#was not about Latinx at all iirc; it was a convo about a guildmate getting frustrated with their French class

[queerplatonicpositivity]

Hi! I like your blog. It's inclusive, helpful, and just generally has a warm vibe. And I read your essay-- to answer your question, Latinx started in the same way as Latin@ in that it was a symbolic written representation of inclusiveness and the pronunciation is not literal. Most Spanish-speaking communities that use Latinx today pronounce it with the -e suffix.

And while I love how the comic simply explains what can be complex concepts for monolingual English speakers, I do have a bone to pick with how the comic tacitly dismisses Latinx as a white-washed colonizer term. The artist uses soft language in discouraging it, so the dismissal only becomes explicit when you notice that all the linked readings are anti-Latinx with no Latinx perspectives.

Latinx's exact origins/creator is unclear. Although definitely used in and by Latin American circles, Latinx may very well have been created by a white Latinx. It may have even been created by a white Latinx with no or little understanding of Spanish. But if a term is created to describe oneself, is it self-colonizing? Where is the difference in a person refusing to use correct pronouns because it "imposes beliefs about genders" and refusing to use Latinx because it "imposes English-speaking norms on other cultures"? It's possible to be Latinx and only speak English and they deserve a right to self-identify as much as anyone else.

While anglocentrism and US imperialism in general are Problems that Spanish has to contend with globally, it's also important to remember that Spanish is a colonizer language, too. So while some may perceive it as linguistic submission to use Latinx in an English-dominated culture, for indigenous folks in a Spanish-dominated culture it can be a form of linguistic resistance. Though, at least ime, indigenous folk are just as likely to reject all disambiguations of Latinx/e/@ as its origins are a matter of recorded history (Michel Chevalier, late 1800s) which show the explicit racist and Eurocentric motivations behind its creation.

But the comic wasn't about rejecting Latin@/e. It was about rejecting Latinx. I don't care about what term gets used, but I do care that self-determined labels are respected and Latinx should not be discouraged in the same breath that Latine, Latin@, or Latino/a is.

Hi, Anon! Thank you for the kind words about my blog. :) And thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspectives about Latine and Latinx.

I was worried that the post would get circulated without the tags, but for context, here is a screen grab of the original post that has the tags pasted into the post and the continued of the "essay" in the actual tags:

[ Image Description: A screenshot of the original post. Below is a transcription of the tags involved. End Image Description ]

Aaand Tumblr ate half my tags because my tag essay was too long. D:

Here’s the original tags and the missing tags:

#when I was in undergrad in a university that was majority Latine#I was involved in some activist circles where people were using the @ symbol#to stand for o + a together#I actually have a t-shirt from a time I went to a protest#that says ‘no somos illegales no somos criminales somos trabajador@s internacionales’#which means 'we aren’t illegals we aren’t criminals we are international workers’#anyway that was the preferred way at the time in those circles for people to signal gender neutral language#after I moved out of Texas and away from the Mexican/U.S. border#I started seeing people online (here on Tumblr) use Latinx#and then I started seeing it elsewhere online#and then about 2.5 years ago someone in my guild (who is Abenaki not Latine)#linked to this comic on Vox in a discussion about gender-neutral language#and whether white Western English-speaking people are engaging in further linguistic colonization#by imposing gender-neutral terms/methods on other languages#(which incidentally was taking place between a French speaker and a Romani guildmate iirc)#and it was really interesting to me because I had long wondered how the x worked in actual words#(like 'amigx’ ??)#and using the instead seemed to make a lot of sense#and there are some very specific feelings about it

#about a year or two later the topic came up again in the guild #this time with a guildmate who is an elder in the community #and said the activist circles he's part of (largely in Arizona) use Latinx not Latine #and he feels as a Chicano (who doesn't speak Spanish because of linguistic oppression in his parents' generation) #that Latinx is the preferred term #and that doesn't even get into things like colonization #as a lot of places where Spanish is spoken are places with Indigenous populations that were colonized #and many Indigenous groups have cultural conceptions of gender that have nothing to do with European concepts of binary gender #so there's like... onion layers going on #which I think many of us in the queer community can relate to #as we have endless conversations about what we should be called and why #so I feel there's a lot of solidarity that can be had

I strongly support self-determination in labels, terms, etc. used in our communities, and I definitely support people choosing to refer to themselves as Latinx.