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 queer Spanish-language communities have criticized how these reinscribe a gender binary and exclude those who identify outside the binary. While in the 1990s, queer online communities took up the arroba—intended to mark where someone is “at” in terms of gender—to create terms such as latin@ or amig@s, difficulties in pronunciation and objections to the appearance of the a seemingly engulfed by a larger O stalled its widespread usage. In contrast, the use of the letter x in latinx (and other gendered nouns in Spanish) seeks to be more gender inclusive and more radical in its gesture toward incorporating other elements of difference. These usages have gained significant traction and are currently being taken up by a range of universities, research centers, community groups, and initiatives (Milian 2017). In 2018, “Latinx” was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.