Long before the first 13 states ratified the Constitution or General George Washington crossed the Delaware, and well before the Mayflower sailed toward Cape Cod, a rolling patch of high desert in what would someday become the American Southwest was known as Nuevo México.
This week, New Mexicans are practically screaming that fact and hoping their collective uproar reaches the White House, where President Trump has mused about renaming their state “New America.”
The suggestion makes no sense, residents fume, because the Land of Enchantment’s official toponym predates both the United States and Mexico, the target of Mr. Trump’s latest round of rebranding. The president has no authority to change the state’s name, but the mere proposition — which he reiterated in at least nine Truth Social posts — constituted fighting words to proud New Mexicans.
“No, just no — never,” said Rob Martinez, New Mexico’s state historian, who invoked a 17th-century rebellion against Spanish colonizers to underscore just how seriously New Mexicans are taking this. “We will start another Pueblo Revolt.”
While Mr. Trump had the power to force federal entities to recognize his rechristening of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario to Lake America, he cannot do the same with a state. Any change to New Mexico’s name would require approval from both chambers of the state’s Legislature and then from New Mexico voters.
In interviews, more than a dozen New Mexicans were unanimous: It’s not going to happen.
New Mexico is not just a name, residents said. It’s a reflection of the state’s heritage and its cherished multicultural identity.
Scholars trace the “Mexico” portion of the state’s moniker to the Aztec language of Nahuatl, and Spanish priests and soldiers began referring to the area as Nuevo México in the 1500s. When New Mexico joined the union in 1912, it enshrined its anglicized name in the first article of its state Constitution.
“We were here before there was a United States of America,” said Randy Rodriguez, a 67-year-old shopkeeper with a horseshoe mustache and a store full ofcowboy hats and antique spurs.
To Mr. Rodriguez, who counts the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca as an ancestor, the floated name change feels personal. “They’re erasing history,” he said.
Mr. Trump has offered little explanation for his reasoning beyond memes, including one that showed a map that warped the boundaries of the proposed “New America” to take in large chunks of Arizona and Texas. New Mexico is a heavily Democratic state that has voted against Mr. Trump in the last three presidential elections.
“Many people suggested changing the name of New Mexico, one of the great vote cheating states of all time, to NEW AMERICA,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “So much more prestigious and beautiful for the people of that potentially incredible State. Wow, I Love It!!!”
But in Santa Fe, America’s oldest capital city, established more than 150 years before the United States, residents found the proposition neither prestigious nor beautiful.
“If you change it to New America, you’re taking away part of our culture,” said Elizabeth Tapia, a jeweler at a Native American artisans market in the historic Santa Fe Plaza on a recent evening.
The new name, said Ms. Tapia, a member of the Santo Domingo Pueblo tribe, “sounds white.”
“Why does everything have to have ‘America’ in it?” chimed in Audrey Crespin, another vendor.
Jo Christen, the owner of a Santa Fe gift shop, said she believed the idea might finally unite New Mexicans of all political stripes against “a common enemy.”
So far, it has done just that. Both major parties’ candidates for governor forcefully condemned Mr. Trump’s idea.
And at least some of Mr. Trump’s voters concur.
“I think that sucks,” Donnell Brox, who was visiting Santa Fe from Las Vegas, said of the president’s posts. “I love Trump, but I don’t always agree with him.”
Gabriel Sanchez, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico — not, he noted, the University of New America — said he saw Mr. Trump’s proposal as another attempt to distract the public from a flagging economy and the war with Iran.
Even though the proposal is far-fetched, Mr. Sanchez said, “people are talking about it. I had a 25-minute conversation with my mail carrier.”
Mr. Sanchez said the president’s focus on the word “Mexico” was racist. He suggested that names of British origin — New York and New Hampshire, perhaps — should also be on the chopping block.
The state’s poet laureate, Manuel González, said he figured Mr. Trump was trolling. Still, he resented the suggestion that New Mexico was somehow not American enough.
“We are already America,” he said. “All the people who come together to make this place special is also what makes America special.”
Mr. Martinez, the state historian, said he would simply refuse to use Mr. Trump’s new appellations.
“It’s still Lake Ontario, it’s still the Gulf of Mexico,” he said.
And, he added, it will always be New Mexico.
“I am the state historian of Nuevo México,” he said. “We are never changing our business cards.”
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