Abstract
The term “Latinx” has become a site of contention, like “Latino” once was. Our goal is to propose an articulation of Latina/o/x populations through the term Latinx as a site of possibilities, while clarifying its potential use and the reasoning behind it. Rather than seeing the use of Latinx as a trend, or a rupture, in linguistic usage, we see its use as a continuity of internal shifting group dynamics and disciplinary debates. Complicating the argument that the term Latinx is an imperialist imposition on the Spanish language is possible by reclaiming the “x” history of (racial and ethnic) resistance as a marker of nonwhiteness (for example, in Xicana feminism), while turning to the “x” usage by Latin American and Spanish-speaking activists. Latinx foregrounds tensions among self-naming practices and terms that encompass all members of a diverse and complex ethnoracial group: Latinx acts as a new frame of inclusion, while also posing a challenge for those used to having androcentric terms serve as collective representational proxies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
“Latino” is still resisted by users of the term “Hispanic,” by those who prefer national-based categories (DeGuzmán 2017; Engel 2017) and by those who, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center report on identity, resist any of these categories and incorporate to a US American “majority” (Lopez et al. 2017).
Terms like Latin@, Latine, and LatinU (Zentella 2017) have been deployed—with less traction—to mobilize Latina/o communities (in personal communications with the authors, some colleagues have suggested Latinex as a new, emergent term). “Brown” has also been used to speak to racialization issues—this, before and while the Latino term became ethnicized (in both the census and popular use; see Urciuoli 1996).
Precision in these cases will support a more nuanced discussion. For us, US Latina/o references immigrants who have arrived decades ago, or young DREAMers, as well as second-generation, and beyond, Latina/o/x people. We recognize that Latina/o might produce a more slippery use: US born Latinas/os have used this category, as have migrants to the US (after a process of racialization and a remaining in the US). Yet, some Latin Americans call themselves Latinas/os as a shorthand, whether living in their countries of origin or in the US, Europe, or elsewhere. Perhaps Latinx (unlike US Latina/o/x) poses a potentially productive challenge, in that some may use it hemispherically (resembling the use of “the Americas” instead of “America” in both English and Spanish).
In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, the editors (Vargas et al. 2017) state they look forward to the inclusion of the Latinx term in future editions and other related works. Given the way many university presses operate in terms of deadlines, decisions about language homogeneity/standardization, and other editorial procedures, texts published between 2014 and 2017 may not include Latinx despite the authors’ or editors’ intentions. We have yet to see the how these editorial politics/processes will change, or not, in the coming years.
“Gay”, “lesbian”, and “bisexual” are, along with “heterosexuality,” sexual orientation categories; “transgender,” like “cisgender,” references gender identity. Many trans people identify as heterosexual, and countless transgender/transsexual people have, like most cisgender people, a strong investment in the gender binary (only some trans people operate outside a gender binary). Moreover, the LGBT “community” is an artificial political category that, while efficacious, may also limit the understanding of the role discrete categories like sex, gender, and sexuality have in discrimination and (in)equality.
The term “trans” is commonly used as a shorthand for “transgender” and “transsexual.” The term “trans*” (with an asterisk) signals an openness to a broader spectrum of gender expansiveness. The use of the asterisk comes from search engine language: when doing online searches, the asterisk is used as a wildcard symbol that expands the search to all words that stem from the same root. For example, searching for trans* may produce such results as transgender, but also transnational, transformation, etc.
Linguistic boundaries are often policed by traditionalists that diminish the effects of inequities in everyday language usage, thus contributing to its systemic reproduction. In Spanish, the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, which is produced by the Real Academia Española de la Lengua (RAE), is the only “official dictionary” of the Spanish language, acting both as the most comprehensive descriptive handbook of the language and as a powerful prescriptive and regulatory document. The RAE is the governing—and notoriously conservative—body that presides over Spanish grammar, syntax and morphology. It is worth noting that the Real Academia has fiercely resisted gender-inclusive language—which is not surprising for an institution that has accepted only eleven women in its more than three hundred years of existence—but has slowly bowed to pressure from intellectuals and activists, and, especially, to the undeniable reality of the rapidly changing linguistic landscape.
As with every rule, there are notable exceptions, determined primarily by usage. For example, the word “presidente” though technically gender-neutral, was primarily operationalized as male because there were no female presidents. When an increased political participation by women made the reference to female presidents necessary, the chosen term was “la presidente” as the word “presidenta” was considered unacceptable—yet recently normalized, to the point of being included in RAE’s Diccionario de la Lengua Española (in 2014).
Although we are not aware of academic studies that trace and examine this phenomenon in Spanish, we have anecdotal evidence of this usage through our work with LGBT communities, specifically trans. In Travar el saber (Martínez and Vidal-Ortiz 2018), we gathered thirty-three personal narratives of trans people regarding their experiences in formal education in Buenos Aires. Many of the them consistently used the “x” as a gender-neutral marker to identify themselves and others.
In Spanish, as in many other languages, words that refer to men are used to describe universal experiences, while the female iterations of the same expressions refer only to the concrete experiences of women. For example, “la historia del hombre” (“the history of men”) is supposed to name the universal history of both men and women, including events recognized as foundational to Western history like the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and so on; whereas “la historia de la mujer” (“the history of women”) would speak only of the experiences of women addressing issues like reproductive rights, suffragist movements, practices and norms of mothering, and the like. Also, the plural forms of masculine nouns are accepted as the correct all-encompassing term to refer to people of all genders in a given context, whereas the feminine form can be used only if all those present are, or identify as, women. Thus, if in a room of one hundred people there is only one man, the norm would dictate that the masculine plural form “todos”—as opposed to “todas” and, much less, “todes” or “todxs”—be used to describe or address the group.
References
Aparicio, F.R. 2016. (Re)constructing Latinidad. In The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. R.A. Gutiérrez and T. Almaguer, 54–63. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Contreras, R. 2017a. The X Factor: The Struggle to Get Latinos in US News Stories amid a Latinx Push and a Changing Journalism Landscape. Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 177–185.
Contreras, S.M. 2017b. Chicana Chicano, Chican@, Chicanx. In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, ed. D.R. Vargas, N.R. Mirabal, and L. La Fountain-Stokes, 32–35. New York: New York University Press.
DeGuzmán, M. 2017. Latinx: ¡Estamos aquí!, or Being “Latinx” at NYC-Chapel Hill. Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 214–230.
Engel, P. 2017. On Naming Ourselves, or: When I was a Spic. Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 193–201.
Gómez-Barris, M., and L. Fiol-Matta. 2014. Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly. American Quarterly 66 (3): 493–504.
Guidotti-Hernández, N.M. 2017. Affective Communities and Millennial Desires: Latinx, or Why My Computer Won’t Recognize Latina/o. Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 141–159.
Lopez, M.H., A. Gonzalez-Barrera, and G. López. 2017. Hispanic Identity Fades across Generations as Immigrant Connections Fade Away. Pew Hispanic Center, 20 December. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/12/20/hispanic-identity-fades-across-generations-as-immigrant-connections-fall-away/.
Martínez, J., and S. Vidal-Ortiz (eds.). 2018. Travar el saber, educación de personas trans y travestis in Argentina: relatos en primera persona. La Plata: Editorial Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
Milian, C. 2017. Extremely Latin, XOXO: Notes on Latinx. Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 121–140.
Namaste, V. 2015. Reflections on Pronouns, Activists, and Funerals. In Oversight: Critical Reflections on Feminist Research and Politics, 133–149. Toronto: Women’s Press.
Oboler, S. 1995. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rodríguez, R.T. 2017. X Marks the Spot. Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 202–213.
Salinas Jr., C., and A. Lozano. 2017. Mapping and Recontextualizing the Evolution of the Term Latinx: And Environmental Scanning in Higher Education. Journal of Latinos and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2017.1390464.
Urciuoli, B. 1996. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Vargas, D.R., N.R. Mirabal, and L. La Fountain-Stokes. 2017. Introduction. In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, ed. D.R. Vargas, N.R. Mirabal, and L. La Fountain-Stokes, 1–6. New York: New York University Press.
Zentella, A.C. 2017. “Limpia, fija y da esplendor”: Challenging the Symbolic Violence of the Royal Spanish Academy. Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 1 (2): 21–42.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Vidal-Ortiz, S., Martínez, J. Latinx thoughts: Latinidad with an X. Lat Stud 16, 384–395 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-018-0137-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-018-0137-8