More On: Latinx
The Latinx’s Failure
The great majority of Latinos despise the phrase and have no desire to be used as puppets in the cultural war by leftists.
The progressive culture elite typically gets what it wants. Single-gender restrooms become all-gender or non-gender bathrooms over night? Done. Is it becoming fashionable to refer to illegal immigrants as "undocumented persons"? But, of course, this is true.
So, when it was decided in the halls of fashionable opinion that the term "Latino" would be phased out in favor of "Latinx," one could be forgiven for thinking that, like so much else in American life, this hideous neologism would quickly move from fringe to mainstream.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Latinx ascendancy: Latinos have rejected the term, even as a large swing toward the GOP among these voters has highlighted the dangers of the Democrats' high-handed cultural politics.
"Latinx" might end up being a failed woke experiment, revealing the huge divide between identity-politics-obsessed progressives in seminar rooms and on social media and the Hispanics in whose name they purport to speak.
"Latinx" is a project that is a natural extension of LGBTQ, which is now more correctly and thoroughly expressed as LGBTQQIP2SAA as of this writing.
The gendered nouns in Spanish are said to be the difficulty that "Latinx" was established to solve. This implies that using the masculine descriptor "Latino" to identify men and women of Latin American origin, much alone transgender and nonbinary persons, is ostensibly discriminatory, cruel, and dangerous. "To default to the masculine gender fosters interpersonal violence against women and nonbinary persons," according to a manual on the language written by a Princeton academic.
“Latinx” rose from the ashes of its predecessor neologism “Latin@,” an attempted amalgamation of the -o at the end of the Latino and the -a at the end of “Latina.” But no one knew how to pronounce the word. It was deemed insufficiently woke because the -o was supposedly graphically dominating the -a. (Yes, this is how some people think.) And it caused confusion on social media where the @ sign is used to tag someone.
Then there's "Latinx," which is even more ludicrous.
According to Giancarlo Sopo of the Daily Wire, who has been on a one-man crusade against the term's spread, "Latinx" is unintelligible to any Spanish speaker who does not know English. Most Spanish people do not believe that their language is severely defective or that Spanish grammar is a proto–hate crime. The -x appendage has been rejected by the Real Academia Espaola, Spain's official organization entrusted with protecting the language's purity.
In the actual world, "Latinx" fares much worse than Joe Biden in terms of polling. According to a Politico poll, only 2% of Hispanics prefer the term, with 68 percent preferring "Hispanic" and 21% preferring "Latino" or "Latina." The term is offensive to 40% of respondents, and 30% say they are less likely to support a politician or group who uses it.
In response to the survey, Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego tweeted that he prevents his staff from using the term "Latinx" in official correspondence. "When Latino politicians use the word, it's mostly to please white wealthy progressives who believe that's what we mean," he wrote. "Confirmation bias is a vicious loop."
Nonetheless, many elected Democrats, as well as elite media outlets and other institutions vulnerable to progressive influence, have obediently adopted the word. It's one thing if someone likes the term "Latinx" (or the much more avant-garde "Latina/o/x" or "Xicanx"). It's another thing to apply the phrase to a vast group of individuals who don't want to be termed something they don't understand.
The backlash is a reassuring evidence of elite cultural power's limits, as well as most Latinos' disinterest in becoming puppets in an increasingly more strained and esoteric progressive politics of continual victimology.
