https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/hispanic-voters-latinx-term-523776
As left wing governments and corporations seek to reach out to Latin Americans in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get serious use among United States academics and activists following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, but according to a new multinational poll of Latin American people, Latinx has unintentionally became one of the most homophobic slurs in Spanish and Portuguese. The incessant use of Latinx in advertising and government documents has only made the word more popular as a slur in only a few years. No Latin Americans polled referred to themselves as Latinx, the vast majority called themselves Hispanic or Latino even among the LGBT. What's most shocking is Latinx ranked first on the list of most offensive words according to Latin American people, most respondents said they wouldn't support a politician or organization that uses the term however there's monetary incentives for businesses and politicians to use Latinx, many Latin American governments are trying to phase out the use of gendered language and are offering tax deductions for the use of Latinx.
Thanks for this perspective. I agree that latinx is very much an imperfect term, but is a good start. Considering it originated with LGBTQ+ people of Latinx heritage in Puerto Rico and North America, I could understand it being a bit clunky in other cultures.
A lot of the hand wringing I see about the word comes from non-speakers obsessing over grammatical rules or bigots attempt to concern troll.
It's super interesting the x found its way into use from some Chicano activists starting off with shifting the spelling to Xicano to emphasize that it comes from the Nahuatl / Aztec language. It then adapted to the end of the word instead (Chicanx) and later shifted over to Latinx.Mostly just mentioning this for anyone reading our convo.
That is interesting, I knew a guy growing up with an "x" name, but never really made that connection. Yeah I think one tricky thing about trying to get a word to stick throughout Latin America is that they already have so many regional differences between how they use words. Every Spanish speaker that's traveled in LatAm as at least one story about how they accidentally prepositioned someone in like Chile or whatever because they didn't study the regional differences in vocabulary and just assumed Spanish is Spanish.
That's also a reason why arguments about Spanish purity are silly, like ask someone from the mountains of Bolivia and someone else from the Caribbean to say something like "desarrollar" and then try and invent a way for there to be one correct "Spanish" way of saying anything.
Right? I love the effort a lot of indigenous activists are putting into further integrating Nahuatl / Aztec into Spanish. There's already tons of it present, especially in Mexico.
Examples off the top of my head: molcajete, aguacate, nopales, etc
100%. It's honestly a great reason for different regions to try out and adapt whatever gender neutral terms work for them.
Totally agree. The concept of one "correct" way to speak Spanish is also pretty based in colonialism.