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A few quick points regarding "Latinx"...
To start, “latinx” is meant to describe people of Latin American ancestry in a gender inclusive way. The people who use the term see it as aligned with the fight against male hegemony, sexism, and transphobia.
In practice, almost nobody uses “latinx” except for activists. But that is not a reflection of pan-hemispheric resistance to gender inclusivity. Rather, its grammatical application is limited, and day-to-day Spanish speakers have no clue how to pronounce it.
Activists on the left have become, like, militant about its usage, even while a lot of people in Latin America descent themselves are unconvinced. That’s very uncomfortable — even if the activists using it are themselves sometimes of Latin American descent
There's a long history in the US of people with Latin American ancestry having their racial, ethnic, and national identity defined or challenged by people in power...or, you know, even random strangers on the street with an Opinion.
Meanwhile, the use of latinx has become remarkably mainstream in corporate and institutional settings even though *basically nobody uses it to describe themselves* outside of a very niche milieu. Seriously the polling shows that only 3 percent of all US latinos/hispanics use it.
Notably, many American hispanics often self-identify with greater specificity anyway — Mexican American, Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc.
So: it’s a fight about a second-order identifier. Lol.
So: it’s a fight about a second-order identifier. Lol.
(Sometimes there's grousing about "Latino" and "Hispanic" being used at all. I actually think they're very useful categories, especially for unpacking caste-ism in the US. I think of "Latino" as being equivalent to "European" — useful with context, useless without.)
But here’s the thing that really gets me…if the goal is to reimagine the Spanish language in a gender neutral way, replacing gendered vowels at the end of words with x’s would be wholly insufficient anyway.
These are technical complaints, but...Grammatical gender is an immutable factor in the structure of Spanish. And replacing a vowel with an x is basically impossible verbally. What about pronouns and articles (a, un/una; the, el/la) which are gendered by default?
Plus, plurals in Spanish that end in “o” are already understood to be the gender neutral option. Some people take issue with gender inclusive plurals in Spanish defaulting to the masculine form: americanos, latinos, mexicanos. Fine. But the “x” doesn't solve that systemically.
And so even as the term has become politically volatile, it also happens to fall far, far short of its lofty aspirations. You're gonna change the world on twitter but not in people's living rooms?
The whole thing is just very odd. Not to mention that Spanish is the most common language spoken in the Western Hemisphere, and its fate probably won't be decided by Spanish-as-a-second-language speakers in the United States.
Lastly, a pro tip: If you want to know how someone identifies, ask them.
Now, with all due respect, I'm going back to watching Selling Sunset.
