The Gulf or the “Golf” of Mexico?

At the start of the reign of Donald Trump, let me paraphrase this Turkish proverb who saw what will happen for the next four years in Washington. This wisdom says: installing a clown in a palace does not make a sultan, but can transform the palace into a circus.

So tie your tuque with spindle, the large marquee settles in the White House. Spectacle, there will be something for everyone. While the curtain rises, a first Trump statement appeals to me. Indeed, I wonder if the American president does not believe that the Gulf of Mexico is an 18 -hole. It may be reminded that the Gulf in question is not a game. So it is better to think before making another hole.

The last time we tried, let us remember what happened. A terrible explosion destroyed the Deepwater Horizon platform from the British company BP on April 20, 2010. This spectacular accident demonstrated in America that oil and water do not mix well, even when you love to brew business in business singing Drill, baby, drill.

More seriously, what America are we talking about in this project to change the name of the Gulf? The question arises because the United States has decided to appropriate the name of the entire continent to designate its only country. I imagine that it was the same logic that led them to confiscate the word “football” to designate a sport in which players spend more time running with the ball in their hands.

Today, even when you are an Aboriginal of Peru or Mexico who descends from the great pre -Columbian civilizations, we do not have the right to say American because of this unjust lexical appropriation. In a normal world, Trump’s compatriots should say about the United States and let the rest of the continent be also Americans, a bit like Boucar is both proudly Senegalese and African.

If Donald Trump really wants to restore a form of toponymic justice, he should rather change the name of America.

This name he cherishes to the point of wanting to replace the Gulf of Mexico with the Gulf of America is an aberration of history.

The continent bears the name of Amerigo Vespucci, a browser from Florence who well known Christopher Columbus, because the two met at the court of Isabelle de Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon. It was in 1491 when Columbus was preparing his first trip funded by Argentiers from Spain. Let me summarize this little page of story nicely told by Stéphane Bern in his book entitled Why in history¹.

After three trips without real treasure and cargo of spices in the holds of his ships, Christopher Columbus falls in discredit before his sponsors and investors. While it is pushed out of the road to the big explorers, one of his former teammates, Alonso de Ojeda, receives funding to try his luck. He then equipped with Amerigo Vespucci in an expedition mobilizing four ships which must set sail on the East Indies. Between 1499 and 1500, the explorers entered the mouth of the Amazon. Charmed by small houses on stilts of the natives, they baptize the Place Venneziola (La Petite Venise). Which gave its name to Venezuela today.

The few precious pearls he reports will give Amerigo the taste for leaving. A second expedition during which he reached Brazil in 1501. Back from this trip, the Florentin recounts his adventures in many correspondence sent to the Medici family with which he has close ties.

In one of these writings, he tells anecdotes on the sexuality of indigenous peoples encountered in Brazil. This account entitled “Mondus Novus” for New World, known as Bern, will be translated into several languages ​​and will be very successful in Europe, probably because of the grivoise stories that it relates to it. So that in 1505, when Christopher Columbus passed the weapon to the left, Amerigo won in the imagination of his many readers like the discoverer of America.

A year after the death of Columbus, in 1507, Amerigo’s letter found itself in the Cenacle that the Duke of Lorraine, René II, organizes in Saint-Dié in the Vosges. A meeting whose mission is to update the atlas in order to include the new world. So here, said the author, how the name of Amerigo Vespucci was given to the continent who became America. Martin Waldseemüller, monk responsible for cartography, will publish for the first time, on April 25, 1507, a planisphere which appears the name America in homage to Amerigo Vespucci. Like what, when you have a vow of chastity and you end up with crisp revelations on the sexual customs of a distant tribe in your hands, it is very difficult to keep all its concentration.

When we made the blunder, we tried to correct it and restore the name of the continent to Columbus, but it was too late.

The new planisphere had already been distributed in thousands of copies. This is how the American continent inherited an appellation error. So, if Donald Trump still adds the name of Amerigo Vespucci to the name of the Gulf of Mexico, as he knows how to do it, he perpetuates this old fake news.

If the American president wants to play the vigilante of the toponymy, why not go to the end and give back the name of the continent to those who really deserve it? Without wanting to minimize the feat and the meaning of his trip from 1492 which, in the Western world, marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, I do not think here of Christophe de Columbus. I also do not think of the Vikings, which, it must be remembered, accosted on the Côte de Newfounder 500 years before the journey of Columbus. Far be it from me also the idea of ​​bringing back the very credible theses which tend to attest that the ancestors of the current Polynesians would have visited America 1000 years before Christopher Columbus.

Christopher Columbus arrived much more by chance in America than he discovered it. Wherever he went during his trips, he was greeted by humans who arrived there thousands of years before him. What did these Aboriginal people represent in this story that has become a sacred and immutable truth? Did these peoples live there simply while waiting for Christophe Columbus to discover them? Were just extras of history? I know it is too late to change the name of the continent, but if you want to modify that of the Gulf of Mexico, why not rename it the Gulf of Aztec?

1. Stéphane Bern. Why in historyParis, Albin Michel, 2014, 282 pages