“What does Latinx mean?”
That’s one of the most popular questions I get from Globe readers. And I don’t blame them for being in the dark. The term has proven to be highly controversial and confusing even for Hispanics in the United States.
The term emerged in the early 2000s as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina. Its origin hearkens back to organic efforts by youth and LGBTQ advocates to create a more inclusive label of those who don’t identify within the traditional male/female gender binary.
And a lot more Latinos and Latinas are familiar with the term now; according to a new report from the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of US Hispanics said in a survey that they have heard of Latinx. That’s compared to 23 percent in 2019.
Yet despite increased awareness of the term, only 4 percent of Latino adults use the term to describe themselves, a number that’s virtually unchanged from 3 percent in 2019. Not only that, 3 in 4 of those surveyed who said they have heard of Latinx said it shouldn’t be used to describe the Latino or Hispanic population. That’s up from 65 percent in 2019.
Why is Latinx so strongly rejected? Let’s unpack.
Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew, told me that there are a multitude of reasons for the aversion to Latinx and why most Latinos have been hesitant to adopt it. For one, some people feel “that it is something that English speakers are imposing on Spanish speakers because it doesn’t quite work in Spanish,” Lopez said. Some who were surveyed, he said, “characterized it as American imperialism because it’s a term that was created in the US.”
Some respondents prefer to use Hispanic or Latino because those are the terms officially recognized by the federal government, and that may be influencing some of the choices people make, Lopez said. “It may be that many Latinos aren’t necessarily thinking to themselves, ‘Well, what term should I call myself? Should I choose Latinx?’ Instead, you might find that people are asking themselves, ‘Well, what’s the right answer to give when it comes to choosing an identity to report’ ” or when filling out federal forms, he said.
Others may not be adopting Latinx because they’re not accepting of more gender-neutral or gender-inclusive terms in general, Lopez said.
The argument against Latinx that I’ve heard cited the most is what I call the purist argument. It’s people who reject it based on the notion that Spanish is inherently a gendered language and removing the gendered element fundamentally alters the language’s structure. But that shouldn’t be an issue because languages are constantly evolving and adapting to new cultural and social norms. “We used to say ‘people of Spanish origin or Spanish-speaking origin’ in the ’50s and ’60s,” Lopez noted.
There is a Latinx alternative, although it feels too academic to me: Latine. Lopez told me that 18 percent of Latino adults in the Pew survey have heard of it. “It’s also meant to be gender inclusive,” he said. “It is pronounceable in Spanish and one could use its structure to then conjugate verbs. You can de-gender Spanish with Latine.” For instance, “rather than saying ‘todos’ and ‘todas,’ you say ‘todes’ and it’s pronounceable in Spanish.”
To me, the controversy around Latinx is just another dimension of a conundrum that’s becoming more salient regarding Latinos as a group: It’s extremely difficult and misguided to put all Latinos in a single bucket. (For instance, who even counts as Latino? What about Brazilians? They don’t speak Spanish but are from Latin America.)
Why would anyone expect this large, rich, profoundly heterogeneous demographic to fit under one social, cultural, or political umbrella term?
As others have theorized, perhaps people of Latino or Hispanic origin in the United States, like myself, need another signifier or descriptor — one that better captures the nuances within the Latino identity. “[E]ven though there are millions of people for whom Latino identity matters a great deal, thinking of us as an identifiable group may be unsustainable,” Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history and Latino studies at Northwestern University, recently wrote in The New Yorker. I find myself agreeing with him more and more.
With Latinx, what some find inclusive, others feel is offensive. Maybe the use and awareness of Latine will rise and eclipse Latinx, maybe it won’t. But it’s important to put this in context: That 4 percent of Latino adults who use Latinx equals roughly 2 million Hispanic adults. That’s not a small number. I count myself among them.
Maybe there will come a different term in 5 or 10 years and that’s a good thing, as long as it helps advance our understanding of this highly misrepresented demographic.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.