Hah, sure, let’s investigate 🕵️‍♂️

The term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user ‘Mxn’.

The description of the edit is the following:

Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic

So, it is clear that the term was identified by user Mxn by performing an active online search.

If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in the spanish Wikipedia: es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in September 16, 2018. I don’t have access to the citation so I don’t know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.

If you check the history you will find that the same ‘Mxn’ fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.

So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico.

I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.

I find it highly unlikely that:

• User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago AND
• This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media

More likely…

• Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
• Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme

And this concludes my little investigation 🧐