A Final Word on Latinx

I'm tired. Are you tired?

The appetite for think pieces about “Latinx” seems insatiable. Every month it seems the same arguments are brought forth about the term, the people who use it and the moment in which it is being used. The arguments are rarely nuanced and they seem to fit into three general categories. The first, that Latinx is colonialist, imperialist, elitist or chauvinistic because of its wide adoption in academia and the top-down adoption of the term which runs counter to public opinion among Latinxs regarding the term. The second, Latinx is a linguistic aberration grammatically and phonologically incompatible with Spanish or with its borrowed form in English and it represents a threat to the language. Third, Latinx is a solution in search of a problem already addressed by the masculine form in Spanish. All of these are, of course, flimsy arguments.

Latinx, Latine, Latin@ and Latina/o are all attempts to tackle the same issue: Spanish has a grammatical gender from which someone’s personal gender is extrapolated, or with which it is inscribed. Any speaker or writer in the language has to make decisions as to how to gender their subject along a binary. As I wrote for the Swarthmore Phoenix’s comment section in 2015, “There is a difference between referring to inanimate objects, concepts or places using la/el and the “appropriate” word ending, and using the same form when referring to people. The difference is that the use of gendered nouns and adjectives to refer to human beings also carries certain assumptions and expectations based on the perceived gender of the person/people they’re referring to; a gender neutral ending, like the -x- (and it is not the only one), gives us space to acknowledge multiple genders in the written form of the language.” In other words, grammatical gender in Spanish when used to refer to people encodes how that person’s sex and gender is perceived or, ideally, how it is willed to be expressed.

This issue is commonly dealt with in academic settings because of the pre-existing sensitivity to issues of gender and sexuality cultivated by gender and sexuality studies departments and by student and faculty advocates. It’s no surprise that as the number of Latinxs enrolled in higher education has increased, questions about labels and terminology become flashpoints. This is not different than last century’s Spanish/Hispanic/Latino debates, regarding which term is the least colonial—as if any of them could be—and which term accurately represents the people of countries who have undergone drastically different reckonings with race and ethnicity. Students in college campuses adopt Latinx because it aims to solve several issues regarding group identification in an anglo-dominant context: 1) It prioritizes linguistic ties and vague cultural similarities but deprioritizes links to Spain, the former metropole, as a way of distancing the group from perceived colonizers, 2) it creates a space for gender ambiguity, for the deprioritizing of the masculine and for the introduction non-binary gender identification, 3) it is a graphic, highly-visible way to declare a progressive, potentially leftist politic both through its personal adoption and its use to describe other people. Academia is, outside of diversity and equity spaces within corporations and government employers, the only place where these concerns are given due space to discuss, due resources to address and good faith to attempt to remedy. This does not mean, of course, that the term is elitist as it’s often non-traditional students from working classes who rally around the label. Nor is the term exclusive to universities; it was adopted within grassroots movement spaces before it explosion in academia and has expanded to every day use in non-academic, non-elite contexts.

Another neologism which had reached its level of use, its level of notoriety and its diversity of adoptees would be celebrated as a marketing triumph. The Pew study which demonstrate its still-growing adoption only highlights the extent to which gender and sexual political issues do not penetrate the mainstream for Latinxs. One could easily wager (and likely win a bet) that the number of Hispanics/Latinos who have heard the term Latinx eclipses those who have an even tenuous grasp of trans issues or those who have heard of non-binary gender identity. The term is useful because it is both didactic and descriptive. 

The second argument, that Latinx is a linguistic challenge to the Spanish language (even when it’s being discussed as an English loanword) is probably the most ridiculous. The language of Cervantes has long become the language of Brayan and Brítani. English loanwords abound, sounds which were alien to the language are now common. But, Latinx doesn’t suffer from this issue. If it is pronounced as “Latin-ex,” it shares the same sound and ending as some of Mexico’s largest companies whose branding is ubiquitous: think CEMEX or PEMEX. Being the Spanish variant with the most speakers, with an influential U.S. diaspora and wide Latin American impact due to the Mexican media’s ubiquity abroad, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny that the sound itself is difficult or impossible for most Spanish speakers to say when they already say and hear words that are similar. Even if it were, it would be no different than the -w- in wi-fi, a letter which in the language is reserved for loanwords. All of this is made moot by the presence of Latine, a variation which has the benefit of being intelligible to screen readers for those with visual impairments or blindness.

Then there are those who would argue ridiculous points regarding how far gender neutral language can be taken. I’ll quote here from my response in the Swarthmore Phoenix in 2015: “An example sentence like: “Lxs niñxs fueron a lx escuelx a ver sus amigxs,” for me, suggests the authors are making an argument in bad faith and haven’t taken a serious look at the usage of gender neutral words in Spanish as they’ve emerged through the various media and have made their way into academia. Who is writing “lx escuelx” except as joke or hyperbole? Who is taking seriously the argument that gendered language in this case is the same as a language with different grammatical cases/genders? It’s an equivocation the authors would do well to correct in order to move beyond their discomfort, but not one anyone else should take very seriously. In regards to the previous quoted example, the idea that it is unpronounceable without reference to an outside language is an unconvincing one. The Spanish language already has examples of many words with letters and phonemes not usually used in the language, that actually, are or were used frequently (an example of one such sound: El water, El wi-fi). The ambiguity and discussions about how to pronounce the -x- have produced several options: some people pronounce it as -ao- (non-nasal, not the Portuguese ão), as -u-, as -tsk- or -ks-, among many more options. If the fact that this isn’t standardized is causing anyone severe anxiety, I would again ask the authors to reflect on the word Latinx’s origins, as a neologism coined and used primarily in written language that is making its way through to the spoken form; it’s going to take some time for us to find a consensus. More broadly, the discussion … reveals an anachronistic understanding of what language is and how it changes and, more troublingly, they display an outright patronizing idea of who its speakers are, both within the geographic area of Latin America and in the Diaspora. It’s a disingenuous and unconvincing argument based on supposed grammatical and phonological principles which, for me, are not well argued or supported.”

Third, the argument that the masculine form could be a neuter form when it refers to people is ridiculous. In a language where article, noun and adjective conveys information about the subject’s perceived or stated gender and sex, it never could be either in the singular or the plural. El maestro or los maestros still conjure images of a male teacher(s). This is made more awkward in interpersonal communication when a person’s gender is unknown and where the incorrect form can be perceived as a form of disrespect. If it is our priority to respect others’ gender identities, then the masculine neuter at best inaccurately describes others and at worst disrespects by misgendering others. Latinx and other -x variants solves this by proposing a gender agnostic form that can later be changed if necessary. It is one solution to a persistent issue in the language, it gives us more flexibility in our correspondence and our daily language when the gender(s) of whom we’re speaking with is unknown, unstated, or undefined. It’s useful. 

These are of course, the stated arguments. The more urgent and implicit argument against Latinx and gender affirming language generally is a reaction against the people who use it more than it is against the words they wish to coin. It is obvious that the most visceral reactions have been both from heterosexual, cisgender Latin men and non-Latinxs on the right who wish to make the term a wedge issue within Latinx communities. What does it say when the term’s most aggressive detractors are those uninterested in and who think they are unaffected by issues of gender and sex in daily language? What does it say when the term’s detractors are monolingual English speakers only interested in the term so long as it is a source of inter-community conflict for partisan political gain? What it says is that those with institutional power, who feel unperturbed by the status quo, feel comfortable lashing out at those whose gender and sexual identities render them vulnerable to violence ranging from erasure to physical attack. It should give us pause that this niche discussion has reached mainstream sources who do not care to wait for the nuances to emerge. 

There are, of course, many reasons to reject the term. One can wonder about the usefulness of a term that ties together countries as different as El Salvador and Argentina, or people whose experiences are as different as Mexicans and Chileans. One can have strong opinions about the fact the term is still anchored in coloniality, in the imperialism of the 20^th century and come to the conclusion the term is limiting or harmful. The term is just a tool. It’s a vehicle that attempts to get us to a place where we currently are not. It aims to free us from the limitations of a language that did not contemplate queer or trans people and must now reckon with them. We can form contrasting opinions as to how effectively it does this. There are complex reasons that undergird the adoption of the term, but its rejection is largely unmoored from the realities of the demands on the language today or the efforts of its speakers to ensure it remains a vibrant, living and evolving language into the future. -X is a collective bet on the future of Spanish as a language for all of us.