A word once only relegated to the pot filled dorm rooms of sociology majors has broken into the mainstream of late, and it’s one that if so-called progressives had an iota of intellectual honesty, they’d lambaste it as the imperialist perversion of linguistics that it truly is.
“Latinx.”
The rhetorical monstrosity of the term is bad enough. For one thing, how do you even pronounce it? La·teen·ex? La·teenx? Lynx? La·tin·eux, in the French manner?
If we’re being honest, the word is pronounced, “I’m a Western imperialist desecrating the beauty of the Romance languages because my ignorant ego cannot handle non-Germanic languages.”
The term “Latinx” has recently replaced the designations of “Latino” and “Latina” on the supposedly woker corners of the Internet in the name of gender neutrality. Merriam-Webster officially added the word to its dictionary late last year, and now it seems that it’s broken into the hallowed halls of Congress, with new Democratic FreshFace Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., touting the grammatically incorrect term.
I hate to break it to you, but using “Latinx” rather than its gendered equivalent is nothing short of white Anglo-imperialism. Here’s why.
The Romance languages, which include Spanish and Portuguese, tend to rely on a number of inflecting suffixes, most notably binary gender. With the exception of Romanian, nouns in neo-Latin languages are either masculine or feminine, and adjectives take on the gender of the noun they modify.
In French, a man would say, “Je suis francais,” but I would say, “Je suis francaise.”
The same is true across the Iberian Romance languages, including Mexican and Central American dialects of the Spanish language. Some indigenous Mesoamerican languages employ grammatical gender, and some do not. So, if you want to be consistent with your use of the ridiculous “Latinx,” you’d have to speak Spanish with the letter “x” in nearly every word: “lx gente dex partidx Democraticx de Nuevx York es muy locx.” Or this election season in Queens: “No me culpes a mi , no vote por lx idiotx!”
In contrast, English derives from the West German Anglo-Saxons, who colonized the British Isles. By the time of the Norman conquest a few hundred years later, grammatical gender had disappeared from the English language.
The term “Latino” itself doesn’t refer to an ethnic or linguistic group, but rather people from Latin American cultures, a diverse conglomerate of hundreds of different cultures. The designation of “Latinos” as a monolith is a product of American invention, one adopted by the American government to replace the term “Hispanic,” which only referred to Spanish speakers and thus excluded Brazilians. For what it’s worth, only 4 percent of Brazilians identify as “Latino-Americanos” anyway; the overwhelming majority identify as “brasileiros” or “brasileiras.”
Replacing centuries of linguistic nuances and traditions in the Spanish language with the grammatical genderlessness of English is nothing short of a cultural imposition, even worse than a cultural appropriation. Perhaps it’s time for us to stop thinking of hundreds of millions of diverse people as a monolith, to move away from such identity pandering and respect individual cultures for what they are: discrete, different, and dignified.
