Less than a month after an executive order requiring the body of water known as the “Gulf of Mexico” be renamed to the “Gulf of America,” the updated name now appears on Google Maps for users in the United States.
A week after the order was issued, Google said in a post on X that the company has “a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
“People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Gulf of America,’ and people in Mexico will see ‘Gulf of Mexico,’ Google said in a statement Monday. “Everyone else will see both names.”
President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14172 on Inauguration Day ordering the renaming of the body of water between the United States and Mexico, a White House statement said.
In a proclamation recognizing Feb. 9 as “Gulf of America Day,” Trump wrote, “I took this action in part because, as stated in that Order, ‘[t]he area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America,” the statement said.
The order also required the name of the tallest mountain in North America be changed to Mount McKinley from Denali. The name of the Alaskan mountain hasn’t been updated in Google Maps as of 7 a.m. Tuesday morning, but Google said in January that the title will be updated.
The Federal Aviation Administration was “in the process of updating our data and charts to show a name change from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and a name change from Denali to Mount McKinley,” according to a memo sent out Monday.