‘It’s always been the Gulf of Mexico’

The beach of Grand Isle, Louisiana. When Trump issued an executive order renaming it the Gulf of America, communities along the coast found themselves thinking about the basin in a way many never had before. — Emily Kask/The New York Times

IN southernmost Louisiana, where the land on the map looks like grains of rice and okra in a bowl of gumbo, the body of water alongside it has always played a potent role.

It has carried in ancestors, allowed for the industries that became the region’s backbone, delivered devastating storms and eroded the coast at an increasingly aggressive rate.