Guest post: Demeaning and unnecessary
Originally a comment by Papito on Smile when you call us that.
Lumping Hispanics together into a single group would be an improvement over what “Latinx” does. Creating a unified Latin American group is what Univision has done so successfully, and as the article says, they never say “Latinx.” When I saw what Univision was doing in creating a broad yet unified Hispanic audience I was amazed.
What “Latinx” says is that Hispanics are using their own language wrong, and they need Anglos to fix it for them. It’s colossally demeaning, and utterly unnecessary. The word is used in English, and English doesn’t have genders (either to fix, or be left alone). If they just used a different word, it would entirely obviate the need. Using “Latino” in English in the first place is a patronizing appropriation of Spanish. It gained popularity because Anglos didn’t want to say Hispanic and are too lazy to say Latin American. The problems don’t start only once you get to “Latinx.”
Mostly, Hispanic people don’t dislike being referred to as Hispanic, they’re not squeamish about the idea of Spain (and, BTW, Spanish people don’t refer to themselves as “Hispanic,” they’re Spanish). The idea that we shouldn’t use “Hispanic” because of the reference to Spain is that kind of woke racism McWhorter talks about. It’s because nice Anglo liberals don’t want to be reminded, they want to project more otherness on Hispanics, and on more than just a linguistic level.
I used to teach Spanish at the college level, and the degree of ignorance of the incoming college student can hardly be exaggerated. Most Americans don’t think there are any white people, or black people, in Mexico, or elsewhere in Latin America. They think that “Hispanic” is a race. They don’t know that people speak Portuguese in Brazil. The term “Latinx” helps cover up all that ignorance.
Crap, you got me up on my soapbox now. The reason it’s important, in America, to use the term “Hispanic” is because of the unique history of Hispanic peoples in America. It’s all well and good to want to use the term “Latin American” if we want to talk about other people who may have immigrated here from the South, but Hispanics hold the distinction of the country moving to them, rather than vice versa. Hispanics aren’t a foreign, immigrant minority in the United States, they’re a linguistic minority (and more than one cultural minority) that has been present here since before the United States existed. Lumping Hispanics in with other Latin Americans is a form of denial of this history. The US never stole half of Brazil, or occupied Surinam. People who ended up in the US because the border crossed them are in a fundamentally different position.
Don’t Latinx Me, Bro!
But, as we’re currently seeing with the laws being passed to ban books about the USA’s history with race, America is very very happy to deny history it finds inconvenient.
My husband and I went to a play a few years ago in which one of the characters was from Brazil – and spoke Spanish. I suppose that’s because they didn’t have any actors who knew how to speak Portuguese, because when I read the play, the author got it right. But damn. Surely an actor could learn a few words? They learn so many other things, you’d think it wouldn’t be impossible.
I imagine they were counting on the audience being too ignorant to notice. I suppose maybe that’s what happened. It’s just that my husband and I are avid readers of things…all sorts of things…and we learn things. And then we wince.
Heh. The ignorance of most Americans regarding Latin America is truly deep. They have no clue that there are even indigenous people who don’t speak Spanish OR Portugese, but rather Quechua.
I think most lazy Anglos (lol) just want to say the right thing and not offend anyone. I think the vast majority of the ones that use “Latinx” would switch to “Hispanic” in a heartbeat if they were convinced that term is preferred. I don’t think they’re trying to project otherness or deny history or impose a name on anyone. Most people just aren’t that sinister.
It’s all because of evil European imperialist colonialism that the Brazilians speak Portuguese! If not for that, they would still be speaking Spanish, like all other Latinxes! (Am I doing it right?)
Why can’t they all just learn how to speak proper English? They would all be so much better orf for it. The way it is going, there are large parts of the US where English is the second language, after Spanish.
A while back there in history, the Spaniards and the Portuguese had the best navies. (Put to rights by Sir Francis Drake, that notable privateer.) And before Whatshisname wrote The Wealth of Nations, it was assumed that the wealthiest nation would be the one which had the most gold. So the Spaniards and Portuguese concentrated on colonising South America, where legends and travellers’ tales said it was lying around all over the place. Instead, all they got was malaria, dysentery and every other pox known to science. Carried them all back to Europe. Tjhanks a lot!
Meanwhile, the British had to settle for that second best territoty north of the Rio Grande.
Ah well. Can’t win ’em all I suppose. What goes around, comes around. Stuff like that.
Tacking an ‘x’ on to gendered words from romance languages is not cute or clever, it’s ignorant. It’s bad enough when they do this to perfectly good English words. Illiterate fxckwits. :P
If Hispanic is a problem for some people, why not Iberian?
Iberian conventionally has a geographic rather than a cultural or linguistic meaning. In Spanish use in previous centuries before the idea of a single nation of Spain was widely accepted, it was used the way you sometimes hear Continental or Metropolitan – almost the opposite meaning of the way Hispanic is used now, a catch-all for the New World Spanish-speaking groups.
When I first heard the term “Anglo” for white Americans I didn’t really understand it because we aren’t all from England; understanding the back ground of “Hispanic” helps me make sense of the fact that its the cultural aspect of speaking English rather than being white.
Aside: I feel more culturally connected to the UK because of language and culture than I do to the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. I don’t connect anywhere nearly as close to the literature or customs of the countries my immediate ancestors came from. I’m aware of them, but I don’t connect.
Michael, “Anglo” isn’t a racial term. It doesn’t refer to the skin tone of a person. A Black person can also be an Anglo. Nor does it refer to ancestral national origin; a German can also be an Anglo. “Anglo” refers to majority, English-speaking Americans from the perspective of one of the Hispanic cultures in America. In this, it’s a complement of “Hispanic.”
You mean Anglx.
@12: No, because Anglos are all part of the patriarchy, and therefore they are all male; therefore there is no such thing as Anglas or Anglxs, just Anglos. Being male has nothing to do with having a penis, remember.
As opposed to Spanish, which has nothing to do with colonialism or patriarchy; it is the true aboriginal language of all BIPOCs.
GW, don’t you mean BIPOX?
Naif,
Indeed, the Spanish term for Iberians who had taken up residence in the New World was Peninsulares, who were at the top of an intricate racial caste system over and above even any of their children born in the New World. Using “Iberian” to mean people explicitly not from Iberia would be about as foolish as using “Caucasian” to refer to white people, very few of whom trace their lineage through the Caucasus in any meaningful way.
Posted this in the other thread after everyone stopped reading. I hope it’s ok to plagiarize myself. If you’ve already read it and it put you to sleep, well, time for another nap.
I’ve heard “Latinx” pronounced. It rhymes with “a Kleenex”. Not a very pretty word in English, and it completely violates the phonotactics of Spanish. (I’ve heard that in Argentina some people have started using -e as a neuter ending (so “Latine”; that at least has the virtue of being pronounceable in Spanish.)
In the past, when I said my wife was Spanish, people would often assume that she was Mexican or Puerto Rican. So I learned to say that she’s “from Spain.”
The US Census Bureau defines Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” So Spaniards are in; Brazilians and Haitians are out. But I’ve always thought of “Latino”. Wikipedia, on the other hand, says “Hispanic includes people with ancestry from Spain and Latin American Spanish-speaking countries, while Latino includes people from Latin American countries that were formerly colonized by Spain and Portugal.” So by those criteria, Spaniards are Hispanic but not Latino, Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic, Paraguayans are both, and Haitians are neither.
This has always bugged my wife, who is never entirely sure what to call herself (or why she should). She’s said that she considers herself Latin, a term which encompasses Italians, French, Romanians, and anyone else who speaks a Romance language; she feels closer to them culturally than to Latin Americans. I’ve tried to explain that there are good historical and sociological reasons for treating Hispanics/Latinos as a group in the US, even if it doesn’t make much sense outside of that context, but still, she has a point. (When we first met in Spain, I knew a lot more about Mexican food than she did.)
Neither my wife nor our kids “look Spanish” (nor do I), at least in the US, and other Spanish speakers are often surprised to hear us speaking Spanish in public. Our daughter was very blond when she was little, and her last name is very Scottish, and so the teachers in her bilingual school were sometimes astonished when she told them that she spoke Spanish. (In Spain, she’s not terribly remarkable. I stand out a bit, but more for my clothes than my looks.)
The Spaniards who ran the empire often didn’t want the natives to learn to speak (much less read) Spanish, because that was the language of power. But the natives often preferred Spanish to native tongues as a lingua franca, because they didn’t want to use the language of rival tribes. Still, even today there are many people in countries where Spanish is the prestige language who speak Spanish as a second language, or not at all. (And the same holds true for Portuguese in Brazil.)
Papito, that’s what I concluded. Sorry it wasn’t more clear in my comment.
Please make it stop…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xicanx
I still remember the use of “chicano” and “chicana” back in the 1960s and 1970s as applying to Mexican-American activism.
Historically, the x in Spanish was used to represent the “sh” sound (/ʃ/ in IPA), and it still is in other Iberian languages (Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, etc.). The city Oaxaca in Mexico was spelled “Wachaca” by a French visitor, which gives you an idea of how it was pronounced. So I read “Xicanx” as “Shicansh”.
When I went to teach a course at the Universidad Pontificia Católice de Chile in 1980 I met a young woman whose name (both first and last) was completely Scottish, but she was Chilean, born and educated. Her English was virtually perfect, except that she mispronounced words like “acetic” that are important in chemistry but don’t come up much in ordinary conversation.
My daughter wasn’t exactly “very blond” when she was little, but certainly blondish, and very English-looking — much more English- than Chilean-looking. Her twin children (a combination of English, Chilean, French and Syrian), now six, are completely different from one another. The boy could be mistaken for me at the same age. His sister has a very exotic appearance that is hard to pin down. They are totally different in personality as well.
Guaraní is perhaps a better for example, as it is the everyday language of the great majority of the population of Paraguay. I don’t think that Quechua has the same degree of usage in Peru.
When I was a post-doc in the USA, I once spoke to my daughter in French (our native language). Someone in the bus told me how great I was for speaking in Spanish to my kid, so that she does not lose her roots.
It felt quite odd to me. That person could not distinguish Spanish from any foreign language, despite Hispanics not being that rare in the USA.
They were also cueing on my external look, because yes, it’s really unclear if I am a Latino, or Middle East or even of mixed first nation ethnicity (I’ve already been asked which tribe I was by first nation people) and I guess some more possibilities I haven’t experienced yet.
For the same reason, filling ethnicity checkbox in the USA has always been uneasy to me. Indeed, it’s always reminding you that such social identity is not merely a personal matter as much as it is also about experiencing how other people see you. And the default position is giving more weight to differences rather than similarities for most people.
Re mistaking French for Spanish: it doesn’t really surprise me, because I suspect that person had mostly heard Spanish, but didn’t speak a word of it, like many in the US, and had essentially no exposure to any other foreign language. Any language that is not English is assumed to be Spanish. Spanish and French are closer than, say, Spanish and Chinese or German; mistaking Chinese for Spanish would be quite odd, even for Americans.
(I suppose it’s similar to people here in the South talking about a “Northern” accent and being unable to distinguish Boston from New York, despite those differences being quite acute to people from that region.)
A basketball player from Senegal, Tacko Fall, had joined the Boston Celtics and was being interviewed. He was speaking a language I didn’t recognize and assumed was Wolof, a commonly spoken language in Senegal. I sent an interview link to someone I knew who had spent significant time in Senegal and spoke Wolof as well as French, the official language. She said no, he was speaking French. I have studied French, I should have recognized it. But, in fairness, she said he spoke French with a Wolof accent.
@Sackbut #24
I get it and it makes sense, but still find it hard to confuse. Of course, being exposed to many different romance languages helps probably a lot. I’m biased for sure.
I know I can’t differenciate regionally close African languages. The only way is to spot words that you know are from a specific language.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I can accurately enough distinguish Portuguese from Brasilian if blinded. As you pointed out, accents are very important.
Last, I know the people who talked to me was meaning well and trying to be nice, and was actually interested and trying to make a casual contact. That’s the thing though, the experience of socially enforced stereotyping –especially racial/ethnic and therefore I get too sex category, accumulates and in the end, even when it’s not necessarily offending per se, it’s becoming more upsetting.