Latinx


Latinx is a gender-neutral neologism, sometimes used instead of Latino or Latina to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The suffix replaces the standard ending of nouns and adjectives that are typical of grammatical gender in Spanish. Its plural is Latinxs.
The term was first seen online around 2004. It has later been used in social media by activists, students, and academics who seek to advocate for individuals living on the borderlines of gender identity. The term became widespread in US universities by 2014. Words used for similar purposes include Chicanx, Latin@ and Latine.
Reactions to the term have been mixed. Supporters say it engenders greater acceptance among non-binary Latinos by being gender-neutral and thus inclusive of all genders. Critics say the term is ungrammatical and disrespectful toward the Spanish language. Both supporters and detractors point to linguistic imperialism as a reason for respectively supporting or opposing the use of the term. A 2019 poll found that only 2% of Hispanic and Latino Americans prefer to use the term. The Royal Spanish Academy does not recognize the use of -x in its Spanish language style guide.

Pronunciation

Pronunciations of Latinx documented in dictionaries include . Other variants respelled ad hoc as "Latins", "La-tinks", or "Latin-" have also been reported. Editors at Merriam-Webster surmised that "more than likely, there was little consideration for how it was supposed to be pronounced when it was created".

Group identity

Latinx is a group identity used to describe individuals in the United States who have Latin American roots. The social category is also referred to by other names, including Hispanic, Latino, Latina/o, and Latin@. In the 2000s, the social category of Latinos was analyzed in one of three ways, as ethnoracial, as a cultural ethnic group, or as familial-historical.
The ethnoracial approach is contextual, highlighting the analyses that Latinos come from a variety of different races, and from different parts of Latin America, which span all the standard US racial categories. This is the approach taken by Linda Martín Alcoff. What Latinx means in a particular ethnoracial context depends on the region one is in and the provenance of the population - from one or another Latin American country or group of countries - Cubans, Mexicans, and so on. Because of this variability and complexity, Alcoff refers to Latinos as an ethnorace as, depending on context, Latinos function sometimes as an ethnic group, and sometimes as a racial group.

History

Origins and early usage

The term Latinx emerged from American Spanish in the early 21st century. The origins of the term are unclear. According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004, and in scholarly work the "x" in Latinx was initially introduced by a Puerto Rican psychology periodical "to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish Language". In the U.S. it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@. Latinx offers an alternative to the gender binaries inherent to the formulations Latina/o and Latin@. Between 2004 and 2014 Latinx did not receive broad usage or attention.
Beginning in 2014, Latinx has gained popularity in social media, and has become commonly used by community activists and in higher education settings by students, faculty, staff, and some administrators who seek to advocate for individuals living on the borderlines of gender identity and more broadly as a gender inclusive term denoting people of Latin American descent.
The term emerged in response "to circumstances in which existent language structures fail to articulate value in appropriate ways."

Origins of the "x"

Use of "x" to expand language can be traced to the word Chicano, which had an "x" added to the front of the word, making it "Xicano". Scholars have identified this shift as part of the movement to empower people of Mexican origin in the U.S. and also as a means of emphasizing that the origins of the letter X and term Chicano are linked to the Indigenous Nahuatl language.
The "x" has also been added to the end of the term Chicano, making it "Chicanx." An example of this occurred at Columbia University where students changed their student group name from Chicano Caucus to "Chicanx Caucus". Later Columbia University changed the name of Latino Heritage Month to Latinx Hispanic Heritage Month.

LGBTQ+

Salinas and Lozano stated that the term is influenced by Mexican indigenous communities that have a third gender role, such as Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca.

Generational

The term often refers specifically to LGBT people or to young people. Brian Latimer, a producer at MSNBC who identifies as nonbinary, says that the application of the term "shows a generational divide in the Hispanic community". A 2016 college article said that the term "has been sweeping across college campuses."

Public awareness

The term Latinx grew in usage since its origins, and came into popular use in late 2014.
Many people became more aware of the term in the month following the Orlando nightclub shooting of June 2016; Google Trends shows that searches for this term rose greatly in this period.
A 2016 NBC News report noted that it was "difficult to pinpoint" the origins of the term, but found that usage was "without question on the rise at U.S. colleges". A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.
At Princeton University, a student group called the Princeton University Latinx Perspective Organization was founded in 2016 to "unify Princeton's diverse Latinx community". As of 2017, several student-run organizations at other institutions have utilized the word in their title.
In 2016, the term appeared in the titles of academic books in the context of LGBT studies, rhetoric and composition studies, and comics studies.
On June 26, 2019, during the first 2020 Democratic Party presidential debate, the word was used by the presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, which USA Today called "one of the highest profile uses of the term since its conception".
A 2019 poll found that only 2% of US residents of Latin American descent preferred to use Latinx, including only 3% of 18-34-year-olds.
A 2020 study based on interviews with 34 Latinx/a/o students from the US found that they "perceive higher education as a privileged space where they use the term Latinx. Once they return to their communities, they do not use the term."

In literature and academia

Scharrón-del Río and Aja have traced the use of Latinx in authors Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Jaime Géliga Quiñones, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso and Adriana Gallegos Dextre. The term has also been discussed in publications by Pastrana, Battle & Harris, Valdes, and many others.
A 2020 analysis found "that community college professional organizations have by and large not adopted the term Latinx, even by organizations with a Latinx/a/o centered mission", although some academic journals and dissertations about community colleges were using it.

Reception

While Latinx has been called "a recognition of the exclusionary nature of our institutions, of the deficiencies in existent linguistic structures, and of language as an agent of social change," the term has also been the subject of controversy. Supporters say it engenders greater acceptance among non-binary gender Latinos. Linguistic imperialism has been used both as a basis of criticism, and of support. The term has been criticized by some lexicographers and rejected from some dictionaries on grammatical grounds, and accepted by others. Some have argued that the term supports patriarchal bias, is antifeminist, based on political correctness, or criticized it because it is difficult to pronounce.
The Royal Spanish Academy, the main authority on the Spanish language, issued a style manual in 2018 which rejects the use of -x and -e as gender-neutral alternatives to the collective masculine -o ending. Some refuse to use the term, as Latinx is difficult to pronounce in the Spanish language.
By 2019, linguist John McWhorter observed that usage of Latinx had not caught on, contrasting it with the success of other neologisms such as African American or the singular they. He argued that this was because "Latinx may solve a problem , but it’s not a problem that people who are not academics or activists seem to find as urgent as they do."

Criticism

The term Latinx has been criticized for being used almost exclusively in the United States and for being virtually non-existent in Spanish-speaking countries. A 2016 HuffPost article stated, "Many opponents of the term have suggested that using an un-gendered noun like Latinx is disrespectful to the Spanish language and some have even called the term 'a blatant form of linguistic imperialism. In a 2017 article for the Los Angeles Times, Daniel Hernandez wrote "The term is used mostly by an educated minority, largely in the U.S."
Another argument against Latinx is that "it erases feminist movements in the 1970s" that fought for use of the word Latina to represent women.
Hector Luis Alamo described the term as a "bulldozing of Spanish". In a 2015 article for Latino Rebels, Alamo wrote: "If we dump Latino for Latinx because it offends some people, then we should go on dumping words forever since there will always be some people who find some words offensive.
Nicole Trujillo-Pagán has argued that patriarchal bias is reproduced in ostensibly "gender neutral" language and asserted, "Less clear in the debate is how the replacement silences and erases long-standing struggles to recognize the significance of gender difference and sexual violence."

Support

The term Latinx allows those who do not identify within the gender binary to be seen and accepted by getting rid of the gendered ending of Latina/o, said Yara Simón in Remezcla. In Spanish and in English, the suffix "x has grown into the linguistic vacuum created by a culture that values inclusivity over the ideologies embedded in a and o." Some commentators, such as Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University and author of the 2018 book Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, associate the term with the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana feminist. Morales writes that "refusal to conform to male/female gender binaries" parallels "the refusal to conform to a racial binary". Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera argues that "The gesture toward linguistic intersectionality stems from a suffix endowed with a literal intersection — x."
Defending usage of the term against critics arguing linguistic imperialism, Brooklyn College professors María R. Scharrón-del Río and Alan A. Aja argued that the Spanish language itself is a form of linguistic imperialism for Latin Americans.
The term Latinx was added to the Merriam-Webster English dictionary in 2018, as it continued to grow in popularity.

Similar terms

Similar gender-neutral forms have also arisen. One such term is Latin@, which combines the written form of the and endings and has been in use since the 1990s. Similar terms include Chicanx and the variant spelling Xicanx.
Latine is another gender-neutral term that has found less acceptance than Latinx. It arose out of genderqueer speakers' use of the ending -e; similar forms include amigue and elle.
Latin* has been proposed as an inclusive term to encompass existing labels such as Latinx, Latiné, Latini, Latinu, Latino, Latina, Latina/o, Latin@, Latin, and Latin American, and as a placeholder for other emerging terms.