But I don't understand why we don't just drop the o/a at the end and use "Latin". No article seems to explain this, and nobody here in HN has explained it either.
I'm not trying to be argumentative for the sake of it, I genuinely don't understand what's wrong with simply using "Latin", which would be linguistically more correct in English, and also a contraction of "Latin American".
Maybe there's some cultural nuance I'm missing, as I'm not American. All the Latin American people I know identify as being from their home country (mostly Argentina and Chile), rather than Latin American anyway. The whole Latino/Latina/Latinx thing seems to be some Pan-Latin American thing for US residents, trying to amalgamate a whole continent into a single cultural identity.
(Of course, if the south/Central Americans want a shared ‘Latinx’ identity then good for them, this comment is more about how Americans (the ones from the USA) refer to them.)
Someone demanding me to blanket treat an entire culture is dehumanizing every interaction with a person from that culture (and it makes each interaction tainted with ideology). I also can't respect someone who thinks they have the right to speak for an "identity" that crosses many cultures and national boarders, or contains millions of people. [1]
Let's reverse the roles. Would you feel comfortable if a white activist (assuming you are white) you do not know, who has never spoken to you before, and comes from a different country or background than you, is demanding the country/world to treat or label you a specific way? What if it was a male? Or female? Or Catholic or atheist? Democratic or republican? Blue collared or white collared? Has children, or doesn't? [1]
[1][1] A single word can be heavily loaded from a political or justice oriented ideology, and cause people to subconsciously distance themselves from people they interact with due to subconsciously projecting that ideology.
/rant.
Sure, but doesn't that apply to every such label? Latinx is the "controversial" term and Latino/a are the "accepted" ones, but that's just because we're having this discussion now; surely further back in history Latino/a were just as unfamiliar as Latinx is today.
Put another way: what label is not arbitrarily decided by pleas from some subset of that group and/or popular usage?