The world’s only museum dedicated to the history and culture of the Gulf of Mexico may be in hot water following Trump’s decision to change the name of the planet’s largest gulf.
Last year Karen Poth decided it was time to rename the museum she runs in Mobile, Alabama, to better reflect its unique status.
To do so, she first had to line up support from elected officials and her board of directors before raising money for the project. Next, she needed to update the museum’s website, logo and printed materials. Then in April 2024, she finally unveiled the new name in letters stretching 50ft across the eight-storey building: the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico, the only museum in the world dedicated to the history, folklore and culture of the largest gulf on Earth.
So, imagine her response when US President Donald Trump recently announced that he planned to rename the body of water to the south of the US from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. “My personality is to laugh,” Poth said. “Or else you cry.”
Poth says she’s not taking sides, but admits she’s overwhelmed at the thought of what would happen if the museum had to change every reference to the Gulf of America. “It would be a complete redo of the entire museum. If you think about it, every audio, every video, every digital, every sign… that will be very, very expensive.”
Since the museum is owned by the city of Mobile, Poth said she will ultimately follow city officials’ leads. “If I need to change the name of the museum, we’ll be up there changing the signage on the top of the building.” The museum still carries debt from its opening a decade ago, and Poth estimates that changing the museum’s name in 2024 cost nearly $100,000.
But as visitors to the museum learn, the Gulf has actually had many names throughout its multi-cultural history. The name Gulf of Mexico, for example, first appeared on Spanish maps in the mid-1500s as a way of honouring the Mexica people who founded the Aztec empire. Yet, the 218,000-sq-mile oceanic basin – which borders five US states and a longer stretch of shoreline along the eastern coast of Mexico, along with the north-west coast of Cuba – has had other names too.
According to John Sledge, the museum’s maritime historian in residence, when the Spanish first reached the Gulf in 1513, they thought they had found a route to Asia and initially called it the Chinese Sea (a name unlikely to appeal to Trump, Sledge noted). Other early explorers called it the Gulf of Cortés or the Gulf of New Spain.
“It was really a Spanish sea throughout the 1500s and the 1600s,” Sledge said. The Spanish were followed by the French, who founded Mobile and New Orleans in the early 1700s. The British gained control of the eastern edge of the region in the 1760s, before the United States finally seized the area in the 1810s.
Sledge, meanwhile, says if Trump wants to change the Gulf’s name, a better choice might be to call it the Gulf of the Americas, which would acknowledge its geographic breadth and its enormous challenges. Scientists say the zone faces many threats in the coming century from pollution, coastal erosion and climate change.
“It’s a shared resource,” he said. “We all depend on it, and it’s in our interest to take care of it – whatever we call it.”
