SANTA FE, N.M. — President Donald Trump on Monday renewed his demand that New Mexico change its name to New America, immediately, as he has now twice in a fortnight. The math is not complicated. There is one America. There is also a state called New Mexico, which sits on it.
New Mexico is not new in the way its name claims. It is new in the way that matters. On a July morning in 1945 the nuclear age went off in the Jornada del Muerto desert, an event that has been described far less dramatically since. The state hosts a missile range the size of Delaware, where the federal government tests its weapons on a portion of itself. It has a commercial spaceport. By every current definition, New Mexico is the facility where America happens, and the name on the map has simply been slow to catch up.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham was not moved. “This tired ‘New America’ bit again?” she said Monday, asking what policy failure the exercise was meant to distract from. Sen. Ben Ray Luján defended the state’s seventeenth-century heritage. The heritage argument is real, and it is the whole problem: a state with a four-hundred-year-old name and the country’s youngest habits is running its public relations on antique equipment.
There is a legal obstacle, which supporters of the rename consider a feature. The state’s name is fixed in its own constitution, and the President’s renaming power runs only to what the federal map database records — a database in which the Gulf of Mexico has already been renamed. New Mexico would have to choose New America for itself, by constitutional amendment, at the ballot.
Asked whether voters would pass it, supporters pointed out that the same electorate approved the state’s last three ballot questions by margins that suggested the questions mattered less than the ballots.
WHY "NEW AMERICA" IS THE HONESTER NAME
- Trinity Site: The nuclear age was invented in New Mexico, in the open air, by Americans.
- White Sands Missile Range: 4,400 square miles of state that volunteers for the federal government.
- Spaceport America: The country's first commercial spaceport, built in a desert that had grown bored of waiting for customers.
- State quarter: Bears the Zia sun symbol, which one recent informal poll found 94 percent of Americans can place geographically.
Not everyone is a fan. A Santa Fe artist burned an easel in the Capitol plaza on Saturday in protest of what she called forced nomenclature. By Sunday she was selling easels to onlookers at a significant markup, in New Mexico, which is exactly the kind of adaptability the new name rewards.
A statewide ballot measure requires sixty days of notice. The President’s patience requires none. The two schedules will meet eventually, at a polling place, where Americans have consistently proven able to answer a question once they agree on what the words mean.