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Are latin@/latinx actually favored by the communities they intend to protect? (hexbear.net)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Not to humblebrag but I’m not online enough to know the details of the likely struggle sessions that have already occurred relating to this (Hexbear or elsewhere)

I’m reading Racial Formation in the United States, and it makes frequent use of latin@. But to me it just seems really awkward/forced.

Just use latine? Or, if one insists on using a combo letter, maybe at least something like the Swedish å? Or instead of trying to change the language, just divorce any correlation between human gender and word gender by selecting either latino or latina to refer to all people.

I only have a basic American level ability to speak Spanish so if there are Spanish speakers here with better insight, lemme hear the roasts

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, it's not really about us. It's about USians, and in the US the community brand that won out is 'Latino'. But yeah, if you want to make that gender neutral I can't see what's wrong with Latin People or Folk, as opposed to Latinx Folk or People.

Latin American as a term was tied to the language of academia and diplomacy. It started as a French geopolitical delusion, continued onwards as a sticking point in hispanic literature, and only came to really include Brazil in the early 1900s due to American geopolitical reality. Since then it described foreign peoples, not a community within the United States. I'd wager that's why it didn't catch: a black person in the US can fill a form referring to themselves as African American - but the mexican person won't find any forms with Latin American as a matter of historical circumstance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

That makes sense!