Anecdata etc…, Just asked my formerly central american, and very feminist, wife what she thought of Latinx (framed as a question of gender inclusivity, not “So, what do you think of this nonsense.”). “I’m so tired of that. I’m whatever.”
Then I tried to show her the video. “I’ve seen that. I told you, I DON’T FUCKING CARE”
I’m obviously done discussing it with my wife because I value my marriage, but I have a suspicious feeling that there might be a divide between people who grew up in latin american countries and USians in that someone who grew up in another country with Spanish as a first language might not think gendered terms mean anything related to how we think of gender. It’s just the water that the language swims in, and in daily use speakers perceive no relation to the kind of power issues that we think of when USians who contemplate such things think of gender. Just a speculation based on my personal experience.
Yes. Latino works just fine. Spanish speakers have been dealing with gendered words for generations without issue, as far as I know. “Tengo tres hijas” means I have 3 daughters. “Tengo tres hijos” means I have three children. Dealing with this is just part of speaking Spanish. They don’t care anymore than English speakers care that “we” can mean “me and you” or “me and you and others” or “me and others but not you”.
So Latinx just looks really stupid to Spanish speakers. Yes it’s an English word now (perhaps originally) but to use the -o / -a gender endings from Spanish IN ENGLISH and then say “well this isn’t good enough – we need an -x too” is just crazy talk.
I’m a native English speaker and that bothers me almost as having “you” being both the singular and plural. (I tend to say “y’all” when the distinction really needs to be clear, even though I’m not Southern.)
(Not a Spanish speaker so can’t comment on Latinx except to say that it looks like a pretty awkward pronunciation.)
Yesterday a friend was telling us of her trip to a South African township. It was quite out of the way and a woman came up to her to say that this is the first time she’d seen a white person before. My friend had to say that she still hadn’t, as she’s Cantonese from Hong Kong. I’ve been mistaken for Uyghur before (some have blue eyes and light hair like mine, their spoken Mandarin level is often about the same and I was wearing typical clothes for a Chinese person).
But in the past it would have been considered politically correct language when we already had the perfectly acceptable word “men”.
A lot of these arguments seem a lot more obvious after culture has changed to accept them, and previous usages seem very excluding in retrospect.
On the other hand,
“Latinx” is not simple at all. You can’t say it, for a start. “La-tinks”? “La-teen-ex”? “la-tinh”? I know what it’s trying to do, but I’ll start using wimmin before latinx (I object to “wimmin” because it’s so cloyingly infantilising and it’s not playing with language, just taking it far too seriously). How about “personas latinas”?
See, “Iberoamerica” (to cut out Brazil from the discussion as they are not really culturaly related to the rest) is about the same # of people that live in the US, but in 19 countries. Each of them have the commonality of being colonized by Spain so having Spanish as a language and some common thread of “Spanish culture” being one of the basis for their respective cultural outlooks. Most of them are big enough to have very different areas where everything from ethic composition to culture is different. All of them have as much history as the US, and that history includes everything from “this part had black slaves, this one didnt” to “Here a lot of European inmigrants came over in the XIX and XX century, over there, not”. to…
Asking what “race” are “Hispanics” makes as much sense as asking what “race” are “Americans”.
They aren’t. At least, not as a form of self-expression. It is for tracking groups that have historically been (or currently are) discriminated against.
I think the confusion is what a “masculine” noun means in Spanish.
La perra = the female dog
El perro = the dog [ i.e. Not necessarily “the male dog” ]
Las perras = the female dogs
Los perros = the dogs [ i.e. Not "the male dogs ]
This applies to all nouns where the masculine form end in -o.
Latinx comes from a fundamental misunderstanding that in order to include both genders a new ending is needed. The -o is already doing what is needed.
Well color me estupidix. It was known but not liked.
From the article:
“In Spanish, the masculinized version of words is considered gender neutral. But that obviously doesn’t work for some of us because I don’t think it’s appropriate to assign masculinity as gender neutral when it isn’t"
Ok well our generation’s control of the language only lasts so long. And our individual control is virtually zero.
Good day, guys, gals, and those who identify as neither and both.
Whats with the odd fixation on “race” in the US? Perhaps you should learn the lessons recent history taught us. We had a whole bunch people over here with a fetish for this race thing. Things went a bit haywire. Now we don’t think it’s a good idea to categorize people for the color of their skin or length of their nose. Some idiots could (again) get the idea that those superficialities could define other characteristics or qualities of fellow human beings … and that leads to “bad things”.
I cannot talk about all areas but discussing and mentioning race happens in my experience much more often on the other side of the pond.
This does not mean that racism is not (or maybe even less) a problem in Europe, the US society simply uses the concept much more often (I cannot remember the last time I used “Rasse” (race) to describe a human being).
