Well, as it turns out I can see why this could pop up in an academic setting.
Specifically, this is about my experience of working in libraries. 20 years ago I did not hear that term, but I do think that if academy is using it, one explanation is that the term eliminates the mistake of newbies putting the latin recordings of medieval chants or Byzantine Empire writings next to the “Despacito” singer.
Reading about the origins of the term, I tend to agree with the writer of the piece at Mother Jones.
As the biracial son of Mexican immigrants, I have, at various stages of my life, described myself as Latino, Mexican American, Hispanic, and Chicano. None of these words ever felt quite right; none of them painted the whole picture of how I see myself or how I want to be seen. I felt I had inherited a chaotic identity with too many facets; language, race, geography—which one should win out? But mestizaje tells us it is precisely this struggle, the search for a cohesive identity, that defines us as a people. The “mixedness” is not a halfway state of being, but a complete state of being unto itself. I can think of no better extension of that sentiment than “Latinx,” a word that concedes to malleability, the “x” willing to become whatever it needs to be for the person who wears it.
I also see it as a concession to the English language, those that complain a lot about the English language bulldozing foreign terms should never forget that:
"We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
As Telemark and others point out, there are places where the term pops up more often; however, there is no intention to be disparaging but to inclusive, what it needs to be point out here is that the way you use “woke” is the disparaging thing.
There is utility to be able be clear if one is speaking about all vs a specific gender group without having to awkwardly state both words each time.
The so-called “woke” aspect of it may be a wider adoption by those more likely to automatically use “they” for generic “he/she”, who prioritize avoiding exclusion of those who fall out of the binary descriptive paradigm.
It is likely also true that a majority of Americans prefer to be referred to as “he” or “she” than as “they”. Polling that demonstrated such would not be too impactful on whether or not using “they” when speaking generically in the default is reasonable or excessively “woke”.
Right, to be clear, I’m not disparaging any person, but rather the tendency of certain English speakers to arrogate themselves the authority to tinker with other people’s language to make it more acceptable to themselves. That’s a bandwagon that definitely deserves disparagement.
Folks need to stop trying to make “Latinx” a thing. If you’re that bothered by Latino/Latina, may I suggest just “Latin.” Literally nobody is going to get confused and wonder “gosh, do they mean the people in or from Latin America, or do they mean medieval liturgical chants? I can’t tell from the context.”
Except, in the perfectly reasonable American way of looking at it, “Latin,” “Latino,” Latina," and “Latinx” (natch) are all terms that refer to people of Latin American descent. No one actually uses “Latin” in the way you are suggesting they should.
Yes, it’s a bad idea to senselessly lump people in together and make assumptions based on one shared characteristic. That’s just bigotry and no one in this thread is proposing that. However, we can also use group labels like Latin American to talk about the fact that in America, sometimes Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans are often going to share common experiences, like being yelled at to “Learn English!” when they are talking among themselves in Spanish within earshot of bigots.
Incidentally, in Hispanic places, when one refers to “the group” (no gender pointed out in that “group”) the term used is “el grupo”, yes, curiously the male gender article is applied to a group of people even if there are women in a group. What if it is a group of women? “la grupo”? Nope, it still “El grupo”. Like that there are many examples of how sexist the Romance languages can be.
Speaking of stopping the use of Latinx, I think that when the dictionary adopts it, it is too late.
Any gendered language will probably have some weirdness like that. In Polish (not romance language), the word for “group” is grupa. It is feminine. It doesn’t matter if it’s a group of men, women, or mixed; it’s feminine. In German, you have weirdness like Frau (“madam” or “mrs.”) being feminine, but fräulein (“miss”) being neuter. The gender-ness of a word does not necessarily follow biological gender, and it’s not at all limited to Romance languages (my examples were Slavic and Germanic.)
Nobody lumps in Italian-Americans with the “Latins”. Nobody wants to. It would be absurd to do so, because there was never a “Latin People”. Rome was a multi-ethnic empire and city composed of different tribes. Moreover, modern Italians don’t have much if any ethnic continuity with ancient Romans.
Latinos are people from Latin America. There’s nothing hard about this. There’s nothing sexist about it. Sure, the word is grammatically masculine in Spanish. So is “paper” or “pencil”. It means nothing, it’s just one of those bits of error-correcting redundancy that languages tend to accumulate over time. That’s all.
I mentioned above that ‘paper’ and ‘pencil’ are also masculine in Spanish. Do you find that to be oppressively sexist? Should we mandate that they be called “la el papelx” or “la el lápix”? Why can’t this just be one of those weird language things like how we sometimes spell “threw” as “through” in English for no reason?
What’s even more hilarious is that English has the same problem in some areas and usually just punts it to masculine with no fanfare at all. At some point we just decided that all actresses are now actors and we didn’t need a dumb crutch word like “actrix” to make it happen. AFICR occasionally a woman is asked why they call themselves ‘actor’ instead of ‘actress’, and we agree that women are empowered to appropriate the masculine term, and we move on with life. I guess this is because it doesn’t involve any ethnicities that need to be rescued from their own language.
In Spanish map is mapa so you would expect “the map” to be translated as “la mapa.” But no, it’s “el mapa.” Sometimes languages don’t follow their own established rules for whatever reason.
Yeah, it’s a silly argument. In Spanish, a person’s feet are masculine, but their hands are feminine. It’s just the way the language is structured and has evolved. I find “Latinx” to be both unnecessary and presumptive.
Also, nouns starting with an “a” are generally problematic if they are also feminine. For instance, “agua” is feminine, but is referred to as “el agua” because the elision of “la agua” is awkward.
But I’m not speaking Spanish. I’m speaking American English. It would be silly for me to refer to a group of Chinese individuals in the Mandarin word for Chinese people. I’d mock someone who did that. In American English the current norm is increasingly to have a non-gendered word for a group of people. That’s the language under discussion.
See my post above about how well-received the term “Filipinx” was among the people who call themselves Filipino, in both English and Filipino. Note that English is an official language in the Philippines.
When Americans referred to their Latin-American population as “Latino”, did you mock them? Did you even think about it at all? Why or why not?
A “norm”? Can you think of another case like this in English where we invented a novel non-gendered word to address the problem of gendered group names? Do you think there will ever be a push to rename SAG to “Screen Actrixes Guild?” Why or why not?
If there’s any emerging “norm” around foreign neologisms in English, it’s to import them as-is into English. We’ve always said it smacks of colonialism to tailor them to our tastes; where possible we’ve tried to revert to using native terminology. This whole Latinx thing seems like a return to the day when the norm was English-speakers treating other languages as aberrations that need to be fixed.
To me this just smells like a solution in search of a problem.
Not oppressive, just an observation almost like a shrug as in “what you gonna do”. The point is that in English there is less of that baggage to deal with so I still think it is a bit sillier to make it a war against academics or reliable media like NPR to prevent it from using the Latinx term.
