Oh boy.

"LatinX" was indeed the first attempt at a gender neutral description. "Latino" is still considered by many native speakers to be "neutral", but the most feasible solution I've seen popping up is the "latine" (as in "estudiante", "vigilante", etc). Since it uses an explicitly non-gendered suffix, it is more correctly inclusive than the "latino". It will take a while though, und until it is really widely adopted.

It was first seen in online queer activist circles around 2004. You can read a little about it here. Latino is traditionally masc/neutral but English style guides also said the same about “he” when referring to someone of unknown or unspecified gender for a long time, which has largely fallen out of use for singular “they” now.

Personally, I don’t use Latinx in writing to refer to all Latinos/Latinas as polling has shown only 2-3% of people readily identify with it. But I do think you absolutely should use it if that’s how someone personally identifies.

Am I the only one who reads LatinX as rhyming with larynx?

For some reason people get violently ill when they see someone use pronouns on the internet, so they came up with an alternative words so that their ideas match up with reality.

How many of them are actually Latino though? It seems like a term created and made popular by white liberals

Rent free

I just know she wrote this while sipping a Starbucks and wearing big sunglasses while indoors.

So far it isn’t as bad as I feared. It’s very early days though! I’m really keen to create a community where we can discuss any topic including contentious ones respectfully, rather than just avoiding posting anything that could bring out the trolls. I’m hoping the one-warning-then-you’re-banned rule will be sufficient to keep the worst at bay. Please report comments that break the rules if you see them to help keep this community an enjoyable place to be!

Thats a good explanation. I'm saving that for future use. It seems easier to empathise with these people when you understand that they're a product of their environment and as much victims of the system as anybody else.

Yeah but it's the cool kind of racism that's allowed so it's okay!

If I can be racist against my very own (according to the 23 and me dealy i got for Christmas 4 years ago) kind, than you know what? Fine I'll take that. White people, especially Americans who feel the need to preamble that with some other European nation like it was an additional qualifying ethnicity, suck. I dislike them. It's like, ooh look at me I'm extra white. Fuck that. They are attention seeking children and a net negative for society.

It's not amorphous enough fit it to ever be ok for a white+ American girl to just say she's Latin because she feels like that's just a state of mind. Language does not work like that.

I'm pretty sure that as a white person I'm aloud to call out a type of behavior that has become all to common in white people.

Right, but it is not and has not been used to describe queer white people. The OOP describes herself as Irish American who identified as Latinx because she "loves hard", and that's not how anything works.

Lover, this keyboard wants be more smart than the writer.

Hispanic is if you come from a country of spanish descent. Latino is if you come from a Latin American country. People from Brazil are latinos but not hispanic.

Half of my family is spanish speaking. My mom grew up bilingual, speaking Spanish at home with my grandma. I lived in Spanish-speaking countries in my twenties for a while and learned to speak spanish myself.

…I still never ever call myself Latino because I grew up in whitesville as a white kid. It never even occurred to me until I was older that I might technically be considered Latino. It just never really came up. The most I ever say is literally what I said in the first sentence. I really feel like deciding later in life to identify as Latino would be some weird kind of appropriation. I don’t look Latino, I didn’t experience anything like a Latino outside of visiting my family and being surrounded by Latinos.

I’ve come across people in very similar situations to me, who do identify as Latin and they explained to me that they decided later in life to start saying it. It just feels…wrong to me. Can you find out after living a super white existence that you may get to qualify as a minority group (in the context of living in the US, that is.) I say no.

I was reading it wrong ... You are not latina because you love hard.

Thanks for your definition. Hispanic is someone with spanish culture. That was my point.

I followed the link you used:

These standards generally reflect a social definition of race and ethnicity recognized in this country, and they do not conform to any biological, anthropological, or genetic criteria. . . . Persons who report themselves as Hispanic can be of any race and are identified as such in our data tables.

I thought the OP was ridiculous but apparently, if they genuinely identify with the culture then she might technically be correct.

So the definition of what "Latino" is comes from... the US institutions?

It's more complicated than that. Latinos in the US also have Native American blood (usually South American). They have a terrible history of persecution. Someone who's from Spain isn't "Latino".

Thx 😅

You are not latina just because you love hard 😂