Trump again proposed the name change of New Mexico to New America

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, reiterated this Monday his proposal to change the name of the state of New Mexico, located on the border with Mexico, to New America. The president disseminated the initiative in a message published on his social media, Truth Social. "New Mexico should immediately change its name to New America. We are not Mexico. We are the United States of America!", he wrote. ADVERTISEMENT Trump maintained that the change would increase the value of the state's properties and income. He also affirmed that it would contribute to improving the image of New Mexico and referred to alleged cases of electoral fraud. Trump had already put forward the initiative on September 7th. On that occasion, he also shared an image of the state map with the word "Mexico" crossed out and replaced by "America". In that post, Trump wrote that many people had suggested the change and asserted that the new denomination would be "much more prestigious and beautiful". The governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, rejected the conversion and pointed out that the state's name was not under discussion. "It has been ours since before the existence of the United States," she stated. ADVERTISEMENT The state has had that name since the sixteenth century The name "New Mexico" predates the founding of the United States by several centuries. The Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) documents that Mexicans called the territory north and west of the Rio Grande as such as early as the sixteenth century. The president had already promoted changes in the names of other places. In January 2025, he signed an executive order to use the name "Gulf of America" in reference to the Gulf of Mexico. In September, he also proposed calling the Ontario lake "Lake America". Executive orders can establish changes to the names used by the federal government to identify geographical features, but they do not allow modifying the official name of a state by themselves. ADVERTISEMENT In the case of New Mexico, the name is fixed in Article I of the state constitution. Therefore, to change it, it is necessary to amend that provision through the corresponding constitutional procedure. There is a precedent that allows understanding how that process works. In 2020, amid the protests over the death of George Floyd, the state of Rhode Island promoted the removal of the expression "and Plantations of Providence" from its official name. The then-governor, Gina Raimondo, ordered the phrase to be removed from executive documents, but clarified that this administrative measure was not enough to change the legal denomination. To formalize the change, an amendment to the state constitution was necessary, which the voters approved in the elections of that year. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT