed from Denali to Mount McKinley, and that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed “The Gulf of America.” The Mercury News reached out to Clancy Wilmott to ask, can he actually do that?
“Can he do it? Yes he can,” said Clancy Wilmott, an assistant professor of geography at UC Berkeley. “But Mexico will just keep calling all of it the Gulf of Mexico. Other countries will also.”
“It will create a lot of work for federal bureaucrats,” Wilmott added. “They will have to change lots of maps and documents. But it’s mostly symbolic.”
There are thousands of disagreements over place names all over the world, said UC Berkeley’s Wilmott. Americans call the river in southern Texas the Rio Grande, while Mexico calls it the Rio Bravo. The British call islands off Argentina’s coast “the Falklands,” while Argentinians call them “Islas de Malvinas.”
Large map online providers, such as Google and Apple, actually show different place names based on which country a search is coming from, Wilmott said. For U.S. government maps and websites, the next president could easily reverse Trump’s orders with new executive orders.
“The bigger the place, the more expensive the change,” she said. “Federal agencies are going to have to prepare lots of paperwork.”
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