Latinx
Latinx is an English neologism used to refer to people with Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States.
The term was first seen online around 2004; it has since been used in social media by activists, students, and academics who seek to advocate for non-binary and genderqueer individuals.
[citation needed] Latinx is used as an alternative to the gender binary inherent to formulations such as Latina/o and Latin@,[9][11][12] and is used by and for anyone of Latin-American descent who does not identify as either male or female, or more broadly as a gender-neutral term for such.
[21] According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[9][22][23] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language.
"[21][24] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.
[25][26] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.
Brian Latimer, a producer at MSNBC who identifies as nonbinary, says that the application of the term "shows a generational divide in the Hispanic community".
[9]: 60 In 2016, a student newspaper described the term as "sweeping across college campuses in the nation with the intent of creating inclusion while inadvertently pitting members of the Latino community into a cultural war".
It is clear that the inclusive approach to nouns and adjectives is becoming more common, and while it may at some point become the prevailing tendency, presently there is no prescriptive control toward either syntax".
[33] A 2019 poll (with a 5% margin of error) found that 2% of US residents of Latin American descent in the US use Latinx, including 3% of 18–34-year-olds; the rest preferred other terms.
[3][41] A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that only 23% of US adults who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino had heard of the term Latinx.
[4] A 2020 study based on interviews with 34 Latinx/a/o students from the US found that they "perceive higher education as a privileged space where they use the term Latinx.
[46] Latinx has become commonly used by activists in American higher education and the popular media who seek to advocate for individuals on the borderlines of gender identity.
"[34] Some commentators, such as Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University and author of the 2018 book Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, associate the term with the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana feminist.
[9]: 61 Scharrón-del Río and Aja (2015) have traced the use of Latinx by authors Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Jaime Géliga Quiñones, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Adriana Gallegos Dextre.
[56] Matthew Yglesias of Vox, discussing Donald Trump's gains among Hispanic voters in the 2020 United States presidential election, stated that for Democrats, while other factors played a larger role, the term "is, if nothing else, a symptom of the problem, which is a tendency to privilege academic concepts and linguistic innovations in addressing social justice concerns."
[57] Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are hesitant to use the term until after usage continues to evolve to make it more common, according to California representative Raul Ruiz.
[58] In February 2023, a group of Hispanic Connecticut lawmakers, including five Democrats, proposed a similar ban on formal state documents, calling the term offensive to Spanish speakers.
[67] Linguist John McWhorter argues that, in contrast to other neologisms such as African American, Latinx has not become mainstream as of 2019[update] because the problem of implied gender it aims to solve is more a concern of the intelligentsia than the "proverbial person on the street".
[73] The League of United Latin American Citizens announced in 2021 that it would stop using the term in its official communications, calling it "very unliked" by nearly all Latinos.
