“Latinx”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, most commonly understood in the United States as The dictionary, recently added the neologism “Latinx” to its rapidly expanding lexicon. Though the Merriam-Webster’s standards that allow many fashionable new words to fit into this repository of American English words may or may not be overly lax, or may or may not be a clever marketing ploy to maintain cultural relevance, the term “Latinx” itself (only around for a dozen years or so) is still somewhat controversial.

I should begin by making it clear that I don’t believe discussing the usefulness or even validity of the term will change the wider scope of what it is meant to accomplish or will — in the long run — have a significant bearing on the context in which it was thought up.

Though the term emerges around 2004 as part of the conversation regarding the inclusivity of people of diverse sexual and gender identities, since 2014 it has met the pull-and-tug reactions of various groups that find the term relevant to their communities. Some believe that it pits people of sexual and gender minorities who have come to embrace the term against cultures from the Romance-language-speaking Americas (also known as Latin America).

A discussion on the term’s incompatibility with the linguistic intricacies of particularly Spanish (the dominant Romance language of the Americas) will not be sufficient to counter arguments for the cause or purpose of “Latinx”. Neither will pinpointing its source to U.S. American, culturally Anglo-Saxon-dominated academia do much to take away…