Latinx
Latinx is a neologism used to refer to people with Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The term aims to be a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina by replacing the masculine and feminine ending with the suffix. The plural for Latinx is Latinxs or Latinxes. The term was first seen online around 2004; it has since been used in social media by activists, students, and academics who seek to advocate for non-binary and genderqueer individuals. Related gender-neutral neologisms include Xicanx or Chicanx as a derivative of Chicano/Chicana.
Latinx does not adhere to conventional grammatical gender rules in Spanish, is difficult to pronounce for Spanish speakers, and is criticized as showing disrespect towards the Spanish language as a whole. In Latin America, terms such as Latine ''and Latin@ have been used to indicate gender-neutrality; however, the Royal Spanish Academy style guide does not recognize gender-neutral language for the Spanish language as grammatically correct. In English, Latin without a suffix has been proposed as an alternative to Latinx.
Reception of the term among Hispanic and Latino Americans has been overwhelmingly negative, and surveys have found that the vast majority prefer other terms such as Hispanic and Latina/Latino to describe themselves with only 2–3% using Latinx. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx''; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.
Usage and pronunciation
Latinx as a group identity term denotes individuals in the United States who have Latin American roots. Other terms for this specific social category include Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latine, and Latin@. Yet another term is simply "Latin", a gender-neutral alternative, and can be stated in the plural as Latin peoples. Latinx is used as an alternative to the gender binary inherent to formulations such as Latina/o and Latin@, and is used by and for anyone of Latin-American descent who does not identify as either male or female, or more broadly as a gender-neutral term for such.Pronunciations of Latinx documented in dictionaries include . Other variants respelled ad hoc as "Latins", "La-tinks", or "Latin-equis" have been reported. Editors at Merriam-Webster write that "more than likely, there was little consideration for how was supposed to be pronounced when it was created."
Origins and public usage
The first records of the term Latinx appear in the 21st century, but there is no certainty as to its first occurrence. According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004, and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language." Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas. In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@. A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.Use of x to expand language can be traced to the word Chicano, which had an x added to the front of the word, making it Xicano. Scholars have identified this shift as part of the movement to empower people of Mexican origin in the U.S. and also as a means of emphasizing that the origins of the letter X and term Chicano are linked to the Indigenous Nahuatl language. The x has also been added to the end of the term Chicano, making it Chicanx. An example of this occurred at Columbia University where students changed their student group name from "Chicano Caucus" to "Chicanx Caucus" in December 2014. The following year, Columbia University changed the name of Latino Heritage Month to Latinx Hispanic Heritage Month. Salinas and Lozano state that the term is influenced by Mexican indigenous communities that have a third gender role, such as Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca.
Between 2004 and 2014, Latinx did not attain broad usage or attention. Awareness of the term grew in the month following the Pulse nightclub shooting of June 2016; Google Trends shows that searches for this term rose greatly in this period. The term was added to the Merriam-Webster English dictionary in 2018, as it continued to grow in popularity in the United States, and to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2019. Between 2019 and 2024, awareness for the term doubled among those who self-identified as U.S. Latinos or Hispanics.
Among US Hispanics/Latinos
Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time., use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States. Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.A 2019 poll found that 2% of US residents of Latin American descent in the US use Latinx, including 3% of 18–34-year-olds; the rest preferred other terms. "No respondents over 50 selected the term", while overall "3% of women and 1% of men selected the term as their preferred ethnic identifier".
A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that only 23% of US adults who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino had heard of the term Latinx. Of those, 65% said that the term Latinx should not be used to describe them, with most preferring terms such as Hispanic or Latino. While the remaining 33% of US Hispanic adults who have heard the term Latinx said it could be used to describe the community, only 10% of that subgroup preferred it to the terms Hispanic or Latino. The preferred term both among Hispanics who have heard the term and among those who have not was Hispanic, garnering 50% and 64% respectively. Latino was second in preference with 31% and 29% respectively. Only 3% self identified as Latinx in that survey.
A 2020 study based on interviews with 34 Latinx/a/o students from the US found that they "perceive higher education as a privileged space where they use the term Latinx. Once they return to their communities, they do not use the term".
A 2021 Gallup poll asked Hispanic Americans about their preference among the terms "Hispanic," "Latino" and "Latinx". 57% said it did not matter, and 4% chose Latinx. In a follow-up question where they were asked which term they lean toward, 5% chose Latinx.
A 2021 poll by Democratic Hispanic outreach firm Bendixen & Amandi International found that only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves "Hispanic" and 21 percent favored "Latino" or "Latina" to describe their ethnic background. In addition, 40 percent of those polled said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that awareness among U.S. Latinos and Hispanics increased from 23% to 47%, but those who self-identified as Latinx only increased from 3% to 4%, roughly equal to 1.9 million people. Demographic groups including age, sexual orientation, and Afro-Latino identity show the largest distinction between users and non-users. Nonetheless, 75% of U.S. Hispanic adults in the survey opposed the use of Latinx to describe their respective population. When asked which term they preferred be used to describe people of Hispanic or Latino origin, 52% of respondents chose Hispanic, while 29% preferred the term Latino.
In literature and academia
Latinx has become commonly used by activists in American higher education and the popular media who seek to advocate for individuals on the borderlines of gender identity. Herlihy-Mera calls Latinx "a recognition of the exclusionary nature of our institutions, of the deficiencies in existent linguistic structures, and of language as an agent of social change", saying, "The gesture toward linguistic intersectionality stems from a suffix endowed with a literal intersection—x." Some commentators, such as Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University and author of the 2018 book Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, associate the term with the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana feminist. Morales writes that "refusal to conform to male/female gender binaries" parallels "the refusal to conform to a racial binary".The term appears in the titles of academic books in the context of LGBT studies, rhetoric and composition studies, and comics studies. Scharrón-del Río and Aja have traced the use of Latinx by authors Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Jaime Géliga Quiñones, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Adriana Gallegos Dextre. The term has also been discussed in scholarly research by cultural theorist Ilan Stavans on Spanglish and by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez on Latinx super heroes in mainstream comics and Latinx graphic novels such as United States of Banana. The term and concept of Latinx is also explored by Antonio Pastrana Jr., Juan Battle and Angelique Harris on LBGTQ+ issues. Valdes also uses the term in research on black perspectives on Latinx. Despite the extensive use of the term across academic texts, Salinas and Lozano write that authors often lack definitions for the term within their texts. Sociologist G. Cristina Mora’s research on the historical construction and institutionalization of Hispanic/Latino categories in the United States, including analyses of how labels such as “Latinx” are adopted and contested in academic and generational contexts, has been cited in studies examining the sociopolitical dynamics of ethnoracial naming practices.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera writes that in Puerto Rico, the "shift toward x in reference to people has already occurred" in limited academic settings and "for many faculty hermanx and niñx and their equivalents have been the standard... for years. It is clear that the inclusive approach to nouns and adjectives is becoming more common, and while it may at some point become the prevailing tendency, presently there is no prescriptive control toward either syntax".
Several student-run organizations at academic institutions have used the word in their title. At Princeton University the Latinx Perspective Organization was founded in 2016 to "unify Princeton's diverse Latinx community" and several student-run organizations at other institutions have used the word in their title. The University of California, Berkeley, has established the Latinx Research Center, "a faculty-led research hub...that is home to cutting-edge research about the diverse Latinx community of the U.S." Conversely, a 2020 analysis found "that community college professional organizations have by and large not adopted the term Latinx, even by organizations with a Latinx/a/o centered mission", although some academic journals and dissertations about community colleges were using it.