For those who aren’t aware, it is the removal of the gender indicators in Latino and Latina in order to be a more gender-neutral, all-encompassing term.
So what do you think? Does it elevate and normalize non-binary people? Does it malign the native language of Hispanics? Is it an effort by straight, cis, white people to white knight on behalf of a marginalized group? (All three are arguments I’ve seen.)
And do you think it has staying power?
I think that it’s a good idea–it beats using the male version as the default–but I also think that it’ll fade away and be forgotten. I can’t recall having ever heard a Hispanic person refer to themselves as Latinx, but I may have seen it in the occasional online profile.
But as a straight, cis, white guy, I don’t have any say in the matter.
From what I can see, the term “Latine” seems to be gaining more ground, to deal with the issues of Latinx. I’ve actually seen a few bios use that on some web news sites I’ve looked at, as well as on Twitter accounts.
It is a failed neologism. It was cringe to begin with and it’s cringe now. For one thing, it looks ugly as hell written out, and sounds even uglier spoken aloud (which is why I think I’ve heard it spoken aloud a total of one time ever.) For another thing, the people that it’s supposed to describe are more likely to identify and describe themselves as Mexican, Honduran, Colombian etc. Latino/Latina to begin with was more of a bureaucratic category that white people use to categorize people, than a self-identified group.
I’m not Latin but I read someplace that actual members of the community do not like the term because of the x in it, which isn’t normally used in Spanish.
I have, but the person was a poet with an MFA. It’s one of those words that gets used widely in artsy / intellectual / activist circles but hasn’t caught on so much outside of those circles. Personally, I’m kind of uncomfortable with it for that reason – it feels like a term that is trying to be inclusive but actually alienates people who haven’t had a very particular sort of education – but since I’m very-much-not-Latin-anything, it’s probably not my business.
What it actually is, in fact, is a verbal form of neo-colonialism–an outside group telling a minority that the outside group knows better than the minority does what they should be called.
Well, I’m not Latin anything either and that won’t stop me from opining on the silliness of the or even worse, cultural imperialistic, attempt to modify language to fit a tiny minority’s current preferences. Now, if a majority of the speakers of Romance languages disagree than obviously I’d rethink my stance.
When I first learned what Latinx was, my impression was that it maligned Spanish. It somehow seems wrong to take one of their words and deliberately change it and refer to all Latino people as Latinx. On the flip side, English has a habit of borrowing words from other languages and changing it to fit our needs.
I don’t. I don’t know any Latinos that use it. And while I’m hoping people are ultimately more accepting of non-binary, gender queer, or transgender people, I think this effort to remove gender from so many things is a fad that will fade away. Latinx is part of that fad.
There are straight cis white Hispanics as well. I would assume they get a say at least, no?
? The term “Latinx” AFAICT is not applied to “speakers of Romance languages” in general, only to people from what is generally known as “Latin America”.
There is no reason that, say, French or Italian speakers should have any more say than English speakers about what term is correct to use for people from Latin America.
I think that there are a lot of faddish suggestions, like Latinx and the neo-pronouns, but the overall effort to decrease the importance of gender in language is not, itself, a fad. Consider the rising acceptance of the singular they, the plummeting appeal of the generic he, and the decline of he or she.
AFAICT it’s not “an outside group” who invented and popularized the use of the term “Latinx”. It originated among various trans/queer activists of Latin American descent and/or nationality.
Those activists may be a tiny minority within Latin American populations, but they’re not an “outside group”.
I just disseminated a survey that gave “Latinx” as one of the choices for giving ethnicity. I had read that it was mostly used by non-Latino/a/x/e people, but that Latinx people themselves found it vaguely amusing but weren’t offended by it.
I didn’t know of a suitable alternative or I would have been happy to employ it. Had I been aware of “Latine” (I wasn’t until this thread) I don’t know if I would have used it ,since it’s obviously a pretty new term and it looks like it might be a typo.
Anyway, the people who are going to be responding to the questionnaire are most likely Asian, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Caucasian, so I hope no one notices or minds.
One issue I have read about regarding the difficulty in getting “Latinx” to catch on with Latinx people is that in Spanish, pretty much everything is gendered, even things that don’t biologically have a gender at all. “The swimming pool” is “la piscina” (feminine). “The computer” is “el ordenador” (masculine). Gender-neutral usages are generally alien to the grammar of Spanish and other Romance languages. “Latina” and “Latino” match their grammar. “Latinx” is weird to use in a sentence because it is doesn’t quite make sense in Spanish. (Or something to that extent.)
“Latine” might be easier to pronounce, but still faces the difficulty of trying to shoehorn a genderless form into a grammatically gendered language.
