We Are Latino, Not Latinx
By Anabella
While woke institutions and figures now widely use the word “Latinx,” there is one heritage group that has yet to adopt the jargon. The group? Hispanic Americans, whom the word claims to represent. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 4% of Hispanic adults self-identify as “Latinx.”
One major reason that “Latinx,” supposedly a more inclusive version of the traditional “Latino,” has never been part of my demographic’s vernacular is because many of us are wholly unfamiliar with it, NPR validates. As a young Latina myself, I know Hispanics reject the label for other reasons, too.
A far too reductionist way to describe our ethnic identity, “Latinx” feels more like an attack on our language than a step towards cultural awareness. Because Spanish is a gendered language, many words take on either a masculine or feminie form. This doesn’t exactly jive with the leftist playbook that rejects sex as a construct.
Woke culture, therefore, entered the awkward spot of trying to appreciate a minority ethnicity while struggling to coexist with its inherently gendered language. To reconcile this conflict, leftists decided to rewrite Spanish. “Latino” in its masculine form was suddenly not progressive enough. Wokesters felt that the term failed to represent female and non-binary individuals of Latin American descent. And so, the word “Latinx” was born.
This shift in semantics has one major flaw. The word Latino is already inclusive. Any group in which there is at least one male present takes on the musculine form. This does not change the makeup of the group; the term still encompasses all members of the group regardless of who is present and what their gender identification is. “Latinx’' is therefore redundant.
Had the inventors of this word taken one minute to understand the Spanish language, they would have seen no need for a newfangled, genderless version of “Latino.” They would have found that an overwhelming majority of Latinas do not feel threatened by gendered language. Their savior complex isn’t new, however. Leftists routinely employ this arrogance when engaging with minorities. They think of themselves as our superiors who know what is best for us. Reforming Spanish to be more ‘inclusive’ is a cheap way to score social justice points and it’s demeaning to my community. Leftist have mastered manufacturing adversity and focusing on trivial diversions instead of legitimate issues.
Now that we have established that the word has no functional use, we can understand why so many Latinos, like myself, are offended by it. Latinos are being redefined by a word we did not ask for or approve of, that was invented by outsiders with no knowledge or respect of our culture and language. It feels like an attempt to delegitimize our existence and force us to submit to a woke ideology that is often incompatible with our value system. Not all minorities automatically subscribe to progressivism, despite what the mainstream media insists.
In France, the use of gender neutral language, and more importantly, the act of altering the French language to make it gender neutral, was banned. French officials feared that allowing such fundamental changes would diminish the French language, a source of national pride. Furthermore, they feared gender neutral words would dilute its elegance to the point that no one would want to learn or speak it, causing it to die out.
The French recognize the impact of unnecessarily modifying their language. Hispanics see it too. We are not interested in fitting into the dumb, ever shapeshifting constraints and expectations of wokeism. We do not want the intrinsic beauty of our language, nor the particular lexicon we use, to be diminished at the discretion of non-Hispanic individuals.
Though “Latinx” may be the first case of “woke Spanish,” it is still incredibly insulting, as it attempts to redefine what it means to be Hispanic or Latino. What those who push “Latinx” fail to understand is that we do not want to be redefined. The Spanish language is not up for rearrangement, just as our culture is not the Left’s to mold. We are Latino, not Latinx.
Photo via @theconservateur
