Latino/a/x
The oldest and most conventional of this keyword’s variants, “Latino,” is commonly used as an ethnic designation that distinguishes Latin Americans living in the United States from those living in their countries of origin. Even this seemingly straightforward variant sustains a hefty set of internal contradictions and has a decidedly blurry genealogy. While commonly used as an adjective modifying everything from voting blocs to musical categories, neighborhoods, and foodways, the exact referent of the term remains indeterminate even as it seems to imply specific populations, geographies, histories, colonialisms, languages, and cultural practices. The problem is that each of these potential referents carries significant contradictions and erasures. The gendered nature of the Spanish language presents its own stylistic challenges. In Spanish, the masculine form—for example, Latino—is intended to be applied universally, a convention that has carried over to English-language usage of these terms. To counteract this masculinist imposition, writers in both languages have developed a range of rhetorical strategies in order to be more inclusive. These have included a slash between an o and a meant to register two possible gendered possibilities, as in “Latino/a,” and the spelling out of both gendered articulations, such as “Latina” and “Latino.” However, feminist and...