"War," once said comedian Jon Stewart, "is God's way of teaching Americans geography." (Quoted in Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, p. 253.)
Donald Trump's desperate effort to restore U.S. imperialist hegemony is expressed in linguistic terms. Not only is an aggressive policy of tariffs, protectionism, economic nationalism, announcements about annexations of territories (Greenland, Panama Canal), humiliation of its subjects and subordinates (European Union, Ukraine), and dog-like treatment of its lackeys (Zelensky first and foremost) imposed. A certain language is also implanted via presidential decrees, a sign that both internal and external dominance involves the imposition of a new-old language to try to symbolically show who owns the world and who should be obeyed.
This attempt by Trump to impose another language has several derivations: decreeing new terms to refer to places in the United States and outside of it or restoring discredited names that had been changed; eliminating the Spanish website of the White House; open or covert repression of those who speak Spanish; and, not least, the imposition of English as the official language of the Federal State.
The most notorious fact has been renaming the Gulf of Mexico to now designate it as the Gulf of America, because that name is "beautiful and appropriate" to name that body of water, said the boss of the White House with arrogant ignorance, which by decree would seem to belong entirely exclusively to the United States, denying that two other countries [Mexico and Cuba] have territorial waters in that Gulf.
This fact serves to briefly analyze two linguistic issues that denote that denominations say a lot about imperialist politics. The first deals with America as a name adopted by the United States, and the second about the Gulf of Mexico.
AMERICA IS THE UNITED STATES
At first glance, it might be thought that the denomination Gulf of America is inclusive and more universal than that of Gulf of Mexico because it would take into account the entire continent. That is not true, since for the United States, America is them, and the other inhabitants south of the Rio Grande belong to a backward world of delinquents and criminals.
This same fact must be explained in historical terms. To begin with, the word America was first enunciated in the 16th century to refer to the entire new continent, in which the dominant power was Spain. The name honors Americo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator who was the first to announce in Europe that another continent had been discovered. In his honor, the German cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller published Vespucci's letters in 1507 along with his Cosmographiae Introductio. In the preface, he wrote: "Now that those parts of the world have been extensively examined and another fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci, I see no reason why 1 we should not call it America, that is, the land of Amerigo, its discoverer, just as Europe, Africa, and Asia received names from women."
America began to be used to refer to the entire continent, and the native inhabitants of this hemisphere began to be called "Americans." Later it began to be used to name the settlers of European origin who settled in these lands or their children. The gentilic American did not designate any nationality but a generic geographical origin, referring to any inhabitant of the new world, whether in the domains of Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, or France, that did not matter.
For its part, the United States began to call itself America several centuries later, only at the end of the 19th century. And that happened when that country became an imperialist power, and the name is associated with that historical transformation.
In 1776, after its independence, the name imposed on the new country was the United States of America. At that same time, some suggested other names: Fredonia, Columbia, The Union, The Republic…
At first, Columbia was often used, a symbolic appellation associated with Christopher Columbus and as a sign that the new country differed from Great Britain and placed it on another continent, in the "new world."
This changed at the end of the 19th century, more exactly at the moment when the United States annexed the last Spanish colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam) and other territories, Hawaii and Samoa. With the entry into the club of imperialist countries, the old names did not seem adequate, because it was neither a Republic nor a Union (the annexed territories did not have the free and express will of their inhabitants). In this context, fervent imperialists proposed various names for the new reality: Imperial America, The Great Republic, The Great United States. However, America prevailed, an appellation that has the merit of being brief, sonorous, easy to pronounce, and does not refer to unions or republicanism.
It was no coincidence that the first viscerally imperialist president, Theodore Roosevelt, referred to America in his first annual address. And from then on, in the United States, everyone began to use the word America, which began to appear in songs, poems, hymns… As the historian Daniel Immerwahr explains: “Imperialism brought ‘America’ to the fore, resolving the country’s afflictions with nomenclature. Presumptuous, carelessly expansive, it was a name that fit the national character at the dawn of the century. Where previous generations might have refrained from adopting ‘America’ in deference to the other American countries, the new empire did not care. God had not shed His grace on them, right? He could claim the hemisphere as his own. To suggest otherwise was un-American.”
And the rest of the continent, spatially speaking, simply ceased to exist or was no longer granted any importance. It did not matter that it represented 75% of the territory south of the Rio Grande and that it covered land, sea, and islands and that it had, as today, almost twice as many inhabitants as the United States.
Calling oneself America and excluding the rest of the continent and its inhabitants from the name became a cry of dominion and power, which generated a new common sense among the inhabitants of the United States, who began to flaunt ethnocentrism and alleged superiority. And that is seen in current times, with Trump and without Trump, only now linguistic discrimination enjoys the legitimacy conferred from the White House, sorry from The White House.
Speak English. This is America. These are the words with which a Manhattan lawyer demanded that a restaurant owner have his employees speak English, not Spanish.
It is the same idea that led a teacher in New Jersey to tell her students, Spanish speakers, that in the United States they fought to defend the right to speak American (English), because nothing is more natural than giving a language the name of the country in which it is spoken.
The driver of a school bus forbade children to speak Spanish inside the vehicle and communicated this by means of a notice that he posted on the front of the bus: "Out of respect for students who only speak English, speaking Spanish will NOT be allowed on this bus!" This is the logic of what is called without euphemisms Linguistic Imperialism.
GULF OF AMERICA, BUSINESS, ABOVE ALL, AND HISTORY DOES NOT MATTER
The Gulf of Mexico, an ocean basin that formed 300 million years ago, has an area of one and a half million square kilometers, its waters harbor great marine biodiversity, its ports are vital in world trade and, unfortunately, it harbors oil deposits. Currently three countries share a coast in that Gulf: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States.
The places surrounding the Gulf were populated by indigenous civilizations many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. Mayans, Toltecs, Olmecs, and Aztecs resided there and baptized the maritime basin in various ways. The Mayans called the coastal waters Yóok'k'áab ("great expanse of water"), Cuauhmixtitlán ("place of the eagle among the clouds") and Chactemal ("red place"), as a reference to the tones of sunsets.
When the Spanish subdued the Aztecs, they baptized the maritime basin with the appellation Gulf of Mexico, from Mexica a Hispanicized term of Nahuatl origin, although at first, on some maps the denominations Gulf of New Spain or Mare de Nort appeared. Gulf of Mexico is a denomination typical of Spanish colonialism that was also linguistic colonialism. That appellation appeared officially on the maps that were published at the end of the 16th century.
The imposition of names by Donald Trump, an ignorant billionaire who does not know much about geography or history, is a daily practice in his life as a wealthy capitalist who is used to baptizing the assets of his wealth with his name and surname (skyscrapers, hotels, wines…). As a pure and hard capitalist, for Trump, the important thing is the brand. Now, the brand is a country that calls itself America (United States) and, therefore, for this individual, the Gulf should bear the name of the country that, he says, makes the greatest economic investment in the basin, and geography, history, culture or languages that have been deployed for thousands of years do not matter, nor that that place is shared with other nations. It is as if the Gulf was born yesterday, when Trump learned of its existence, which was possible because many of his economic investments occur in the basin space, in Florida, to point out a case.
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