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Comment by forgetfulness | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow there was "latinx" there. People from Latin America take a lot of umbrage at having this little exonym pushed on us, believe me. It feels like colonialism.

The term "Hispanic" is already very broad to refer to people from a large collection of polities with several cultural spheres in it, but at least the concept of "hispanoamérica" exists in it, and the word isn't a novel take on the Spanish language coming from the US.

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The best example of how all of this is just a huge virtue signaling effort. I don't want to be called latinx and it's not a bunch of yankees feeling guilty of their government who's going to choose what to call us. It's the most colonial term I've seen from these types and it's unpronounceable in either Spanish or Portuguese. A juice of wokism.

Humor may apply here since the best way to kill this is to pronounce it la-tinks instead of Latin X. My parents are from Central America so feel free to say a latinks person told you it's pronounced that way.

I prefer lantinucks. There was also a short-lived trend of using 'x' in some parts of South America, it kind of died down in Chile as people decided to roll back to more boring centrist positions after a period of radicalization, and priorities shifted lower in the pyramid of needs during an economic crisis and a crime wave.

According to some random commenter I saw on HN last week, BIPOC is similarly questionable.

I will make an effort to use whatever term people prefer, but it's impossible to know which that is when the loudest voices don't agree.

You speak for all latin americans?

Do the American "lantinx" and their "allies" at fancy Universities do?

People at the last place I worked (US) wanted to. When I brought up that people in Latin America aren't really on-board with the whole latinx thing, the pushback I got boiled down to "they shouldn't be using gendered language". Yeah. I didn't want to get into a whole "that's mighty colonial of you" debate. It was kind of a weird place to work.

> People from Latin America take a lot of umbrage at having this little exonym pushed on us

Don't.

It's just an effing word.

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