The X factor…. Malcolm or Latin?

So easy to ridicule liberals …. or Liberals. They are now taking to saying “Latinx” instead of Latin, Latino, or Latina. Seems silly, right? Just as letting woman sign a contract to buy a car or letting a Black person vote.
That’s right, it has to do with recognizing the pernicious effects of discrimination. Those of us who speak Spanish and have had significant contact with local Mexican culture can speak to the amount of sexual discrimination found in that community. Add that to our own culture of misogyny in “traditional” American culture (whose tradition?) and we have the old assumptions and surmises relegating the women folk to the lower orders.
In Spanish, one cannot say just “Latin” or “Mexican” without determining the sex of the referent. The default is masculine, Latino, Mexicano. Unlike Mexicano, Latino has been taken up by a good many people as a label (on another post I will discuss the ethnonym problems), and that is compounded by the fact that few in the media speak Spanish and so do not use Latina when it is appropriate, thus “masculinizing” every Latin-American person.
So the compromise has been to just stick a generic “x” on the end of Latin.
Don’t shame us for P.C. and ID politics, join us!

2 Comments

  1. 伟思礼 says:

    In writing, those Spanish speakers who care about this issue use arroba (@) as a substitute for o/a.

    1. Pat Barrett says:

      Thanks for that, Wes. Most interesting.

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