Another Hot Take on the Term ‘Latinx’

Fortunately our readers keep me accountable. In my last column, for example, I used the word “Latinx” as a broader term for the Latino community, to some people’s perplexity.

Latinx, meant to be a more feminist, inclusive term that also considers transgender folks or those who don’t identify with the gender binary, has started to pop up more frequently in recent years. So many explainers and articles and videos have been created about why it should or should not be used. The phrase is widely adopted on college campuses and by activists, and in September, Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary. But many are still critical of the word, and they expressed as much in our Facebook comments.

In part, it’s a linguistic issue: Latinx just doesn’t translate to Spanish, some argued. A commenter from Ohio wrote that, if you’re a Spanish speaker, “the term Latinx reads like a thousand nails in a thousand blackboards.” Some readers in Latin America said it was an Anglicization that wasn’t relevant in their home countries. Another implied that the term is elitist, writing that the word Latinx “ostracizes all the speakers of Spanish who don’t have wealth or time to pontificate the ‘oppression’ of a language which at its very root genders everything.” In a very official poll on my personal Facebook page, some friends and family said that they’d never even heard of it.

So, should it be used at all?

Linguists have mixed feelings.

Kim Potowski, a professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in Spanish linguistics, tried to employ inclusive language in a forthcoming Spanish grammar book, but replacing the masculine “O” throughout overwhelmed her and her co-writer, Naomi L. Shin. “It came to a point where we said, ‘You know what, we’re not ready,'” she said. Maybe in the fourth or fifth edition of the book, she added, “we will have those X’s in there.”

“There is absolutely no consensus among linguists,” Potowski said.

Another scholar, Lourdes Torres, a professor of Latino studies at DePaul University in Chicago, argues that the word Latinx undermines hard-fought feminist battles. “In its attempt to be gender-inclusive,” she said, “one can argue that it’s gender-erasing of women who have fought for a long time to not just have Latino, but to have Latino/Latina, to make sure women are represented.”

But they do agree that language evolves with the culture.

“As social factors change, sometimes the language has to change,” Torres said. “The people who use the language are the ones who determine what it is.” She and Potowski both gave words like “presidenta” or “jefa” as examples; neither existed until women entered the workforce and took on those roles.

Ed Morales, a Columbia University professor who wrote “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” agrees. In a recent conversation he said that “the X, which is so strange and is not Spanish, sort of marks this new hybrid idea.” The title of his book, similarly, was meant to be forward-looking. “I thought it was a futurist term,” he said, “imagining a future of more inclusion for people that don’t conform to the various kinds of rigid identities that exist in the United States.”

Still, the arbiter of Spanish is the Real Academia Española. That entity decides which words make it into the dictionary, and they’re not big fans of Spanglish or Spanish words developed in the United States. In 2012, they added a definition for “estadounidismo,” which translates to Americanism. At first, Torres said, the word was categorized as a “deformation of Spanish.” Linguists had to push for them to change the official entry.

Dialectical hierarchy is nothing new. Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, for instance, are criticized for dropping word endings or using inventive slang. It’s significant that the Real Academia recognized American Spanish in its pages, but why is it widely perceived as being less valid than the Spanish dialects spoken in other countries?

Because American Spanish is for the youth.

Many young, American Latinos believe that Spain’s official ruling on language erases our African and indigenous roots in favor of European values. Some have argued that Latinx is partly a nod to the gender fluidity that existed among Natives before colonization.

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States, and many Hispanic adults feel that it is important for their succeeding generations to keep the language alive in this country. Inevitably, though, new words that meld Spanish and English will be introduced.

Both Morales and Torres said feminist and queer circles in Latin America are experimenting with their own terms. “We’re not creating this change in Latin America,” Torres said. “They recognize that their language, like all languages, is sexist. All languages are sexist because we live under the patriarchy everywhere.”

The value of the X is that it “provokes conversation about who we’re including and who we’re not including in our communities,” she said. But that doesn’t mean everybody has to use it.

“If you talk to my dad or my tía, that’s just another silly academic or political thing,” Torres said. “It’s definitely of a certain world.”

Still, she said, even if the terms are not always understood, it’s important to be “inclusive of all those identities that have had less visibility in our conversations, in our books, in our movies.” If we can, she said, “it would be a really powerful thing.”