OPINION: Let’s Stop Focusing On Latinx
By: Pedro Naveiras
Latino identity is complex. Certainly, people should be free to determine how they want to be identified. However, rather than expending outsized resources on inclusion in the Spanish language, we should focus those resources on the problems that truly matter. Understandably, retorts will be made that we can and do have the intellectual capacity to advocate for multiple social and cultural remedies simultaneously. Yet, in practice, something about that refrain has proven inaccurate.
When something like making Spanish gender-neutral produces a term like Latinx, bad-faith conservatives insist that woke liberals are ruining the country. Then, the left responds, and without fail, the media turns this “conflict” into a multi-day sideshow that sucks the oxygen out of every room. Meaningful conversations on meaningful issues then naturally get lost in the circus.
Recently, USA Today published an op-ed, written by The Blaze’s Giancarlo Sopo, that outlined his case against the term Latinx. Calling it an “absurd Anglicization of a language that generations struggled to conserve,” the author argued, “The last thing [Hispanic Americans] need are progressives ‘wokesplaining’ how to speak Spanish.”
He’s a little confused, but he’s got the spirit.
Sopo’s piece is one of a number of articles and op-eds that have been part of a conservative effort to sow division in the Hispanic community by criticizing people for using Latinx. The movement to call Latinos “Latinx” comes from a good place. However, every week that gets lost to these comparatively small issues becomes another week where the public discussion gets irreversibly diverted from the ongoing, abject moral failure of our country caging children at the border. It’s not that Latinx isn’t important. It’s that I would prefer every possible minute dedicated to freeing these helpless, powerless, and blameless children so they can be reunited with their families.
Latinx has critics from all sides. Some are critical because they view it as an attempt to erase Spanish culture and language by replacing Latino with an anglicized version. In Spanish, the letter x can be pronounced differently depending on the context, making the term Latinx difficult to grasp for native Spanish speakers. Others view the term as elitist and a poor attempt to critique machismo culture –– the patriarchal structure and gender preference in Spanish that favors the masculine over the feminine.
The terms Latino and Latina refer to individuals of Latin American descent by either the masculine or feminine pronoun, respectively. The masculine version, Latino, is the default term because it can also encompass the feminine. Latinx, however, is increasingly being used by younger Spanish speakers, in left-leaning articles, and by Latino LGBTQ people and their allies in an attempt to be more inclusive. Even Democratic Presidential candidates Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Elizabeth Warren have used the term in addressing Latino and Hispanic voters.
Latinx can be a part of the greater conversation in the community about machismo and gender inclusiveness, but it has dominated some of the political discourse at the expense of more important issues. ThinkNow, a multicultural market research agency out of Burbank, CA, released a poll that found that “98% of Latinos prefer other terms to describe their ethnicity. Only 2% of our respondents said the label accurately describes them, making it the least popular ethnic label among Latinos.”
Simply typing in “latinx” and doing a Google search on the news tab returns over 250 results … in November of 2019. Doing the same search, in the same timeframe, and combining the total searches from “children in cages” and “kids in cages” yields roughly the same number of results. Again, the Latinx discussion does carry importance, but like most concepts, importance is relative.
If someone wants to use the term Latinx in their daily life, as a self-identifier, or as a more inclusive way of referring to a group of Latinos, we should welcome that. But we should focus much less on the term and turn our attention to more pressing issues.
Some issues worth more consistently intense and focused advocacy include, but certainly are not limited to: the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border, lower educational attainment rates for Latinos, the daily fear undocumented families have of deportation, and a President that relentlessly denigrates and dehumanizes our ethnicity. These are human rights and deeply troubling societal issues that should be the main focus of our advocacy. Because our collective attention span can only handle so much, we should endeavor to be better and more consistent advocates on these issues.
When more imminent and pressing concerns exist, it feels like a disservice to the genuinely life and death issues facing our community to allow ourselves to get sidetracked, even if only briefly. Issues along the ideological continuum are all important, but dealing with human rights abuses is a moral imperative, while using the term Latinx is a linguistic and oratorical choice.
Progressives, Hispanic or otherwise, are not the problem for attempting to be more inclusive. As progressives and liberals, it does us no good to quibble over the term Latinx when, among many other things, children are still in cages, our opportunities for educational and career advancement are disproportionately low, and our health outcomes are poorer. This is not the hill we need to die on.
(Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the December 2019 [Volume 50, Issue 2] version of The Advocate.)