Not to humblebrag but I’m not online enough to know the details of the likely struggle sessions that have already occurred relating to this (Hexbear or elsewhere)
I’m reading Racial Formation in the United States, and it makes frequent use of latin@. But to me it just seems really awkward/forced.
Just use latine? Or, if one insists on using a combo letter, maybe at least something like the Swedish å? Or instead of trying to change the language, just divorce any correlation between human gender and word gender by selecting either latino or latina to refer to all people.
I only have a basic American level ability to speak Spanish so if there are Spanish speakers here with better insight, lemme hear the roasts
latine is used officially by the cuban and argentinian governments at least, seems to have struck a stronger chord in people that speak spanish
latine
Is it pronouced lah-teen or lah-tee-ney? I've never heard anyone say it
in spanish, you pronounce every letter. la-teen-eh, for the anglophones.
Spanish doesn't have silent letters and all vowels are consistently the same.
I can only speak for myself, but I don't personally use Latinx to refer to myself or others by default; frankly, I've always used Hispanic, which is already gender neutral, so I never saw a compelling reason to switch the term I use in English, and Latinx just feels wrong and even alienating to me. It does see a lot of usage in activist communities, but to me it seems a fool's errand to try to get a term adopted that so clearly does not fit into Spanish phonotactics. Of course, I'll use it if someone prefers it, but I cannot imagine it ever gaining widespread adoption among those whose primary language is Spanish--pretty much the polar opposite of singular "they".
I'm also a fan of latine which fits neatly into the language (not just the term itself, but the strategy for making other gendered words neutral) and does seem to have some purchase among Spanish speakers. It's the term I'd use if I wanted to be explicitly inclusive, which I realize is something "Hispanic" fails to convey (not just with regards to gender but also indigenous communities as well as Portuguese speakers).
This is all the perspective of someone who's probably considered a gringo by most of my family (born and raised in the US, decent but clearly non-native grasp of Spanish), so maybe not the insight you'd hoped for, but it's a perspective nonetheless.
Latine gang rise up.
X or @ feel like corporate branding.
Latine feels more like a natural progression of how the language is already structured.
That being said, I'd estimate a good chunk of the hispanic/latin-american population over 30 aren't even aware that people were trying to make X/@ a thing except for memes about how they hate X/@.
I'm told Latinx was originated by trans women in Bazil but idk if that's true. It certainly seems like it never caught on anywhere.
I understand this is a question that involves an american community, but here in Brazil it's generally regarded as ridiculous because it is linguistically awkward and feels like a cultural import from the USA. Latine being no better than Latinx.
That may be relevant for first generation immigrants because the male form of words is perceived as both generic and masculine, it is the female form of words which is regarded as special. When you say Eles (they, masculine) it can be a group of men, but it is generally impersonal and without character. When you say Elas (they, feminine) it is always a group of women, and carries special meaning therefore. A group of parents vs a group of mothers, for an example.
I have to say that english could just call latin americans the latin community. It's gender neutral and a word in current use. Nobody from the classical region of Latium is gonna resurrect and be miffed about it and I'm positive there won't be any confusion with 5th generation italian families from New York.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not just talking about people online with transvestigation syndrome. For an example, when Dilma Rouseff was elected president of Brazil the Worker's Party made a big deal of calling her Presidenta. It is grammatically sound, as it follows the rule for Master (Mestre/Mestra), but it's also correct to just call her Presidente. The right wing made a big deal of refusing to use the gendered form because politics.
Now, for most normies it just sounded weird, not just because it's a new word but almost like a mocking thing to call the president. Latine and Latinx go beyond that. It will take a lot of work and outright imposition for those terms to filter down from academia and corporate authority, and it still might not in the end.
Another thing that comes up to me right now is that going out of your way to say LatinOH! and LatinAH! comes across as a way to create and experience that migrant identity in an anglophone country. Latinos in the US are, frankly, basically Americans in most ways that count. Especially the second gen ones. But being LatinOH! rather than Latinx is one way of living the fact that your parents and grandparents are from Guatemala.
That may have cultural value in itself and might respond to some resistance you'll see.
I never understood what the problem with Latin American is. It's gender neutral and accurately describes a person's origin. I consider myself Latin American, and I don't know any other Brazilians who would object to being called that, unless they have some very online chip on their shoulder.
Well, it's not really about us. It's about USians, and in the US the community brand that won out is 'Latino'. But yeah, if you want to make that gender neutral I can't see what's wrong with Latin People or Folk, as opposed to Latinx Folk or People.
Latin American as a term was tied to the language of academia and diplomacy. It started as a French geopolitical delusion, continued onwards as a sticking point in hispanic literature, and only came to really include Brazil in the early 1900s due to American geopolitical reality. Since then it described foreign peoples, not a community within the United States. I'd wager that's why it didn't catch: a black person in the US can fill a form referring to themselves as African American - but the mexican person won't find any forms with Latin American as a matter of historical circumstance.
The @ was commonly used by Spanish progressives about 10 years ago, but it has since been superceded by the 'e' because... you can actually say it lol
I'd love to know because it's hard for me to know the general consensus on this as well. There's too much enbyphobia in most mainstream discussions of this subject for me to really tell.
The ones that I have spoken to prefer the older forms, including generic masculine, but also don't feel strongly on the matter.
Latinx and latin@ are useful if you want to make a point of being inclusive since they stand out as very intentional but they don’t have general traction even among LGBT communities and basically feel very forced, not at all an equivalent to using they/them in English in that sense.
The issue isn’t just that Spanish is a gendered language, it’s also that Spanish is not always a gendered language. Adverbs and adjectives are not gendered but pronouns are, so constructing a non-gendered pronoun makes the pronoun kind of feel kind of like an adverb which kind of “feels wrong” in an inner logic sense not in a transphobic sense. Nonetheless “latine” still follows the vibe, so to speak, since at least adverbs and adjectives are not gendered so importing that into a pronoun is much less jarring than using x or @.
To approximate it, using “they/them” is natural in English since it was used as a gender neutral pronoun anyway versus some of the other pronoun choices which “stick out” more such as “xi/xey” for example - to be clear I’m not hating, I believe you can choose whatever pronoun you like but xi/xey is more of a statement than they/them if you know what I mean. Similarly Latinx/latin@ are making a statement, which can be great if you want to stridently own your identity or be very overtly inclusive, but not everyone wants to make that kind of statement or prefers to be more subtle basically. Latinx or latin@ intends to be inclusive but it often ends up meaning, in actual practice, “I am speaking specifically about trans people as a group” rather than “Latinos in general” since Latino is, as a matter of actual current practice, what is used to refer to Latinos overall.
What’s more, if you say “a group of Latinos” you don’t actually think of a group of males but a group of Latinos. I do think the practice should change since there is certainly still some subtle effect at play in the masculine form being the default / collective form but to understand the debate, it’s important to be aware that the use of the word Latino does not at all evoke the idea of “a group of males”, except in some very subtle sense. To analogize to English, if you said “a group of doctors” you’re not at all saying they’re males but of course latent sexism might still make most people picture mostly men, it’s more similar to that.
Basically the Spanish language debate isn’t the same as what exists in English and you can’t draw a 1:1 parallel between them since the languages simply work differently, which isn’t to say a change shouldn’t be made - it should be - but it does mean the contours of that change to be made and the way to approach making the change are very different without a clean answer.
There is no broadly accepted standard in Spanish. The best approach is to be sensitive to the audience to whom you’re speaking and, of course, to ask someone for their preference.
If I had to make a choice today which to use I would probably use Latinx if I was trying to express and emphasize inclusivity and also strategically since this would make the chuds mad and move the Overton window enough to make Latine an accepted term that doesn’t bother the chuds as much, but I would prefer to know the preferences of whichever group I am speaking to anyway and go with that.
Idk about online struggle sessions but my irl family sometimes says Hispano, sometimes says Latino, but normally uses a more specific word. Like the country/region/state a person is from or their ethnicity. Ex: Portorriqueño, Venezolano, Sudamericano, Caribe, Oaxaqueño, Náhuatl, güero
And they use standard Spanish gender rules for those words (do neutral versions even exist? shout out to the güerxs out there)
Latino/a/e/x/@ is a strange term because to a certain extent, it's used to group millions into 1 category for the people who can't tell us apart. I'm pretty sure that in my area, corporations use it more than the people it's meant to represent.
Like the term “Indian” when referring to Native Americans, it depends. Latinos and Natives aren’t monoliths. Some of them despise one term while preferring others, and some of them don’t care as long as you’re respectful. Some of the reasons may be reactionary, some may be progressive, some of them cultural, some may be confusion, and some may be because they genuinely don’t care.
It would be very funny to me (not really bad, just funny) to be referred to as Latinx. Latin American is perfectly fine to me. It also includes Brazilian Portuguese speakers as well as speakers of the native languages of Latin America.
The only time I've personally seen @ as a replacement of gendered a/o in Spanish is in an alternate spelling of "EZLN Para Tod@s Todo", a song by Manu Chao. I think I once wrote to a Latin American trans person on the matter, and they said that @ is commonly seen as somewhat dated and awkward.
It's a bit dated. The @, sometimes written o(a) is a very 90s thing. Most people would likely remember it from their early school years.
For some reason I thought it was more of a '00s thing than a '90s thing...
It definitely survived into the early 2000s, but not long after.
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/07/31/zapatista-pirates-learning-from-other-rebel-indigenous-sexual-dissidences/
I know most don't mind being called latino or hispanic.
Latinx bothers a lot of my hispanic friends.
