New Mexicans reject Trump's call to rename state 'New America'

Constitutional amendment required for any state name change

New Mexico residents are denouncing President Donald Trump’s social-media calls to rename the state “New America,” with residents and the state historian telling The Guardian that the proposal targets communities of color in a state with the largest share of Latino residents and the most federally recognized Native American tribes of any US state.

Actor and comedian Steven Michael Quezada, a native New Mexican who played Drug Enforcement Administration agent Steven Gomez on the television series Breaking Bad, said he initially dismissed news of the proposal as a joke. “At first I thought, nah, that’s got to be a joke,” Quezada said. Non-profit executive Sarah Noss, also a native New Mexican, said the proposal reflects what she characterized as the targeting of communities of color. “In his mind, the word ‘Mexico’ has some kind of connotation of people of color and it just feels like the whitewashing of our state,” Noss said.

The controversy has reopened long-standing grievances about how the state has been treated. The US acquired the New Mexico territory from Mexico in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Civil War General William T. Sherman later urged the US to “declare war on Mexico and make it take back New Mexico,” The Guardian reported. US lawmakers then resisted New Mexico statehood for more than 60 years — until 1912 — because of the territory’s large Spanish-speaking and Native populations.

State historian Rob Martinez said the discrimination was rooted in the state’s demographic makeup. “We were denied statehood because we were considered mixed-blood Mexicans, fanatical Catholics and savage Indians,” Martinez said. “We went to bed Mexicans and woke up supposedly American citizens, but we weren’t treated like Mexican American citizens, we were treated like foreigners in our own land.”

An AI-generated video depicting the president changing a “Welcome to New Mexico” sign to “Welcome to New America” came 10 days after the Trump administration sued New Mexico over the state’s policy of providing in-state tuition and state-funded financial assistance to undocumented immigrant students — the majority of whom are Latino, The Guardian reported. Some residents characterized both moves as targeting people of color.

Martinez said the state’s name dates to the 1560s, when Spanish settlers called the region Nueva Mexico in reference to Mexico City; the name evolved to Nuevo Mexico before becoming New Mexico. By the 1920s, civic groups had launched several campaigns to rename the state, including one push to call it Coolidge, after President Calvin Coolidge.

Republican state officials have rejected the renaming suggestion. Gubernatorial candidate Gregg Hull dismissed it out of hand, and congressional candidate Greg Cunningham, who is running in a swing district, called Trump’s posts “satire” and an attempt by Democrats to “distract voters from their awful record by focusing on what the president is posting on social media.”

Quezada, whose 2022 comedy special was titled “The New Mexican,” compared Trump to a comedian who knows he is losing the room. “Everything’s a mess right now, and I guess the best entertainer knows to distract you from what’s really going on,” he said.

The proposal’s practical effect would be limited: renaming the state would require an amendment to the state constitution that voters would have to approve — an unlikely outcome in a state where every statewide office is held by a Democrat, The Guardian reported.