(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Due to the astonishing lack of success of the gender-neutral term “Latinx” within the Latino community, left-wing culture police have premiered a brand new term: “Latine.”
New York University’s LGBTQ+ Center first used the term in an Instagram announcement about their “Cultural and Identity-Based Graduation Celebrations” to “acknowledge and celebrate the accomplishments of graduating students of color and LGBTQ+ students,” according to Campus Reform.
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An event titled “Latine Grad” was featured in the post. Similar to “Latinx,” “Latine” is presumed to be a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” or “Latina.”
However, past polls have indicated that Latin–American respondents did not appreciate the effort to implement “Latinx” into their every day vernacular.
Critics of the “Latinx” term have complained that the word does not conform to the rules of the Spanish language, which attaches masculine and feminine meaning to nouns.
Writing for Swathmore College’s The Phoenix, Gilbert Guerra and Gilbert Orbea called the term “a blatant form of linguistic imperialism.” They continued, arguing that activists are “forcing U.S. ideals upon a language in a way that does not grammatically or orally correspond with it.”
“Latine” appears to be an attempt to appease both the left-wing gender activists and the Hispanic community, remaining gender-neutral while adhering to the linguistic rules and pronunciation of Spanish.
Bendixen & Amandi International, a Democrat firm specializing in Latino outreach, 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 a poll taken in November of 2021.
There are legitimate ethnographical differentiations between the latter two terms, with Hispanic denoting those of Spanish origin and Latino referring more to the indigenous Native-American populations.
Regardless, all seem to find offensive the efforts to appropriate their language and culture for political purposes.
According to the survey, 40% of respondents said “Latinx” bothers or offends them to some degree, and 30% said they would be “less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term,” Politico reported.
“Latinos don’t use the term—only upper-educated white liberals who hardly interact with the Latino community,” Virginia’s Cuban–American attorney general, Jason Miyares, told Politico. “I believe that every time they use the term Latinx, they lose another Latino vote.”
