Nobody in Miami Says ‘Latinx’ | Hacker News Reader

Nobody in Miami Says ‘Latinx’

wsj.com

39 pointsimpish920858 comments

Speculation: There may be more news articles, TV segments, and online comments complaining about "Latinx" than there are people who have ever used the term to refer to themselves or others. It's never been a popular term among any group, not even among people who want Spanish to be more gender-neutral ("Latine" and the -e suffix seems to be more popular among them, probably on account of it being pronounceable.)

Plus, it's worth pointing out that there are some Latin Americans who prefer the term "Latinx" and use it to describe themselves. Not many, of course, but not zero. So accusations that it's only used by Anglophones are wrong.

It appears to be a popular word in styleguides. It has been adopted by journalists, thus you mostly see it from people with authoritative voices.

It seems to me the majority of the group should get to pick the labels used to describe the group. And since that hasn't happened yet with latinos, it’s unfair to use ‘Latinx’ without their permission.

The analogue is the F and N words for people in those communities. Both of those words were forced on those communities by people outside those communities.

Forcing this label on latinos, without their consent, is an act of violence and furthers the long-standing marginalization of that community.

It seems hyperbolic to compare slurs to a word for a group that's merely unpopular.

The framing of Latinx as a word unwillingly forced onto Latin Americans by outsiders is exactly why I brought up that some people use it to describe themselves.

Thing is, there are also many Latinos who are complaining about it being forced on them and/or treat it as a form of cultural imperialism (not necessarily in these exact terms, but e.g. "anglos are mutilating my language"). So it can be offensive either way, and it's down to how many people you're willing to offend.

I think its far to early in the etymological lifespan of words to make that claim.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has used her position to push use of the term so it's not exactly fringe.

it's not fringe, it's a subsection of progressives.

I'm glad there were so many articles about this; it made clear to a lot of people who thought they had to say "latinx" to be inclusive, didn't actually need to do so (it seems like lots of people want external guidance about what they can and cannot say and somehow there was a message that latinx was inclusive).

"it seems like lots of people want external guidance about what they can and cannot say"

Could this be because they've seen others socially ostracized or persecuted at work for unknowingly, innocently, violating whatever taboo progressives invented 5 minutes ago? They're afraid. I don't blame them.

Yes, exactly. It was a lot worse about 5 years ago, at least now you can push back politely and not get insta-cancelled.

"Filipinx" introduces non-gendered terminology in an already ungendered language, using letters not even in the Tagalog language. I don't know any Filipinos who use it.

Not only is it ignorant, it's literally racist white cultural and linguistic imperialism. Wasn't the enslavement, rape and murder of my ancestors over centuries enough for you all already?

Nobody offline has ever said "latinx" out loud except to ask what it is.

Not to diminish the very real issues these ideas attempt to resolve, but in some ways political correctness is just as much of a hallucination as anything ChatGPT spits out. That's what's so terrifying and divisive about it.

I was watching a Disney+ show (aimed at young teens) with a Latina main character and she used the term. Took me immediately out of the show, because it made me think there must not have been any Latinos on the writing staff.

What show?

I forget the exact name, but it's the "National Treasure" show that's a sequel to the movies. It was dumb but kind of fun.

I heard it in an All Hands meeting only recently, while talking about our DEI and hiring processes. It confused me for a second, but then I realized what word they were saying. But, to your point, it probably confused me because it's so rare to actually hear someone say it.

Is there a real issue? El carro is a problem? La casa is a very real issue?

It can be a problem wrt occupations and other descriptions of people if there's no non-gender-neutral term to describe them - people then tend to fall back onto the whatever their cultural stereotypes are when gendering those, effectively reinforcing them. For example, when "engineer" is "el ingeniero" rather than "la ingeniera" by default.

But there are certainly much better ways to solve it that don't involve bolting on things that are alien to the language phonotactics.

It is for people who find binary gendered terms in language offensive.

This is just hilarious to me because I imagine Spanish is like French where every word and pronoun, including the sky, a windshield and a machine gun is gendered.

It's basically like saying "we're going to be inclusive of you by calling your native tongue offensively sexist." Gee, I wonder why it's not popular.

It’s a mistake to think of this as something inflicted by outsiders. Much of the early usage around the turn of the century was by native speakers, but those were activists pushing boundaries – basically challenging continuation of an arbitrary convention. That’s a reasonable thing to do but that doesn’t say what’ll become mainstream.

It has seemed like in this case the problem was that some people outside of those communities heard that debate and thought they were being accommodating by going with the loudest voices on the topic rather the most representative. In a more HN analogy, it feels like setting a corporate standard on Arch Linux without realizing that you’re hearing from a small, self-selected group because most people don’t feel strongly enough to spend time evangelizing.

You imagine right. And, like French, the genders often do not reflect expected associations with sex. “Clitoris” in Spanish is masculine.

It’s more to do with etymology. The “-dad” words such as universidad are feminine; but there’s nothing particularly female about a university.

seems circular

Is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nobody?

My wife is a native Spanish speaker and an ardent feminist to her core.

It has always really bothered her about Spanish that (for example) you refer to one million women as “ellas” but one million men OR one million women and one man as “ellos.”

Despite this, she just cannot get behind -x endings in Spanish.

My wife is 2nd generation. Her father once asked "What's Latinx?"

He thought the notion that Latin grammar had become politically incorrect as absolutely insane and offensive.

While well meaning, I believe a lot of the ideas in vogue with the identity movement is harmful to the cause of equity and inclusion. It just doesn't sell to working class people regardless of their cultural background. Which is an impediment to obtaining the political power needed to create actual change beyond arguing about the right words to use.

I think a lot of those things are extremely frivolous, a waste of time, and very silly at best. These aren't things that appeal to the working class. If some rando is using me for some weird political or social clout, I wouldn't be impressed.

The trouble is, well-meaning plus controlling equals not-well-meaning.

I switched to the 50% rule. If the group has more than 50% females I use "ellas" in spite of the official rule.

I have a workgroup with 3 females and 2 males (including me), and I call it "La reunión con lAs chicAs."

Two thoughts here:

1. If the English language needed a gender-neutral term for Latino, we could have just used "Latin", which has the triple benefit of already being an English word, already being gender neutral, and already having the desired meaning.

2. While I'm grateful for the pushback against renaming other ethnic groups without their input or consent, this is the exact same origin story as the term "Native American".

I haven't looked into the history personally, but heard once that the original term used (by outsiders, of course) was "Latin". But because it doesn't fit well into the gendered Spanish language, it was disliked by native speakers, who went on to organically derive Latino/Latina as replacements.

If true, that makes the English-speaking movement to replace Latino/Latina with Latinx doubly ridiculous.

I'm currently in Colombia and have been here many times for several months at a time. I too have never heard of "latinX" outside of online diatribes from Americans

> ‘Latinx’ has failed to gain buy-in from the people it’s supposed to empower.

The hubris... We have assigned a new name to some other group, whether they want it or not, in order to empower them. Why don't they feel empowered by us imposing a name on them?

I live in Central America and the only time I hear or see this monstrosity is in NPR reports. Use this word if you want to remove any shred of remaining doubt about what a tool you are.

I don't think homeless people call themselves 'a person experiencing homelessness' either.

But my (limited) experience is that they don’t use homeless either. The few people I knew used to talk about “sleeping rough” or something like that.

In autism land (which is a cool place you all should visit) there's a discussion about 'person first language'. I haven't made my mind up either way.

Is this the logic whereby "colored people" is an offensive slur while "people of color" is the preferred nomenclature?

My primary complaint with this stuff is the same as my primary complaint with corporate/marketing/bureaucratic jargon: it's just ugly and overcomplicated language. I wish we could speak plainly instead of dressing up our language in ugly fashions.

One thing to remember is that there’s also a generational aspect: an older friend mentioned that basically everyone his age referred to themselves as Black, there was a middle group favoring people of color, and the younger people he knew were back to Black.

My general preference is using whatever term someone prefers for themselves but that doesn’t scale to large groups of any sort.

I get that - it sounds silly. But also people have been abused by others yelling that.

I’m an Aussie. I live the UK. Nobody takes offence to people calling me Aussie. That’s because nobody was ever beaten up by anyone yelling “Aussie” at them. If I was from Pakistan that wouldn’t be true though, so the shortened version of Pakistani is considered “the P word” in the UK.

I wish there could be black, white, yellow, red people. I wish skin color wasn't a slur.

The word is not the problem, the will to be offensive is. "Colored people" and "Fair skin" do sound problematic for me.

nobody anywhere who is latin american uses this term.

They don’t use the term because they don’t use “latino” which is mainly an American word with a context that mainly makes sense in the US.

But “woke” latinos definitely use “x” and “@“ in this way like “hola todxs” and “bienvenidxs”.

This is the main thing missing from this conversation. Pointing out that a Mexican in Mexico doesn’t call themself a latino is different than claiming “x” isn’t used as a neuter token in latam. Anyone in a group chat with cosmopolitan latinos under 25 would know that “x” is in fact being used.

Or just search Twitter for “todxs”.

How is it pronounced in verbal communication, though?

It isn’t. It’s a text comms phenomenon. I suppose there’s no reason it won’t hit a critical mass where people come up with a pronunciation like how “lol” or “pwn” crossed into verbal use, but it doesn’t have to to be a real part of internet/social media culture.

Another example would be “periodt”. It’s social media phenomena. That you don’t or can’t use it verbally has no bearing on whether it has or can have traction online.

In US, the push for it is not constrained to text comms, though. After all, if gendering is offensive in writing, why wouldn't the same be offensive in speech?

And if, say, we have something named "Latinx Community Center" or some such, at some point someone will have to figure out how to pronounce it, if only to ask people for directions.

Maybe, but I’m not sure of your point beyond the fact that we can’t predict if or when or how culture will change.

NPR already says “latin-ex”. Maybe that will catch on. Maybe it already has in the circles where it matters. But note that incredulity nor derision are evidence against cultural changes happening right before our eyes.

At one point it was silly to pronounce “lol” or “pwn” and then five minutes later everyone was pronouncing them. There wasn’t some internet meeting to deliberate it, it just happened. I think that’s just how culture changes in general.

I would be more interested in how the native Spanish speakers pronounce it, and whether or not they find it a bad fit for their language phonotactically.

I've heard x-neutered words, like "todxs", pronounced as "todes" using the -e neuter even though writing it with an "x" which is more popular than writing with -e. Or it's macro expanded into "todos and todas". But neither of these pronunciations even work on all words yet it still catches on.

Though note that people who would do either may still be a small part of genpop, you can't miss it if you interact with younger (<40) people in latam metro centers, especially.

In these convos, people are all too tempted to come up with logical reasons why "todxs" or "tod@s" cannot possibly catch on since it must surely offend the very nature of Spanish, yet that ship as already sailed. It still seems like you're trying to come at this from that angle which is why I'm trying to disabuse you of the notion.

Fwiw, I don't like this trend. But my eagerness to see it die doesn't change the fact that the trend exists and is popular on latam social media among certain demographics.

The dictatorship in Nicaragua started using the @ and introducing "ungendered" words mamy years ago.

For instance, they wrote "Tod@s con Daniel" and officially read it as "Todos y todas con Daniel"

In this case, the @ didn't get any special pronunciation. It was a direction to read the word twice.

I couldn't find anything about this with straightforward search queries. Is there any reading that you can recommend to explore it in more detail?

The goverment doesn't publish meaningful reports about anything.

The example I am refering to is this:

https://i.postimg.cc/W4vykVW5/beb2ba48cfda77d6d8ae72644f829d...

It is unadvisable to take a picture of anything in a wall in any public building. It is such an easy way to be tagged as traitor.

Doesn't it publish the policies themselves?

Is there any official name of the policy, or anything that could be used to find commentary on it?

https://archive.today/OgHaO

In Washington, D.C., I haven't heard anyone say it in conversation.

Perhaps the reason is that, once you hear it's pronounced "luh-tinks," you can't read or think of it any other way.

That pronunciation is for lack of a better word, the minority.

https://twitter.com/REMEZCLA/status/958714776615620609?ref_s...

In other news, x is supposed to be pronounced either sh or h(j). Don Quishote or Mehico (originally Meshicl.) Latinish still gets my vote.

Regardless of your opinion of the word, a descriptivist will acknowledge that a subset of people ARE using the word, and that its use should be documented. And thus, needs a pronunciation. Even if at the moment it appears to be mostly tribal signaling.

Who should I believe, an editorial in the WSJ, where all I can read is the headline and some introductory text, before I hit a paywall?

Or a search of the Miami New Times web site at miaminewtimes.com where I can read about:

"Latinx Art Sessions Explores What It Means to Be Latinx in the Art World " - https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/things-to-do-in-miami-lat... and here's that museum using "Latinx" at https://www.pamm.org/en/collection/?term_id=1347 .

"Latinx Playwright, Cast, and Director of GableStage's Fade Recognize Themselves in Story" - https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/things-to-do-in-miami-fad... (Teo Castellanos is quoted as using 'Latinx' twice. He lives in Miami.)

"Gay8. Celebrating the intersectionality of being Latinx and queer, Gay8 takes over Calle Ocho on February 19. Expect everything from drag shows to live music and dance parties as you celebrate every color of the rainbow." - https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/things-to-do-in-miami-cul... .

Or a search of that event's web site, where https://www.gay8festival.com/news/gay8-festival-weekend-retu... says "The festival is set to attract over 80,000 guests and 70 vendors, making it the largest Hispanic/Latino/Latinx LGBTQ hosted festival in the nation."

To be clear, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx highlights the various controversies in using the term, and how only "2% of US residents of Latin American descent in the US use Latinx", and how it's mostly a US term, with Latine more common in the Spanish-speaking world.

But 2% is not "Nobody", and I easily found counter-examples of people in Miami using it, making me distrust the editorial I am unable to read.

solo los pinches pochos usan este gonorrea

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