San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
90 percent of Hispanics and Latinos dislike use of ‘Latinx,’ survey says
Latinx is a buzzword for individuals of Latin American origin in the United States, yet the use of “Latinx” as a noun to identify people of Latino and Hispanic heritage is not universally welcomed.
“Ooooo, you’ve entered the dangerous territory of ‘identity politics,’ ” said Rice University professor Luis Duno-Gottberg on a social media post where a journalist asked for opinions about the use of Latinx.
The word “Latinx” and its sometime plural “Latinxs” spark passionate discussions, with supporters asserting it is more inclusive than the predominant “Latinos” or “Hispanic” to group the multifaceted identities of people who trace their origins to Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.
Some analysts trace the original use of Latinx to the early 2000s when it began to appear in web searches. The word started a slow trend upward in June 2016, according to Google Trends data. Some observers associated it with the mass shooting that month at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando where 49 people were killed and 53 injured.
Young activists gave a push to Latinx in political campaigns in the last election cycle. Former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, DMass., used the term in 2019 during their presidential campaigns.
“Latinx is now widely used in the academia to reflect an awareness of the intersection of gender and sexuality,” said Duno-Gottberg, who teaches in Rice’s Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies. He said the identifier is mostly embraced by younger generations.
The logic behind Latinx
It isn’t clear who coined the word, but young scholars developed it as an inclusive term in the LGBTQ communities to describe Latinos who are gender nonconforming, said DunoGottberg. Latinx became an academic identifier to eliminate the gender markers in the Spanish nouns Latina for feminine and Latino for masculine.
The consonant “x” created a gender-neutral option in the United States. Outside of the U.S., the word Latine is used for the same purposes.
“I support its creation because it is inclusive of different groups of people that would otherwise be ostracized — communities like the LGBTQ+ that are often removed from conversations,” said Yaritza Acosta Corral, a recent UCLA graduate who studied Chicano Studies. “Latinx is a term that brings queer folks into the conversation and does not harm anyone.”
Some Hispanic-Latinos like the term because it was invented in the United States.
“I like the fun feel and vibe from this new label for our community. It’s fresh and we made it,” said Cathy Areu, a former Fox News contributor and founder of the magazine Catalina. Her company also produces the podcast “Catalina Stars Young and Famous,” a podcast promoted “for young and famous Latinxs,” where her 9-year-old daughter, Cristina, is the podcaster. “She understands this term, and so do the Disney, Netflix, Hulu and other teenage stars she interviews,” said Areu.
Areu is among people outside academia, many of whom are activists or in marketing, who use the term.
“It’s a more inclusive, nongender-tied option that can now be found in the (Merriam-Webster) dictionary,” said Jessica Bolaños Vanegas, CEO and director of a marketing firm in Houston. Defending Latinx on the social media discussion, she said she doesn’t relate to the predominant generalizers of Hispanics or Latinos.
Hispanics and Latinos
Juan Tejeda, retired Mexican American Studies professor at Palo Alto College, takes more issue with the “Latin” than the “X.” Broad terms such as Latino and Hispanic are forms of erasure, he said.
“It completely denies the most important aspects of who we are and our cultural and social and political identities, that we are native to the Americas,” said Tejeda, who was attending the University of Texas in Austin during the Chicano movement of the 1970s.
“We’re indigenous to this continent. Latin has nothing to do with that.”
Same with “Hispanic,” Tejeda added.
Identity words to encompass all people in the U.S. who trace their origins to Latin America and Spain have always been controversial, experts said.
In the United States, Hispanic refers to people with origins from countries where Spanish is an official language, regardless of their ability to speak it. The word refers to most Latin American countries and Spain, but not to Brazil, where Portuguese is the official language.
Hispanic became widely used in the country after the Census Bureau officially included it for the first time in the 1980 Census in response to activists pushing for a broad identifier inclusive of all people of Hispanic heritage, according to Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C.
The main difference between Hispanics and Latinos is that the latter alludes to people from or with origin in Latin American countries, including Brazil but not Spain, a European nation. The Census Bureau began using the combination “Hispanic or Latino” in the 1990 decennial.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the late demographer from Texas Leobardo Estrada were among civil rights organizations and Chicanos — an identity term used by many Mexican Americans — behind the move to create broadly inclusive pan-ethnic population identifiers.
Tejeda, who identifies as Chicano, sometimes Chicanx and Xicanx for inclusivity, would like to see people be more specific.
“Are you Chicano? Are you Colombiano? Are you Puertorriqueño?” Tejeda said. “You don’t need one term that identifies us, and in fact, there is no one term that identifies us.”
Traditionally, in the Spanish language, Latinos is encompassing of all genders. A group of Latinos can include females and non-binary people. But that thought process might be “old school” now, Tejeda said.
“While the Chicano movement was very important, in a lot of ways, the Chicano movement was very sexist and homophobic and we fought with our women to change that,” Tejeda said.
Tejeda, who is also a musician, released a 2018 album called Ra íz XicanX, and received criticism for it, he said.
“There still is a movement,” he said.
Widely disliked
Many Latinos and Hispanics who are familiar with the word “Latinx” respect and understand it in the context of LGBTQ inclusiveness. But it’s overwhelmingly unsupported as a pan-ethnic identity word.
“For the population it is meant to describe, only 23 percent of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3 percent say they use it to describe themselves,” a 2020 report by Pew Research Center found after a national bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults.
People in the 18 to 29 age bracket who are college graduates are most likely to have heard the word. However, its use as a self-identifier is low across all categories of age, educational attainment, preferred language, political party, foreign or U.S. born and women and men.
ThinkNow Research, another research firm, found similar results last year in a national survey indicating that 98 percent of LatinoHispanic people do not identify with “Latinx.” The most preferred words to self-identify in this poll were Hispanic and Latino or Latina. They are followed, near or below 10 percent, by country of origin and country of origin plus American, such as Mexican American.
One of the main criticisms about Latinx is its pronunciation for both English and Spanish speakers.
“Lateenex or Latinks? Cómo se pronuncia? (How do you pronounce that?)” asked Danny Hermosillo, a bilingual news manager at Telemundo Houston TV. “When I was kid, I was called Mexican (even though I was born here, and mom is from Panama). Then they called me Hispanic. Then Latino. Some wanted me to call myself Chicano. Even MesoAmerican. But Latinx? No creo yo! (I don’t think so!).”
The Merrian-Webster Dictionary entry said that “More than likely, there was little consideration for how (Latinx) was supposed to be pronounced when it was created,” noting that the most common way is by pronouncing the “x” as the name of the English letter X, for a sound like lah-TEEneks. The use of the letter X at the end of an English word is rare, mostly for medical and specialized terminologies.
“Latinx is a fruitful marker of diversity and inclusion, even though its use is mostly prevalent with academics,” said Maria Acosta Cruz, a professor in the Department of Language, Literature and Culture at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “It’s in many ways a logical outgrowth of the trajectory of people of Latin American heritage finding their own identity when they live in the U.S.”
She and other experts suggest that most problems arise in these discussions when any moniker describing specific communities attempts to become an umbrella, pan-ethnic identifier for a much larger set of communities.
“The Latino community does not need to be exed,” said Al Martínez, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Most Latinas, Latinos, Hispanics did not ask for it.”
Martinez added that “the idea of replacing a vowel with an X, which is artificial and alien to the Spanish language, shows a needless American phobia against gender in Spanish words.”
The issue of gender in language is not exclusive to Spanish. Around 90 percent of the world population speaks gendered languages in different degrees, including English with pronouns and where actresses are still called actors. International movements fighting for gender equality and opportunities for women have rendered small but important changes. The broad incorporation in daily language of feminine nouns such as “congresswoman” instead of “congressman,” and “policewoman” are examples in English.
The use of the letter X as a gender neutralizer, such as in “womxn,” however, hasn’t been a successful proposition outside academia and limited circles.
Whether Latinx will ever become a preferred panethnic identifier for people with Latino-Hispanic heritage is uncertain.
“So far, there’s a lot of resistance from communities that are proud of the Latino and Latina social struggles and don’t want them forgotten,” Acosta Cruz said. “At times, a designation like Latinx flattens out differences in gender and heritage. It also makes the political struggles of Latinos and Latinas invisible.”