Posts Tagged: Latinx
New guides for engaging Latinx youth published
A series of ANR publications have been developed for people who wish to engage Latinx youth and families in their programs.
These briefs were inspired by a research project and the Journal of Youth Development article Guiding Principles for Reaching and Engaging Latinx Youth in Youth Development Programs, by Fe Moncloa, Nancy Erbstein, Aarti Subramaniam and Claudia Diaz Carrasco.
“We know that, in general, youth-serving practitioners do not read journal articles so we used the information to write easy-to-read briefs,” said Moncloa, UC Cooperative Extension 4-H youth development advisor in Santa Clara County.
The brief ANR publications are authored by Moncloa and Claudia Diaz Carrasco, UCCE 4-H youth development advisor in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
The five-part series are
Engaging Latinx Youth: https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8690.pdf
Conceptual Foundations: https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8691.pdf
Organizational Infrastructure: https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8692.pdf
Program Elements: https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8693.pdf
Building Relationships in Latinx Communities: https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8694.pdf
Introducing Latinx youth to the science behind Southern California’s natural wonders
As a child, Sandra Bonilla had a strong connection with the natural world, however, when she grew up and began introducing people of color from Southern California's poorest neighborhoods to local mountains and forests, she said they felt marginalized.
“Almost immediately I saw the outdoor showcased as place for white privilege families, and those of us with colorful backgrounds were not welcomed,” Bonilla said. “As time went on, I realized that my own people were no longer being connected to nature and that our youth had no idea what was camping, or hiking or just enjoying the flight of birds through the top of Jeffrey Pines.”
Bonilla founded the Southern California Mountains Foundation Urban Conservation Corps of the Inland Empire. The program offers young men and women paid work in environmental conservation on meaningful projects where they develop skills that increase job readiness.
To further enhance the educational aspect of the program, the conservation corps partnered with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) California Naturalist and 4-H Youth Development programs to train a group of corps members to become certified naturalists as part of a unique cohort called Los Naturalistas.
With funding from the National Forest Foundation, UC Cooperative Extension 4-H Youth Development advisor Claudia Diaz Carrasco and conservation corps staff members Gaby Nunez and Lizzet Pineda met with the cohort every Saturday for four months to coordinate presentations by the U.S. Forest Service, CalFire and other professionals and to cultivate an appreciation for the beautiful natural resources that surround their community. The group also gathered for weekly cafecitos, early morning study sessions that helped all the participants get through the training materials together.
Translated materials, creative teaching methods, a diverse expert speaker pool, and incorporation of the strengths the students bring to the table ensured that the cohort received training that was culturally relevant. All 12 emerged as Los Naturalistas, ready to make positive changes in environmental justice and access to public spaces for their communities through nature and Spanish-language interpretation.
“I give thanks to people such as Fabian Garcia, USDA Forest Service; Henry Herrera, CalFire; and Claudia Diaz, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, who are making new career pathways for Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans and are ensuring that programs such as Los Naturalistas are changing the color of green outdoor spaces,” Bonilla said.
Diaz Carrasco's involvement in the movement was sparked by an early-career research project funded by UC ANR to identify the most effective ways to reach Latinx communities.
“We found out it's best to go through organizations that are already connected with youth and families,” Diaz Carrasco said.
To learn how to encourage families and youth to participate, engage and stay involved over time, she interviewed leaders of organizations serving this population.
“We were able to identify 25 guiding principles for successful engagement with Latinx families and youth,” she said. “Things like creating a positive ethnic identity, responding to economic poverty, including families and communities, and recruiting culture brokers help build bridges. A lot of these concepts guided the development of Los Naturalistas.”
(For more on the guiding principles for reaching and engaging Latinx youth in youth development, see https://jyd.pitt.edu/ojs/jyd/article/view/19-14-02-FA-03)
The Southern California Mountains Foundation Urban Conservation Corps was a natural partner. They had a diverse corps membership and sought educational opportunities to complement the job skills their corps were gaining through field work.
“Los Naturalistas is a college-level course. You need to do the homework. You need to do the reading. When they get their certification, the participants learn that they can be successful in a college course,” Diaz Carrasco said.
With renewed confidence, the newly minted Naturalistas are encouraged to complete their high school diplomas and enroll in community college classes. They are also charged with completing volunteer time in natural stewardship, education and service. One way they can do that is by sharing their experiences and offering nature instruction to younger members of their communities.
“Instead of me directly reaching the youth, I was able to train corps members to generate interest in California's natural world and the career opportunities available to people who pursue an education. The crew is helping me hit my target audiences,” Diaz Carrasco said. “Part of my work in UC ANR is to mix science and culture. If don't do this work, there are few bilingual people who are able to teach this.”
More Latinx Farmers Own Their Land. Could They Make the Food System More Sustainable?
Source: Published originally on civileats.com, More Latinx Farmers Own Their Land. Could They Make the Food System More Sustainable? by Muna Danish, Farming, Food and Farm Labor, April 15th, 2019.
Moving from farmworker to farm owner has long been a challenge for Latinx farmers. But with support, more are making the leap, increasing the number of diverse, small-scale operations.
It wasn't until 2009, when Javier Zamora was in his 40s and living in California, that he started to consider farming as a career. After moving to the U.S. from Mexico in 1985 and working in the restaurant industry in Southern California, Zamora attended Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz, where he studied agriculture, reconnected with his farming roots—and realized he had a passion for growing organic food.
At first, Zamora worked for others, but the pay was low, and he had a family. “I needed to be financially stable, so making $12 an hour was not going to cut it,” he recalls. In 2012, he struck out on his own.
In just a few years, Zamora made a name for himself by establishing a business, JSM Organics, and growing it from one-and-a-half acres to more than 100. He sells his vegetables, flowers, and berries to retail outlets as well as farmers' markets all over the Bay Area—and was recently recognized with the 2018 Rising Star Award from the Organic Trade Association.
Zamora's story is exceptional, however; most Latinx farmers still have a long way to go to achieve this level of success. While Latinx people make up about 83 percent of field laborers in the U.S., they own only about 3 percent of the farms.
The low number of Latinx farm owners is “misrepresentative of who's farming now and who's got the talent and desire to farm,” says Chris Brown, Development Director at the Agriculture and Land-based Training Association (ALBA), a nonprofit in Salinas that incubates mostly Latinx-run farm operations.
Brown points to the fact that the official numbers of new and beginning farmers have not been keeping up with the number of those who are retiring in the U.S., adding that skilled farmworkers are rarely considered in that equation. “You want new farmers, and you have droves of them already in the field,” he says.
There are a number of factors at play: Latinx farmworkers face an array of challenges when they try to start their own farms, including language barriers, lack of knowledge about the market, and for the more than half who are undocumented, an inability to access government resources such as subsidies and grants from the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
While Latinx farm ownership grew at the beginning of this century, it has since plateaued. According to the USDA's 2012 Census of Agriculture, the proportion of Hispanic farm owners increased by 21 percent between 2007 and 2012, to 3 percent of all U.S. farm owners. This increase doubled that of other groups and ran counter to the overall decrease in farm ownership in the country.
The 2017 Census released last week, however, reveals that while the number of Hispanic farm producers increased from 90,344 to 112,451 between 2012 and 2017, the number of total producers also increased, meaning the proportion of Hispanic farm producers remained steady at 3 percent over the five-year period. (Important to note: the USDA changed the demographic data collected from farm operators to farm producers, defined as someone involved in making decisions for the farm, which could increase the number of people identifying.)
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, an assistant professor of food studies and agriculture researcher at Syracuse University, believes the census numbers likely do not fully represent the number of Latinx farmers. “Most farmers I've interviewed, who identify as first-generation Latino or Hispanic farmers, have not filled out [any USDA] census,” she says.
The Challenge of Moving from Worker to Owner
California's agricultural industry is especially dependent on immigrant labor, with nine in 10 agriculture workers coming from Mexico. Over 40 percent of the country's Mexican-born crop workers are in California, according to data from the National Agricultural Worker Survey.
California also employs the most agricultural workers compared to any other state, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the instability of farm work, coupled with a desire to have more autonomy and upward mobility, has caused Latinx farmworkers to look increasingly toward farm ownership.
And many of them are already primed for the job, coming from farming regions where practices such as planting diversified crops and growing food with little or no pesticides are common. Minkoff-Zern says many Latinx immigrant farmers seek to reproduce the farming they did in their home countries, which “resembles what we think of as a homestead: growing food for consumption, and basically living on the land.”
But in trying to establish their own operations, these farmers often find themselves up against daunting challenges. The increasing consolidation and mechanization of large farms in the U.S. has made accessing land and capital difficult, and small-scale farmers like Zamora have to find ways to stand out in order to survive. Many Latinx farmers choose to farm organically, Brown says, in part because the higher market value allows them to build their own businesses and have autonomy over their work. But, in California's competitive market, going organic isn't enough; farmers have to grow new and niche foods and get their products successfully to market. Farmers' markets in urban areas often have long wait-lists, and new vendors have to offer something that isn't already there.
In addition, many Latinx farmers want to remain small-scale, making it difficult for them to compete in an increasingly monocrop-focused, industrialized industry, says Minkoff-Zern. “Scaling up is tough because they have to change their way of production. Most first-generation farmers … are not necessarily interested in doing that,” she says.
Language access is another problem for primarily Spanish-speaking farmers, especially when it comes to USDA programs and loans. Lorette Picciano, executive director of The Rural Coalition, a Washington, D.C-based advocacy group that works with Latinx farmers all over the country says these farmers often see the USDA solely as a regulatory agency and not a source of resources and loans. Minkoff-Zern adds that “because Latino growers are culturally separated from the type of farmers working with the USDA, they don't know about those opportunities.”
For example, the USDA's Outreach and Assistance to Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Program and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program offer outreach, technical assistance, and loans to minority and beginning farmers. Those programs were recently combined in the 2018 Farm Bill and will receive up to $50 million in funding by 2023, as well as permanent baseline funding for the first time.
However, Minkoff-Zern says that in order for Latinx farmers to truly take advantage of those opportunities, the USDA needs to employ more bilingual staff and do intentional outreach to Latinx immigrant communities, where she says information often spreads by word of mouth rather than through online channels. Many Latinx farmers might also miss out on government loans and organic certification because they require extensive record-keeping that they may not be accustomed to completing due to language and education-related barriers.
When it comes to accessing markets for what they grow, Minkoff-Zern adds that a type of “veiled discrimination” can happen in farmers' markets and other alternative food spaces such as co-ops, where Latino farmers don't have the same social networks as white farmers.
In Javier Zamora's case, the support of local organizations such as ALBA and Farmlink made all the difference. He received his first loan of $10,000 from Farmlink after being turned away from banks due to bad credit. He also farmed his first piece of land through ALBA's incubator farm.
Supporting Minority Farmers
ALBA, which grew out of the work of the Rural Development Center founded in 1985, helps low-income, minority farmworkers become organic farm owners in rural Salinas. ALBA's primary program, Programa Educativo para Pequeños Agricultores (PEPA), or Farmer Education Program, is a year-long training that combines classroom instruction and field-based work.
After graduating, participants can apply to be part of the organic farm incubator, which rents them up to five acres of land at a subsidized rate and helps farmers launch and grow their businesses over four years.
Victor and Veronica Cortes have a small, two-and-a-half-acre farm just around the corner from ALBA. Victor participated in the ALBA program in 2013 and has been farming independently with his wife since then.
On a recent fall day at the farm, Veronica was in a shed packing up boxes of serrano peppers to send to their distributor. “The hardest part is selling the products,” she says. “The last four years we sent a lot of product to the garbage. We didn't sell it because the market is full.” This year they've fared better. They diversified their offerings and started growing niche products like gherkins and jicama.
Victor, who worked as a manager for the berry-growing giant Driscoll's for nearly a decade before launching the farm, is kneeling behind a single tall row of corn plants as he picks jicama roots. He says left Driscoll's because he didn't see any way to advance at the company. “For a worker like me, that was it. I am limited in English, in my education,” says Cortes.
Nationally, community-based programs that focus on providing technical assistance to Latinx farmers are few and far between. Latinx farmers in in Washington can work with Viva Farms, a nonprofit farm-business incubator that is similar to ALBA. The Farmworkers Association of Florida has also done trainings geared toward Latinx farmers, and FARMroots, a program of Greenmarket farmers markets in New York, provides technical assistance and mentorship to primarily immigrant farmers. Still, Picciano of the Rural Coalition says there is an “urgent need” for more investment in technical assistance to Latinx farmers.
Cortes says he is seeing more Hispanics becoming farm owners, but the most significant barrier is confidence. “When you come here from Mexico, you think you will be a laborer,” he says. In order to increase the number of Hispanic farm owners, he thinks immigrants need to learn that there are other options. “We can change our situation, we can be on the other side,” he says.
For that shift to happen, farmworkers need to be viewed as a priority in terms of farm ownership, “rather than just as workers,” says Minkoff-Zern. That could mean more economic incentives for farmers to sell their land and machinery to their workers, especially as the average age of primary farm operators is 59.4, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, and many are thinking about retirement.
Erin West, federal policy director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, says young farmers are already more diverse than the general farming population, but there needs to be more opportunities for those groups to access federal support. “If we want agriculture to be successful and want young farmers to be successful, that means including Latinx farmers and other socially disadvantaged producers,” she says.
Ultimately, both Minkoff-Zern and Picciano believe that more Latinx farmers could also mean stronger rural communities and a shift to a more sustainable food system, especially as Latinx farmers tend to opt for diverse, small-scale operations that sell direct to eaters. But Picciano adds that Latinx farmers also need to be thinking about succession. “We need to work with them on transition plans so they can also pass farms on to the next generation,” she says.
That next generation is something Zamora has just recently started to think about. While he shows no signs of slowing down, he says that his daughters, 22-year-old Cynthia and 23-year-old Selena have started working at the farm five days a week. “My hope is that once I turn a bit older, then they can carry on with it,” he says.
Two female farmworkers are harvesting raspberries on an upstate New York farm. (Photo by Joseph Sorrentino / iStock)
Is 'Latinx' elitist? Some push back at the word's growing use
"If I were going down to the local taquería, they wouldn't know what you are saying if you used the term,” said a scholar near the Mexican border.
The gender-neutral "Latinx" is becoming the preferred term over "Latino" or "Latina" in some circles — but Hispanic-Americans are debating among themselves about whether it should be.
The question goes to the heart of Hispanic identity in America, and it sheds light on the diverse array of family histories and present-day experiences of millions of people who would have a hard time agreeing on a single word to encapsulate who they are.
Pronounced “Lah-teen-EX," the term has emerged among younger and more progressive Hispanics — as well as scholars, writers and civil rights advocates — to express inclusiveness and recognize the sexual, ethnic and racial diversity of Hispanics. Unlike "Latino" or "Latina," the term does not refer to any specific gender.
The University of California, San Diego, recently announced that it would use Latinx to replace the gender-specific terms Latino and Chicano when referring to those groups. Other universities have already made the change.
But as the term gains traction, some scholars are pointing out that there are Latinos who don't see themselves reflected in the word. Some see Latinx as an elitist attempt to erase a history of more traditional gender roles, or as a distraction from other pressing issues facing Latinos in the United States.
"I am just a few miles from the Mexican border. If I were going down to the local taquería, they wouldn't know what you are saying if you used the term,” said David Bowles, an author and assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Though he is a proponent of using "Latinx," Bowles said it's mainly used among his Mexican-American and Chicano studies colleagues, LGBTQ activists and authors of color.
Motecuzoma Sanchez, a political activist in Stockton, CA who works in community advocacy, police and government accountability, and is the founder of a local organization that focuses on literacy called Semillas (seeds), views Latinx as a “fashionable identity” adopted by elite Latinos to address an issue he doesn't see as crucial in his community.
Latinos "still struggle with educational advancement, incarceration, teenage pregnancy, police brutality, predatory bank practices, discrimination, crime and violence, low literacy, immigration and labor exploitation, diabetes, etc., but suddenly gender nouns are the priority,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez,43, is also concerned that Latinx erases Hispanic history by suggesting that the use of traditional gendered Spanish terms is exclusionary. He sees "Latino" and "Latina" as describing the different roles men and women have historically adopted.
To discard those terms "is to disrespect the entire culture as well as our brothers, fathers who have fought hard to be respected as men," Sanchez said.
Like Bowles, Sanchez said Latinx is rarely used in everyday situations. “No one calls themselves Latinx,” Sanchez said.
Enrique Salas, 27, a South Carolina resident who works in retail, said there's a simple reason he won't use Latinx.
"I don't see the point of it when there's already a word for it, and it's Latinos," Salas said.
But supporters of the term point out that in their experience, much of the resistance comes from Latino men, while proponents include those who want to raise awareness of gender as nonbinary, including those who identify as gay, queer or transgender.
"People who identify as such should have language that validates their identity," said Christian Uruburo, 24, a clinical research coordinator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who is gay. "I use it on a regular basis to identify myself or in English conversation."
Using Latinx avoids the complications that come from gendered language like "Latino" or "Latina," he added.
Liza Estrada, 22, a student at San Francisco State University, said she first became aware of "Latinx" on Twitter. She praised the fact that it's becoming more common in her academic life.
"Professors at my school have started incorporating the term as well, which is really great," Estrada said. "It's a huge step that teachers are becoming aware about the nonbinary students in their classes and aiming at inclusivity," she said.
"It teaches us to accept everyone in the community — even more so, we aren't valuing the masculine over the feminine."
In her experience, the majority of those who object to the term are men, especially those she encounters on social media.
"It's usually men who have a problem with it," Estrada said. "They claim that we're trying to change the Spanish language, which is ridiculous because the Spanish language is constantly changing."
Proponents of Latinx argue that Spanish's gendered structure privileges men in many ways: For one, masculine terms are often used to describe dominant traits. Simple, everyday uses of gendered pronouns reaffirm social relationships in which women are viewed as inferior. One example is the common use of the pronoun “he” to describe God.
Studies have found that gendered language can reinforce existing inequalities between men and women and that this can even affect economic productivity. One study by a researcher at the Rhode Island School of Design who studies the role of norms and identity suggests that countries that speak gendered languages have less gender equality than countries that speak in genderless languages, particularly in terms of economic participation.
Some see Latinx in the context of social justice: María R. Scharrón-del Río, an associate professor at Brooklyn College, has made the case that Latinx succeeds in incorporating groups and communities that have traditionally been left out of the greater Hispanic umbrella.
“As Latinos, we pride ourselves on the strength of our family ties,” Scharrón-del Rio told NBC News in 2017 for an article on the growing use of the word. “Using Latinx is a way to bring visibility to people who have been marginalized and who we have not taken care of as part of our families.”
ACKNOWLEDGING A WORD'S SOCIO-POLITICAL HISTORY
Concern over the use of Latinx also comes from Chicanas, women of Mexican descent who have a desire to respect past political battles, including the fight to use terms like Chicano/a and the more gender-neutral Chican@.
Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at California State University at Northridge, grew up identifying as Chicana while fighting for recognition of the role of women in the Chicano experience. Chicana activists in the 1960s sought a voice in a movement dominated by men.
Bowles recalls gender activists in Argentina and Paraguay in the 1970s who crossed out the letter "o" at the end of gendered words on their protest signs as a demand for acknowledgment.
Sandoval sees the discussion over Latinx as both important and a distraction.
“My tendency is to not enter this discussion, because this is really not about labels, but all the forms, both institutional and collective, that marginalize and oppress us, such as homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.,” she said.
Sandoval said it's important to focus on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and power, and how they affect identity.
“I can't use Chicano only to map the Mexican-American experience. One word doesn't define us. One label doesn't define us. When you get to unmasking the layers that make up our communities and the different ways to identify ourselves and the ways we negotiate identity-making in the U.S., no one word works. No one term is going to fix it,” she said.
The scholars who spoke to NBC News said that people have a right to identify themselves however they wish, but that things get complex when institutions, such as the media, the government or universities, privilege one set of identity terms over another.
Everyone agrees, though, that Latinx will not be the last word coined by Latinos.
"We, as Latinxs, make new words everyday," said Estrada, the student from San Francisco State. "Why should Latinx be any different?"
Source: Published originally on nbcnews.com, Is 'Latinx' elitist? Some push back at the word's growing use, by Stephen Nuño-Pérez and Gwen Aviles, March 7th, 2019.
The argument against the use of the term “Latinx”
As we continually search for ways to improve gender inclusivity in Spanish, we have come up with a myriad of broad language such as Latino/a and Latin@. The most recent of these solutions is the term “Latinx.” In our opinion, the use of the identifier “Latinx” as the new standard should be discouraged because it is a buzzword that fails to address any of the problems within Spanish on a meaningful scale. This position is controversial to some members of the Latino community here at Swarthmore and beyond, but the other positions within the community also deserve to be heard. We are Latinos, proud of our heritage, that were raised speaking Spanish. We are not arguing against gender-inclusive language. We have no prejudice towards non-binary people. We see, however, a misguided desire to forcibly change the language we and millions of people around the world speak, to the detriment of all. Under the “degenderization” of Spanish advocated by proponents of words such as “Latinx” words such as latinos, hermanos, and niños would be converted into latinxs, hermanxs, and niñxs respectively. This is a blatant form of linguistic imperialism — the forcing of U.S. ideals upon a language in a way that does not grammatically or orally correspond with it.
The term “Latinx” is used almost exclusively within the United States. According to Google trend data, “Latinx” came into popular use in October of 2014 and has since been widely popularized by American blogs and American institutions of higher education. The term is virtually nonexistent in any Spanish-speaking country. This is problematic for many reasons. It serves as a prime example of how English speakers can't seem to stop imposing their social norms on other cultures. It seems that U.S. English speakers came upon Spanish, deemed it too backwards compared to their own progressive leanings, and rather than working within the language to address any of their concerns, “fixed” it from a foreign perspective that has already had too much influence on Latino and Latin American culture. The vast majority of people in Latin America from personal experience, would likely be confused and even offended by this attempt to dictate for them how their language is to be structured and how they ought to manage their social constructs. It is interesting to observe how many “Latinx” activists become outraged when a non-Latino person wears traditional Latino costumes such as sombreros without understanding the significance of what they are wearing when they themselves participate in a form of reverse appropriation. To be clear – this is not to say these Latinos are detached from the culture, but rather taking American ideals and social beliefs and inserting into a language that has widespread use in places outside of the U.S. Rather than taking from a culture or people a part of them without respect or reverence for it, this reverse appropriation aims to put into a culture a part of one's own beliefs. This is not the forced and unwarranted taking of culture but rather the forced and unnecessary giving of incompatible segments of U.S. culture.
Perhaps the most ironic failure of the term is that it actually excludes more groups than it includes. By replacing o's and a's with x's, the word “Latinx” is rendered laughably incomprehensible to any Spanish speaker without some fluency in English. Try reading this “gender neutral” sentence in Spanish: “Lxs niñxs fueron a lx escuelx a ver sus amigxs.” You literally cannot, and it seems harmless and absurd until you realize the broader implication of using x as a gender-neutral alternative. It excludes all of Latin America, who simply cannot pronounce it in the U.S. way. It does not provide a gender-neutral alternative for Spanish-speaking non-binary individuals and thus excludes them. It excludes any older Spanish speakers who have been speaking Spanish for more than 40 years and would struggle to adapt to such a radical change. It effectively serves as an American way to erase the Spanish language. Like it or not, Spanish is a gendered language. If you take the gender out of every word, you are no longer speaking Spanish. If you advocate for the erasure of gender in Spanish, you then are advocating for the erasure of Spanish.
What then, is the solution if not “Latinx”? It may surprise you to learn that a gender-neutral term to describe the Latin-American community already exists in Spanish. Ready for it? Here it is: Latino. Gender in Spanish and gender in English are two different things. Even inanimate objects are given gendered -o/s and -a/s endings, although it is inherently understood that these objects are not tied to the genders assigned to them. In Spanish, when referencing groups, we only use the feminine ending when referring to an exclusively female group. On the other hand, when we refer to groups using the masculine ending, the group could either be exclusively males or a mix of people. For example, when someone says “los cubanos” an English speaker may instinctively interpret this as “the male Cubans,” but a Spanish speaker simply hears “the Cubans.” In fact, the only way to refer to a group that is not exclusively female in Spanish is by using the masculine ending. Therefore, according to the grammatical rules of Spanish, the term “Latinos” is already all-inclusive in terms of gender. For those that want the singular form of “Latino” without the association with gender, alternate forms exist — one can state their ancestry (“soy de Cuba/Mexico/Venezuela/etc”) or “soy de Latinoamerica”. Ultimately, the problem here is that “Latinx” does not fit within Spanish, and never will. X as a letter at the ends of words in Spanish is unpronounceable, not conjugatable, and frankly confusing. These alternate options both respect those on the non-binary spectrum and respect the dignity of the Spanish language.
We understand that some people may still support the term “Latinx”. Ultimately, we will never attempt to force anyone to personally define themselves in any way. If after reading this article anyone still feels that calling themselves “Latinx” instead of any other term brings them more happiness, we will respect that choice. However, we are strongly opposed to and cannot support this particular terminology becoming the new norm or creeping any further into a language it does not belong in. Some may be put off by gender in Spanish. But we are offended by the attempted degradation of our language at the hands of a foreign influence. “Latinx” undoubtedly stems from good intentions but is ultimately also clearly representative of a poorly thought out and self-defeating execution as well as a lack of respect for the sovereignty of Spanish.
Source: Published originally on The Phoenix, The argument against the use of the term “Latinx”, by Gilbert Guerra and Gilbert Orbea, November 19th, 2015.