Opinion | Latina, Latinx, Latine…

The term Latinx is used as a gender-neutral alternative for the terms Latino/Latina to represent the community from Latin American descent. However, this term is not really embraced by the community, so should we actually be using it? Illustration by YANA SAMOYLOVA, Illustrator

Back home, I’m Mexican; when I leave my country, I become Latina. Or, at least, that is what I was used to until I came to the United States and found out that here it’s Latinx. 

At first, I didn’t really think that much of it. To me, it was a nice gender-neutral term that represented me. But when I talked to some other students who came from Mexico, I noticed that not all of them liked it. Some were actually annoyed by it. So I asked myself, why is that?

First, we have to acknowledge that Spanish is a gendered language. Every noun has a gender. When it comes to nouns used to describe what people do or where they’re from, you can usually adapt them to feminine or masculine. You can be a maestra (female teacher) or maestro (male teacher). You can be a mentirosa (female liar) or mentiroso (male liar). 

You can be Latina or Latino. 

This is just the way the Spanish language works. So why Latinx?

Since Spanish has no gender-neutral terms, when talking about a group of people, the default is to use the masculine term. Maestros, mentirosos, Latinos… 

No big deal, right? That should be enough. Why do we need a whole new term when we already have a way of addressing everyone at the same time? This is what most people in the community feel like. 

Emilia Cuevas Diaz, Opinions Editor

And sure, that sounds like no big deal. Kids being kids. Except it continues into middle school, and then high school, and then college and so on… 

This “funny” joke doesn’t simply go away when we stop being kids. It evolves with us. It goes from Children’s Day to students to job titles. Everywhere you go, people make the same joke. But if you complain about the masculine plural not being inclusive, you get laughed at or told you’re exaggerating because that’s the plural. So, what else do you need? 

One term suggested as a gender-neutral way of referring to Latin American people is Hispanic. This one has a few issues. For one, it’s not really gender-neutral in Spanish. And honestly, that should be enough of a reason. But just for the sake of argument, let's go further. The term Hispanic is inextricably tied to Spain, the country that colonized most of Latin America. When using that term, the people from Latin American countries are defined by their colonizers and not by their own identities and cultures.

The second term and the more recent one is Latinx. On the surface, this term seems fine; it’s a gender-neutral term, it translates to Spanish as gender neutral and it doesn’t tie the Latin American community to Spain. So that’s the solution then, right? Not really.

On closer inspection, you realize that the term Latinx has some issues. For one, the term is only a good alternative to this specific term and doesn’t really solve the bigger issue of the lack of gender-neutral terms in Spanish. Adding an x to the end of the word to replace the a/o doesn’t translate as well to other words. 

More to the point, the term isn’t really used as much by the community it’s supposed to be representing. Latinx is used a lot more by academics, so it becomes a label that is imposed onto this minority community. 

This is not to say that the term is bad. Latinx represents an important step in the right direction because there is a need for a gender-neutral term. But we need one that honors the language of the community. We need a term that fits in with the culture and that the community actually feels represented by.

There’s people in the community who disagree with the need for a term to group all people of Latin American descent together. They say that we should recognize that we all are from different countries with their distinct histories and cultures. And they do have a point. The term Latinx should not be an excuse to erase our culture and group us all together.

However, those criticisms don’t take into account the fact that, in the United States, a lot of the issues Latinx people face are similar, if not the same. The term doesn’t just exist to group us all together and erase our uniqueness. The reason why Mexican-American activists fought to get the term Hispanic on the census to begin with was so that they could prove that there was a need for resources in the community.

The reality is that, as a community, Latine people in the United States share more similarities than differences. We talk the same language, we have similar cultures and we face the same challenges. The best way to get through them is together as one community.

So maybe Latinx is a temporary placeholder while we figure out a better term. Or maybe we already have it with Latine, and we just need a little bit of time for it to spread. We need the term that defines our community to truly represent us, not be imposed on us.