New Mexicans slam Trump’s threat to change state’s name

When scrolling through social media over the Labor Day weekend, actor, comedian and native New Mexican Steven Michael Quezada was stopped cold by a post about Donald Trump’s recent call to rename New Mexico as New America.

“At first I thought, nah, that’s got to be a joke,” said Quezada, who played drug enforcement agent Steven Gomez in the legendary TV series Breaking Bad.

But it’s not drawing a lot of laughs in the state with the largest percentage of Latinos and the most federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.

“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,” said native New Mexican Sarah Noss, a non-profit executive, one of many residents expressing outrage at Trump’s social media posts in interviews with the Guardian.

The president’s calls to rename New Mexico have reopened deep wounds for a state with a racial and ethnic composition that has made it a target for bigoted attacks dating back to 1848, when the US acquired the Mexican territory as part of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Later, the former civil war general William T Sherman said the US should “declare war on Mexico and make it take back New Mexico”.

AI-generated video of the president changing a “Welcome to New Mexico” sign to “Welcome to New America” comes 10 days after the Trump administration sued the state for providing in-state tuition and state-funded financial assistance to undocumented immigrant students – the majority of whom are Latino – another example of what some residents said were policies targeting people of color.

The messages have tapped into longstanding anger in the state over racist government policies. US lawmakers resisted statehood for New Mexico for more than 60 years – until 1912 – because of its large Spanish-speaking and Native populations.

“We were denied statehood because we were considered mixed-blood Mexicans, fanatical Catholics and savage Indians,” said the New Mexico state historian, Rob Martinez. “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.”

Martinez said the state’s name traces back to the 1560s, when Spanish settlers called it Nueva Mexico, in a reference to Mexico City. The name evolved to Nuevo Mexico, then New Mexico. By the 1920s, various civic groups launched campaigns to rename New Mexico, including a push to call the state Coolidge, in honor of the sitting president Calvin Coolidge.

Republicans in the state, including gubernatorial candidate Gregg Hull, have dismissed the president’s suggestion out of hand, and congressional candidate Greg Cunningham, who is running in a swing district, called the president’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, who called his 2022 comedy special The New Mexican, said Trump is like a comic on stage who knows he’s 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.

But the last laugh will be for New Mexicans, who would have to approve an amendment to the state’s constitution for a name change, an unlikelihood in a state in which every statewide office is held by a Democrat.