Like I said you can do it with Latino/a/x and it works. Buts it’s generally not the correct usage for ethnicites and racial identifiers. Latino/a/x is one of the exceptions here.
Jose is Latino. He’s Latino, she’s Latina, they’re latin.
“Many latin people from South America” is somewhat redundant, and while some one might write that it isn’t a great sentence and is as odd as saying “many blacks who are decended from Africans”. “Many Latin people” would be the normal thing there. “Many Latin people on cruise ships”. “Latin people in the military”.
Latin band leader Desi Arnez. Latin jazz. Latin people in Texas. Latin voters. Not " the latins" and so forth. Just like we wouldn’t neccisarily say “the Irishes” but we might say “the Irish”. It’s already plural.
Didn’t say it was current, or still frequently used just that it’s long been the English and ungendered term. Predating the common usage of gendered Spanish forms Latino and Latina. So if we’re looking for a non gendered equvilent, in English, it already exists and has usage rules as clear as any other English term.
Latinx is certainly well accepted in certain contexts. But for example you don’t see it often in mainstream news coverage. And very few of my Latin friends seem to like it very much, including the LGBT ones. One gay Puerto Rican friend of mine described it as “some white people shit”. And it doesn’t seem to have much currency out side of American English. But then niether does “Latin”.
Prop 10 failed due to wildly misleading attack ads and astounding amounts of money spent by realtors’ associations. Prop 10 did not, in fact, “create a real solution to the housing crisis” because it was never meant to; the wording in the proposition meant that it paved the way for a solution, which was Prop 1.
So, the next time legislation like this gets proposed, clearly the one bill must do both things to keep the opposition from lying about it so easily.
I’m happy to use whatever term people from those countries prefer, at least until they decide they prefer another term, and then I will use that one instead.
Well no, because it’s a new English word. A modification of the borrowed words “Latino” and “Latina”. It’s not an attempt to change Spanish, just to enlarge English.
Also, as a latino, i personally like “Latinx”.
That’s a bit of the complication, both your various constructions of Latin and Hispanic are catchalls for groups of nationalities and ethnic groups.
A Latino born in and raised in the US is still Latino. you are not describing people who are neccisarily “from those counties”. And a good lot of American Hispanics predate the Anglo population for their area of the US, especially in those South Western portions of the US that used to be Mexico. So you’re not neccisarily even addressing people who are decended from people from another country anything like recently.
Generally speaking it seems to me like Latinos seem to favor the gendered Spanish form. “Latin” seems to have fallen out of usage through the 70’s as civil rights activists pushed for the use of Spanish language terms over English or anglicized ones. It’s sort of the same way that the bulk of US native Americans prefer “Indian”.
The exception is when we run into non gender conforming people, who want a specifically non gendered term. And that’s what latinx comes out of. But I’m not sure if that’s something that came out of white activists and academics as so many of these things do. Or of it came up through actual latin trans and queer activism.
Internationally, and not just in Latin America or the Hispanic sphere, a lot of people don’t like being catchalled. And would prefer to be referred to as something more specific. Or by a less ethnically tied catch-all. South and central Americans often argue for being included in “American”, or for the use of “Columbian” as the proper catch-all for all residents of the Americas.
And even in the US there are more specific terms that are preferred regionally. “Chicano” still has a lot of currency in parts of the US. Especially for Mexican Americans or those decended for the original Mexican residents of the South West. Hispanic descendants of indigenous peoples are often “indígenos”, or struggle to be accepted as part of “Indians” or “Native Americans”.
So yeah that’s a bit complicated. Catch-alls usually are. As your rolling in a bunch of interrelated cultures with different priorities.
I just find it awkward in terms of real world use. And it’s not an expansion English technically needed. But a hell of a lot of these terms are terribly awkward, and I think that’s why we’re perpetually looking for new ones.
I try to use Latin simply because I think it’s easier to use. But at this point it’s not as recognized as Latinx. So I mostly fall back on that and stick to Latino/a where that seems more appropriate.
Jumping into this conversation as a white, Anglo dude carries with it a significant risk, but just to add: in my area, there is a quite large Hispanic population, and it has been pointed out to me by them that Hispanic / Latina/o/x is a purely white construct. They have told me they identify by their national origin more than a catchall term, especially first and second generation. Hence Honduran, Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc. As I thought about this, it is similar to referring to anyone from the Old World as European. They themselves would identify as French, English, Italian, etc. It is easier for white people to not have to concern themselves with where these folks are actually from. Now as you get into third and more generations, they seem to more just consider themselves Americans.
I’m so while I’m nearly transparent. And my interest in this weird little linguistic problem has not produced any pitch forks yet.
It’s a pretty fascinating issue. We’ve got all these traditional terms that follow the language rules and work well in a mechanical sense. But have serious problems in terms of their cultural connotations. They got baggage. And then we’ve got all these newer terms that express what we’d like them too. But they end up with all these mechanical short comings because they weren’t built up from within the language.
And ultimately it’s all etiquette. Just don’t call people shit that pisses them off. And I think your generally doing that if you’re just making some base level of effort. So long as your not cluelessly running with something mean, or deliberately applying negative or inappropriate terms.
The more people I meet from around the world. The more I find that universally true.
Noone seems to like being catchalled. Except Americans. The Irish hate to be call “Celtic” or god forbid “British”. The English hate being “European”. The Japanese don’t like being called “Asian”. The catch-alls seem to have currency/acknowledgement for use in history, or sociology, or other broad academic and print context. But for the most part it’s quite rude to apply them to specific people or face to face.
And almost every catch-all falls apart somewhere. So people will almost always flinch at the points where they just don’t apply.
Losing. Losing big not just in the general elections, but in the primaries. Until the big daddy warbucks wing of the party can’t ring the Racism, Rifles, and Right-to-Life bell to victory they’'ll keep doing it. Once that stops working they’ll try to find some other way into power to further their plutocratic agenda.
the only downside I can see to this is that in a few years fingers will be pointed and say “see see California should be a paradise but it’s not” and blame democrats for all the problems - just like suddenly Obama was responsible for decades of government mess and things literally done by Bush & Co.
I am curious to see what happens when a party has such a monopoly though, it can’t be entirely healthy, unless maybe a moderate vs progressive split occurs
Well it kind of is, at least when you compare it to most red states. Even our biggest problems (i.e. lack of affordable housing, water supply) largely stem from having so many people want to live here.
At this point, I am not so sure that the current “platform” has not driven off a large enough chunk of those who would strive to change it that the only way it could change would be with the collapse of the Republican party as currently structured. That would be a seismic event, and I think the outcome would be fairly unpredictable.
Putting labels on people only works to segregate and legitimizes racial / cultural bigotry. My goal (and I’m the first to admit I’m not there yet) is to be able to look at a person and not make judgmental images of who that person is until I get to know them.
If the Democrats had a more concerted plan to go after them – or even attempted, in some cases – I think we would see a LOT more fo this. Bernie went over quite well with many voters who ended up voting for Trump, as bizarre as that is to people who actually know anything about issues of political economy. Hint: Most Americans don’t understand very much about political economy.
How would that even work? These people enslaved those people. Calling out that people are being denied their right to vote isn’t as important as which people and why. Which is usually pretty well connected to which people.
How am I gonna buy pears instead of apples is it’s all just “fruit”? There’s a practical need for specificity in language just to deal with the world around us.
That sounds deep but it’s a terribly shallow take on the subject. Different groups of people have different concerns, problems, risks, histories. The inability or unwillingness to acknowledge specific peoples leads to erasure. How, for example, are you going to identify that black Americans are more likely to sit in hereditary poverty than whites if you can’t look at black people and white people as separate entities? How would you do anything about it if you can’t identify it? How is the unique culture of a particular area or group going to be preserved, recorded, or celebrated if it’s just place and they’re just people?
Refusal to acknowledge the uniqueness or significance of a culture is a fairly common tactic among autocratic regimes. The Germans did a lot of that. Decide this particular culture is just German, forcibly relocate that people. Supress it’s unique features. China likes to do that as well.
And at the very least I’m reasonably sure the bigots would just resolve themselves to their targets being “not people” since that’s generally what they’re arguing to begin with.
Well, I have neither power, nor money. All I can do is try to be an example for my kids on how they should act and relate to the world. Call me naive, but I am not the guy who is good with words nor am I charismatic.
@Ryuthrowsstuff - I know you didn’t mean to equate what I said with Nazis, but your post seems to indicate that. See my response to @Wanderfound.
While going through some of my old things, I ran across an old prose poem by Max Ehrmann written in 1927. I had forgotten it in all the chaos of today’s world, but it rang true for me again.
Hispanic is either overly broad, technically applying to everywhere under Spanish colonial rule, even the Philippines, or too specific, referring only to residents of Hispaniola. Latinx more broadly refers to people from the American continents, generally of mestizo heritage.
