essay

a response utilizing the debate between scholars, regarding the labeling of Spanish-speaking people “Hispanics”, “Latino”, or “Latinx”.

Write a response if you agree or disagree with the author of “That is What they Call us” article. Which argument is the strongest?  What term do you prefer? 

5 full drafts (line space 2.0). 2 pages 

WHO ARE YOU CALLING LATINX?

By Graciela Mochkofsky

 

The New Yorker magazine

Sept. 5, 2020

 

Until a half century ago, discrimination was hidden by the fact that those now being called Latinx were counted in the census as “white.”Photograph by Kristoffer Tripplaar / Alamy

 

As a reader of this publication, you will have undoubtedly come across the term “Latinx.” Politicians—including Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have adopted it and use it regularly in speeches. It is commonplace in universities and progressive circles. And yet the Pew Research Center recently released the results of a 

nationwide poll

 revealing that less than twenty-five per cent of the people whom the term claims to name have even heard of it. In fact, the number of Latinx people who use “Latinx” is just three per cent.

 

At first glance, the rise of Latinx seems like only the most recent chapter in the saga of trying to label a population that has pushed back against every previous attempt to name it—to name us. The people successively referred to as Hispanics, 

Latinos

, and now Latinx, who now number more than sixty million, almost twenty per cent of the U.S. population, only reluctantly agree that they are actually one and the same people. Just thirty-nine per cent say they have “a lot in common” with one another, according to 

another Pew survey

, and thirty-nine per cent think they share “some values,” fifteen per cent say they share “only a little,” and five per cent say they share “almost nothing.” If you give members of this community the freedom to choose how to identify themselves, the more than fifteen years of polling that Pew has conducted show that most prefer other collective names: Mexicans (or Mexican-Americans, or Chicanos), Puerto Ricans (or Boricuas), Cubans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Colombians, or any of our many nationalities of descent. Increasingly, more people choose to identify as indigenous or as Black.

 

Not long ago, I ran my own quick poll. A colleague who was raised in Ciudad Juárez and educated in El Paso, said that, when he filled out his census form, he marked himself as Hispanic when asked about ethnicity, but left the race box blank. “I identify as a Borderlander, but the census doesn’t capture that, so I adopt Hispanic as a public and social identity,” he explained. He would like to mark mestizo—“part indigenous, part European”—as his race, but there is no such option. A Dominican friend said that she marks Hispanic/Latino and adds Dominican, but marks “other” in the race category and is frustrated because she is not allowed to add more: she’d like to mark herself Black and also Taíno, but “they won’t understand what that is.” A third friend said that she marks Hispanic/Latino and Puerto Rican, but, even though in Puerto Rico she is seen as white, she leaves “race” blank because she thinks that choosing white would be identifying with the hierarchies of a white-supremacist ideology.

 

In other words, it’s complicated. Why bother, then, inventing one name to bind the many together? Perhaps it’s because these people, who carry legacies of two continents of varied cultures, traditions, ethnicities, social status, and even languages, do have one thing in common: the ways in which they’ve been discriminated against by the white majority in this country. Until a half century ago, that discrimination—in housing, employment, education, health care, justice, and influence—was hidden by the fact that those now being called Latinx were counted in the 

census

 as “white.” That is why, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, as the sociologist G. Cristina Mora describes in her 2014 book, “

Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats & Media Constructed a New American

,” a coalition of activists, public officials, and media executives lobbied the Johnson and Nixon Administrations to create a new census category.

The chosen label was Hispanic, a term that had been used in its Spanish-language version, hispanos, by different local communities, among them New York Puerto Ricans who supported the Spanish Republican cause in the nineteen-thirties and New Mexicans who, to this day, trace their roots to the Spanish conquistadores of the sixteenth century. For the first time, questionnaires were sent to a sample population asking if they were of “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, Other Spanish” origin. It was estimated that 9.1 million people, or roughly 4.5 per cent of the total U.S. population, were Hispanics. In 1980, the Census Bureau incorporated the question into the decennial census that year; by then, Hispanics had reached about 6.4 per cent.

 

In the following years, a group of TV stations that later became 

Univision

 played a central role in packaging the separate groups under that label. For the first Spanish-language network in the country, here was an incredible opportunity to invent a national audience and sell it to the advertising industry. Univision was so decisive and so successful in selling the idea of Hispanics that, through soap operas, talk shows, and newscasts, it proved persuasive not only to advertisers but to the newly constructed audience itself.

 

In the nineteen-nineties, however, “Hispanics” came under heavy criticism by a new generation of activists and multiculturalists. They objected to its reference to Spain, with the country’s history of colonial oppression in Latin America, and to its glossing over of the racial and ethnic diversity within the various communities. As the novelist Sandra Cisneros said, in 1992, “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.”

 

Then came the alternative: Latino. The term had emerged during the civil-rights era but waned. It was revived and included as a synonym of Hispanic in the 2000 census, thus redefining the by then roughly 12.5 per cent of the population as people of Latin American descent—a move that excluded Spaniards but included Brazilians, who speak Portuguese. Hispanic and Latino became synonyms outside the census, too. In the recent poll, when Pew asked this population which of the two labels better describes it, sixty-one per cent preferred Hispanic, but only twenty-nine per cent opted for Latino.

 

In the early two-thousands, a young, global movement for gender equity evolved, bringing about the rise of “they” as a singular pronoun. To many of those activists and intellectuals, “Latino” was a gendered—and therefore flawed—term. (As with most Spanish words, Latino is gendered: ending in “o,” it is masculine; Latina is the feminine version.) After the short-lived alternatives Latin@ and Latino/a, by the mid-two-thousands, many people, particularly in the academic world, had settled on Latinx. Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of global migration and demography research at Pew, told me recently that its research shows that the use of Latinx became more common in the aftermath of the 2016 

mass shooting at Pulse

, the L.G.B.T.Q. night club in Orlando, when “media, celebrities, corporations, and universities” started to embrace the term. In September, 2018, the editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary adopted it.

 

Inside the community, it was initially used by L.G.B.T.Q. groups, artists, and academics, but many others greeted it with mockery. Some columnists claimed it was awkward and impossible to pronounce. Latinx was “the bulldozing of Spanish,” Hector Luis Alamo, then the deputy editor of the news site Latino Rebels, protested. He said that he had gone through the entire Spanish dictionary and found not a single word with an “x” following a consonant. The popular Latino culture site Remezcla ran a Twitter poll asking its followers how they pronounced it: the votes were divided between LAT-in-x and La-TEEN-x. “If you can say Kleenex, you can say Latinx,” Ed Morales, the author of the 2018 book “

Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture

,” maintained. Others argue that Latinx is “

an anglicization

,” a colonialist residue, an attack against the Spanish language: in Latin American countries, the proposed neuter form substitutes an “e” for an “a” or an “o” (in this case, Latine).

 
 

“Latinx” has become a polarizing term, with defenders accusing detractors of machismo and homophobia. César Vargas, a writer and advocate of the label, addressed those detractors in a recent post on Latino Rebels: “You are our weakest link toward true progress, reciprocity, and inclusivity. And for that, you are dismissed. Vamoose. Begone. Get to steppin’. Corran camino. And take your shitty misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic family members with you.” On the same site, Alamo challenged this argument: “Banishing the word Latino won’t eliminate homophobia; on the other hand, the elimination of homophobia will change the meaning of Latino.”

 

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, a leading scholar on Latino studies and a professor at Columbia University, observed that Latinx “is in part a generational response. That in only a few years it has reached this level of visibility is significant and indicative of its political reach. It also points to multiple other phenomena: that political time has accelerated, Latinx communities are more diverse than ever, and several groups—women, young people, L.G.T.B.Q., Afro-Latinos, among others—are politically rising. These groups, who have been largely considered marginal in Latinx politics by other groups (men, middle class, white), are redefining what is politics and who are political actors.” The Latinx population is increasingly young and diverse: nearly two-thirds are millennials or younger; about half are younger than eighteen. Roughly a quarter identify as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, or of African descent. Of all U.S.-born Latinos (who make up more than eighty per cent of the population aged thirty-five and younger), about forty per cent have a non-Latino spouse.

 

Accordingly, the Pew study found that the young most commonly identify as Latinx. Young women do, in particular: forty-two per cent of Latinos between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine have heard of the term, and fourteen per cent of women in that age group use it. It’s mostly older people, immigrants (who make up about a third of the Latino population), and those who don’t speak English who have never heard of it. Cristina Mora sees this confirmed in her own research in California: “We see it used a lot in high schools.” Morales says that, with Latinx, we are actually peeking into the future, not just because of the age of its users but for the radical option it offers. “Latinx is futuristic because it subverts the Spanish language by erasing the gender binary. As far as I know, we are the only ethno-racial group where this kind of discussion over labelling is going on.”

 

I grew up in Argentina and, beginning in 1995, lived on and off in the United States until, seven years ago, I settled with my family in Harlem. In 2016, I launched the first bilingual master’s program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. During the past twenty-five years, I have been successively seen—and, on different occasions, have marked myself—as Hispanic, Latina, and Latinx. I’ve also been seen and identified as other things, such as middle class and the daughter of a Jewish Argentine father and a Catholic Paraguayan mother. I am now one of the three per cent who, in some contexts, use Latinx. I like the values and the ambition behind the term. Latinx is the political fight of this moment, just as Hispanic and Latino were in former times.

 

Yet, whatever one thinks about Hispanic, if the category hadn’t been invented, the government wouldn’t have counted us, and there would be no data to shape public policy, assign federal funding, and apply civil-rights or voter-rights protections. There wouldn’t be electoral districts “where the Latino communities have elected candidates of their choice,” as Thomas Saenz, the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, pointed out during a recent conversation—between 1996 and 2016, the number of Latinos in government rose by sixty-one per cent.

But future struggles will spawn new names. And maybe there is a future in which we will just call ourselves—and be called by others—by a name that, in its broader sense, brings together two continents: Americans.