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.
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?
Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo) – who hailed from a similar strain of class populism as Trump, even though he leaned left – was able to build a relationship with Trump as an ally, and his government began to block people from migrating north under US pressure, a boon to Trump.
But it was unclear whether Mexico’s first female president, a scientist and leftist lacking the folksy populism that rocketed López Obrador into power, would be able to build the same relationship.
While Wednesday’s joke quickly ricocheted across social media feeds, it also set the tone for what a Sheinbaum-Trump relationship could look like in the coming years.
“Humor can be a good tactic. It projects strength, which is what Trump responds to. It was probably the right choice on this issue,” said Brian Winter, vice-president of the New York-based Council of the Americas. “Although, President Sheinbaum knows it won’t work on everything – Trump and his administration will demand serious engagement from Mexico on the big issues of immigration, drugs and trade.”
Sheinbaum’s remarks come after other stern but collaborative responses regarding Trump’s proposals.
On Trump’s pitch to slap 25% tariffs on Mexican imports, Sheinbaum warned that if the new US administration imposes tariffs on Mexico, her administration will respond with similar measures. She said any sort of tax was “not acceptable and would cause inflation and job losses for the United States and Mexico”.
She’s taken a more concessionary tone on immigration, falling in line with years of Mexican efforts to block people from migrating north.
After originally saying her government would push the Trump administration to deport people directly back to their own countries, in January she said Mexico would be open to accepting deportees from other countries, but that Mexico could limit deportees to certain nationalities or request compensation.
