By writing this newsletter, I’ve become used to writing “Latinx” without much thought. Before, I might have written “Latino/a” and gone back to replace the last vowels with the x, but now it just flows. I don’t plan to go back to writing the gendered version of the term in this newsletter, but I have to admit that “Latinx” still doesn’t feel second nature.
It might be that I’ve used “Latino” for most of my life, and switching to Latinx will take time. It might be that when I speak, I rarely say Latinx, usually opting for just “Latin.”
I began writing these thoughts out a few days before that nationwide poll of Latinxs found that most Latinx don’t identify with the term. In fact, only 2 percent do. For some reason, this poll got more attention than past polls with similar findings. Maybe it was because it scared the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) — the always ethical organization with a squeaky clean history — enough to ditch the term. Maybe it’s because we’re getting closer to the start of election season in a year when Democrats are expected to lose and are going to do whatever it takes to play it safe once again. Maybe it was just time to bring up this debate again.
Either way, I was already thinking about the term before the poll, but after the poll, I instead spent a lot of time reading way too many fun think pieces and editorials about what we should do. I’m not going to tell you what to do but please (please) try to avoid taking any advice from editorial boards. Especially ones that resort to the tired chancleta trope twice in their article.
Anyway, even though the poll and the following articles got in the way, they didn’t really change my mind. I’m still going to use the term, but the reason I made this lil post is to say that I’m gonna start throwing in the term “Latine” into posts too, just to see how it feels and to add some variety. I feel like if people really stay so resistant to “Latinx,” Latine might be the future of how we identify. I like it and it serves the purpose of Latinx, plus I am all for having multiple terms we can use to describe ourselves since we’re a hard group of people to pin down with a single word.
This didn’t merit a whole post tbh. I could have just begun peppering Latine into posts without warning, but I also wanted to try out a more casual kind of post to see how it feels.
So what I’m trying to say is…Latine, Latines. You’ll see it around here more.
Also, yesterday I listened to the latest Code Switch podcast episode, which was about what exactly qualifies as “Latin Music.” It doesn’t fully answer the question, but it does have a nice discussion about it and brings up a lot more questions…so that’s kinda nice.