If Hispanics Hate the Term “Latinx,” Why Is It Still Used?
CAS’ Maia Gil’Adí says that polling agencies have given the word an unfair reputation
Photo by calvindexter/iStock
If Hispanics Hate the Term “Latinx,” Why Is It Still Used?
CAS’ Maia Gil’Adí says that polling agencies have given the word an unfair reputation
All summer long, we’ll be reposting stories that originally published during the 2022–2023 academic year—stories about research, BU classes, food, alumni and student profiles, and more.
It seems like there’s a new word for Latin American heritage every couple of decades—and it never seems to fit just right. “Hispanic” was brought into common parlance in the early 1970s, but was later challenged by “Latino” and its feminine partner “Latina.”
Now comes the rise of the divisive—but gender-neutral—“Latinx,” touted by progressives for its supposed modern hipness, yet somewhat reviled by the people it represents.
With Hispanic Heritage Month in full swing, it’s time to ask: what’s in a name?
“As an immigrant, I found myself being classified as Hispanic upon arrival to the United States, a term I did not know nor had used to call myself before,” says Dina Castro, a Wheelock College of Education and Human Development professor of early childhood education and director of the BU Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being. “Then, there was the option of using Latina, which is my preference because it highlights my Latin American origin and not only the fact that I speak Spanish.”
While there’s no one group or individual responsible for coining Latinx, its popularity has snowballed in tandem with conversations around gender. Previous terminology forced the speaker to identify as male or female, Latino or Latina, while Latinx gives both speaker and listener the ability to opt out of the gender binary. The term was embraced enthusiastically by progressive entities with a stake in gender-neutral policies. It was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2018.
According to the Pew Research Center, a thimble-sized portion of people with Latin American ancestry use the term Latinx. In August 2020, the center reported that 3 percent of respondents viewed it favorably; a year later, a Gallup poll increased that to 4 percent. If you were to base your impression on this research—or on various recent think pieces—you’d assume that the term was foisted on an unwilling community who found themselves saddled with it.
Maia Gil’Adí, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of English, says this isn’t the case. “You have to ask yourself, who’s taking the surveys?” she says.
Gil’Adí, who specializes in Latinx literature and culture, points to a journal article by Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, an Emory University professor, who places the term’s coinage “around 2004 in queer contexts.” It was an organic youth movement, she contends, born of the internet, and rejected by the older generation.
“With the younger generations—with the kids that I teach—I would think that they’re much more comfortable using the term Latinx,” Gil’Adí says.
The conversation around Latinx often includes reference to its usage in higher education, not by just students, but the institution as well. (BU, for instance, uses the term “Latinx” in its official style guide.) This can be attributed to the fact that college students are leading the national discussion on gender—or that the national population of Latinx college students is on the rise. In 2020, the Postsecondary National Policy Institute reported that at 21.8 percent, Latinx students were the second-largest ethnic group of college enrollees.
At BU, the Latinx community has increased across the board in the past five years: undergraduates by 7 percent, graduates by 23 percent, faculty by 17 percent, and staff by 38 percent.
Not everyone at BU represented by these numbers prefers the term Latinx. Gil’Adí understands, she says, but thinks it’s important that people realize that to her and other scholars, the X does not refer solely to gender neutrality. It can represent an unknown value, as in mathematics, and signifies what she refers to as a “categorical impossibility.”
“How do you define a population made up of descendants from all the countries in Latin America, people that are white, Black, Asian, and indigenous?” she asks. “Anglo-American culture always wants to define the minoritized other as this one thing, and I think the X pushes back and says, no, we are all these things.”
The conscientiousness of Latinx contrasts with its predecessor term, “Hispanic.” Popularized under the Nixon administration when it first appeared on the 1970 US Census—also the first time the Latinx population was seen as a separate entity by the government—the term was the result of a decision by an ad-hoc committee convened by the Census Bureau to group people from Latin America together under one mother tongue. It’s an arbitrary designation, Gil’Adí says, one that erases indigenous languages and puts a “linguistic belonging and a sort of limitation” on something that’s not so easily confined.
And of course, many are opposed to grouping Latinx people together under the language of their colonizers.
“For me, the term Hispanic highlights only the colonial part of my ancestry, and I have indigenous and Afro-Peruvian ancestors as well,” Castro says.
In 1992, author Sandra Cisneros told the New York Times: “To say Hispanic means you’re so colonized you don’t even know for yourself, or someone who named you never bothered to ask what you call yourself. It’s a repulsive slave name.”
In spite of the pushback, the 2021 Gallup poll reported that “Hispanic” was the favorite out of the terms on offer, at 23 percent. It’s possible that those who participated have also filled out their fair share of censuses.
There are plenty of other options for self-identification beside Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic. There’s Latin@, popular in the 1990s as a gender-expansive precursor to Latinx. There’s Latine, a gender-neutral term championed by detractors of Latinx, primarily for its better adherence to Spanish grammar.
“With regard to the more recent terms proposed to address gender equity, I prefer Latine over Latinx,” Castro says.
There’s also the option of abandoning racial classification altogether and instead focusing on geography.
Johanna Calderon-Dakin (COM’06), a publicist and bilingual culture consultant born and raised in Mexico City, says she prefers to identify herself as Mexican. “What is most important in my opinion is that whether you use Latino, Latinx, or Hispanic, we all are part of this one great community, yet we are not homogeneous,” she says. “The diaspora of the Latino community is immense, so it is difficult to put us all under one blanket.”
Gil’Adí wonders if the ideal self-identifying term might not be invented yet. “Think about the different permutations that have led to ‘Black’: Negro, African American, Afro-American,” she says. “Within the past 5 years, this explosion of Latinx has been huge, so what’s going to happen 5, 10 years from now?”
Ultimately, while she remains partial to Latinx, Gil’Adí doesn’t think that these terms primarily benefit the people they refer to. “When you’re in [Latin America] you’re Colombian, Brazilian, whatever. Once you come here, you become this other thing that then becomes racialized,” she says. “People have a really hard time with things that aren’t concrete, that are slippery. It’s about learning to sit with that uncomfortableness.”
To prove her point, look at the 2021 Gallup poll. When asked their preference between Hispanic, Latino, and Latinx, the overwhelming majority—57 percent—put down, “Does not matter.”
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