Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the newly-elected Republican Governor of the US state of Arkansas and the one-time Press Secretary of former US President Donald Trump, got to work immediately, passing seven executive orders on her very first day in office. One of these orders banned the word “Latinx” from government documents, citing “the government’s responsibility to respect its citizens and use ethnically appropriate language, particularly when referring to ethnic minorities.”
The term “Latinx” has a contested history over the short period it has come into common usage. While hailed by many progressives as a gender-neutral alternative to the commonly used “Latino/Latina,” used mainly in the US to refer to people of Latin American origins, the expression has not gained as much traction as hoped. A Pew Research survey showed that only three per cent of American Latinos and Hispanics use the word “Latinx” to describe themselves.
Notably, Congressman Ruben Gallego, of the Democratic Party, also banned the use of the term “Latinx” in all his office’s communications in December 2021. In a statement, he said that the word was brought in “largely to appease white rich progressives.”
We take a look at the history of the term “Latinx” and the politics around such descriptors.
Coining of gender-neutral “Latinx”
According to Merriam-Webster, which added the term to its dictionary in 2018, “Latinx purposefully breaks with Spanish’s gendered grammatical tradition.” The male/female binary is inherent in the Spanish language, which lacks a neuter or non-gendered noun form, unlike English. Thus, nouns are either masculine, often indicated by an “-o” ending (Latino), or feminine, indicated by “-a” (Latina).
According to Google Trends, which maps the usage of terms online via Google’s search engine, it was first seen online in 2004. In academia, it was first used “in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language.”
The argument for Latinx’s grammatical coherence
A major point of contention regarding the usage of Latinx is that it is grammatically incoherent. The Royal Spanish Academy (RSA), a Spain-based institution whose stated aim is to “ensure that the changes experienced by the Spanish language, in its constant adaptation to the needs of its speakers, do not break the essential unity that it maintains throughout the Hispanic area”, does not recognise the suffix “X.”
Critics have argued that using Latinx reeks of linguistic imperialism – imposing American sensibilities on Spanish. However, supporters of the term also use this idea in their arguments, questioning why a Spanish imperial institution like the RSA, should be the one to determine the “correctness” of an ever-evolving language.
In fact, the suffix “X” expresses a crucial meaning. Maia Gil’Adí, a professor of English at Boston University, told BU Today that the X can represent an unknown value, as in mathematics, and signifies what she refers to as a “categorical impossibility.” Thus, not only is it more inclusive of non-binary gender identities, but it also points to the diversity of identities within the Latinx population.
Classification of diverse identities
Latin America, containing a vast area stretching from Mexico to the southernmost tip of Chile, is diverse. Languages, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds can vary not just from country to country but also within national boundaries.
However, when people from these diverse lands enter the US, they have historically been homogenised and grouped together.
In the 1970s, the term “Hispanic” gained popularity after it was used in the US census, due to a growing population of immigrants from South and Central America entering the country. It homogenised a diverse population on the basis of the language that they all “supposedly” spoke, Spanish, and is often thought to be an arbitrary and inaccurate classification.
Notably, Spanish has been the language of colonising forces in the region, who have wiped out indigenous populations in their imperial quests. In 1992, author Sandra Cisneros told The New York Times “To say Hispanic means you’re so colonized … that someone who named you never bothered to ask what you call yourself. It’s a repulsive slave name.”
“Latino/a” was then adopted to be more inclusive and became popular by the 1990s to 2000s. However, even this term is criticised for erasing indigenous identities and history before the European conquest of the Americas.
Moving beyond racial classification
“When you’re in [Latin America] you’re Colombian, Brazilian, whatever. Once you come here, you become this other thing that then becomes racialized,” said Gil’Adí. In response, there has been a movement towards using more specific terms, such as Mexican, Puerto Rican, Columbian, etc.
Some people often prefer the Latinx classification as it is the one that they would commonly use within their communities. Even as far back as the 1990s, car stickers proclaiming “No soy Hispano, soy Cubano” (I am not Hispanic, I am Cuban) were popular, according to The New York Times.
However, for many, this debate disunites a population that needs to be united at a time of racial polarisation. According to Cuban-American anthropologist Jorge Duany, “Latin American immigrants are increasingly coming together, … using the Spanish language, the Catholic religion, and other features of their Hispanic cultural background to construct a broader sense of themselves and to mobilize their communities.” Therefore, how they describe themselves becomes important also for the purpose of movements.