Latina/o, Latinx, Latine

Identity terms are always in flux. They may be revised or replaced in response to the shifting concerns of the collectivities that use them, or a term may be disputed yet remain the preferred designation of part of the group in question. Latino (with its feminine form, Latina), Latinx, and Latine all now coexist in the space once occupied primarily by Hispanic, with overlapping but not identical meanings. This post gives a brief overview of the history and purposes of these terms as a resource for writers, without prescribing or proscribing any of them.

Added to the census in 1980 in response to a 1976 act of the United States Congress calling for the adoption of a category under which to collect “economic and social statistics for Americans of Spanish descent,” Hispanic became the first widely used blanket term to designate people of Latin American heritage living in the United States. Because Hispanic technically includes Spaniards (although the communities it was intended to unify were mostly of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban descent) and highlights the Spanish language—and therefore, some contend, the legacy of Spanish colonialism—Latino was embraced as a replacement with a geographic emphasis that centered Latin America. Latino surged in popularity over the course of the 1990s and was added to the census in 2000.¹

The definition of Latino as referring to “peoples in the United States who originate from Latin America,” writes Juana María Rodríguez, “immediately invokes cartographic debates about the precise borders of Latin America . . . as a specific cultural and historical construct” (154). Brazilians in the United States are often included in the category of Latino, but peoples from countries of South or Central America or the Caribbean with histories of French, Dutch, or English colonization are generally not. The term does not necessarily imply origin outside the United States: Puerto Ricans and the descendants of Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the territories annexed by the United States with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were incorporated into the US populace not through migration but through US conquest and colonialism. And while the category includes Indigenous people, some Indigenous peoples from territories once colonized by Spain or Portugal do not identify as Latin American or Latino.

Latinx emerged as a concise gender-neutral alternative to the masculine form as universal. It was less cumbersome than giving both gendered forms, either in full or by including both o and a endings separated by a slash, and it was more elegant than Latin@, which was used with some frequency in the 2000s and 2010s. And unlike formulations that combined the two gendered forms, Latinx served the purpose of including nonbinary people. The term quickly gained traction in academic and activist communities in the United States, and it is now used in English across written and spoken registers, as well as in such official contexts as the names of university departments and other organizations.

The x of Latinx has been ascribed a multiplicity of associations—some positive, some negative, and some productively ambivalent. It has been connected to indigeneity, since x occurs frequently in the lexicon of Nahuatl and other Indigenous Mesoamerican languages as they have been codified in Latin script. It can signify the crossroads of histories, ethnicities, cultures, or intersecting identities; erasure and gestures denouncing erasure, such as that of Malcolm X; or simply the unknown or indeterminate.²

Critics of Latinx have argued that, despite its popularity in the US academy, the term is not widely used in the communities it names and that it is at odds with the rules of Spanish phonology, “seemingly crafted without consideration for Spanish speakers who find the ‘x’ ending awkward, unfamiliar, and US-centric” (Montez and Sanchez Saltveit 1). It is also contested on the grounds that it violates the gendered structure of the language, but that is of course the point.³ In response to the objection that most Latinos do not use the term Latinx, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, a professor of cultural studies at Columbia University, cautions against judgments based on quantitative survey data: “The claim that the term Latinx should be dismissed because few people identify with it implies that everyone must accept the categories of the majority. This begs many questions: Who is the majority? What is the basis of their authority? What do we need homogeneity for? What is the cost of trying to achieve it?” As for the problem of consistency with the Spanish language, Negrón-Muntaner points out that “Spanish is not the only language Latinos speak; many also speak English, indigenous languages, and border tongues.” And to advocate for acceptance of a new term is not to argue for its imposition. As Roy Pérez insists, Latinx serves “as a supplement and not a substitute” for Latina and Latino, or more specific terms of ethnic or national affiliation (qtd. in Onís 82). 

Latine is the product of a more general attempt to create a third, nonbinary inflection in Spanish that can be used in speech or writing with any noun or adjective, collective or not, that previously required a binary gendered ending.⁴ Latine is more flexible than Latinx, which works best as an adjective, in that it can more naturally take a plural form (Latines) and function as a noun. It is more clearly a loan word from Spanish into English than the other way around (although Latine now has an entry in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, while major Spanish dictionaries do not yet recognize gender-neutral suffixes, whether x or e).

While Latinx and Latine are often used synonymously, Latine can be broader in geographic scope, meaning Latinx and Latin American: “an inclusive identifier for people of Latin American descent, whether born in the United States or not” (Montez and Sanchez Salveit 1). Olga Sanchez Saltveit, a professor of theater at Middlebury College and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance, uses all three forms for different purposes. “Generally, I self-identify as a Latina, acknowledging my gender within my ethnicity,” but, she says, “I will identify myself and others as Latinx when speaking of myself/ourselves as folks born in the US. Latine, when that circle includes people of Latin America.” Understood in this way, Latine offers more than concision: it affirms that these two groups can be meaningfully designated as a single collectivity.

In addition to the structural affordances and semantic implications of the terms themselves, writers take context into account. “When considering which terms to use,” says Cristina Pérez Jiménez, a professor of English and Latinx studies at Manhattan College,

so many factors can come into play. From the language in which we are writing and the intended audience to the geographic context we are addressing, which encompasses not only distinctions between the US and Latin America but also nuances within regions such as the Northeast and Southwest. There is also of course the terminology employed by our sources themselves, as well as the specific period and context of our writing—it is a politically charged decision—all of which inflects our usage of these capacious and powerfully affiliating, if also slippery and imprecise identity terms.

This imprecision and provisionality, inherent to identity labels in general, is not necessarily a bad thing; it can empower writers to build new connections—or to draw distinctions—with their linguistic choices. 

You need not impose consistency in the use of these terms if you are using different forms for a reason. As always, respect the preferences of the person or specific group you are referring to when that preference is known, but bear in mind, as Negrón-Muntaner advises, that the larger groups named by these categories constitute “a complex assemblage” and do not speak with one voice. And finally, expect their use to change: “As a cultural historian,” Negrón Muntaner tells me, “I can only guarantee that neither Latinx nor Latine will be the last word on this question!”

Notes

The image accompanying this post is from Procession of Angels, 2024, watercolor by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, used with permission of the artist.

1. This summary refers to broad recent and contemporary usage; the history of these terms and their earlier variants is older and more complex. Hispano as an abbreviated form of hispanoamericano and latino as an abbreviated form of latinoamericano have been attested since the nineteenth century among Spanish speakers in the United States. Hispanoamericano and latinoamericano, along with their English forms, Spanish American and Latin American, once served to distance the speaker from the more stigmatized Mexican (Guitiérrez 34–37; Dávila 15). Accounts of the development of the current iterations of the terms note that Latino, especially as of the 1970s, served bottom-up coalition-building purposes, uniting communities of different national origins with common social and political objectives, and that Hispanic and, subsequently, Latino have served homogenizing purposes of the state and commercial interests (see, e.g., Gutiérrez; Mora; Oboler).

2. See, e.g., Milian 9–18; Roy Pérez qtd. in Onís 86.

3. Since January 2023, executive orders have been issued in Arkansas and Virginia and legislation proposed in Connecticut and at the federal level to ban Latinx in official government documents as an “offensive and unnecessary” imposition on Latino constituencies (Geraldo Reyes, Jr., qtd. in Morales 211). Arguments against Latinx in the arena of electoral politics are often connected to broader campaigns to delegitimize and censor public discourse, scholarship, and teaching focused on systemic racism, sexism, and heterocisnormativity—to attacks on critical race theory and the teaching of content related to gender and sexuality (see Morales).

4. While most Spanish nouns ending in o are masculine and most Spanish nouns ending in a are feminine, nouns ending in e might be masculine or feminine, and those that can be either, for example, estudiante (“student”) rely on modifiers (articles or adjectives) to determine their gender (el estudiante / la estudiante). The gender-neutral e has therefore been proposed as a supplement to the o/a binary, along with the articles le and une and the pronoun elle (as supplements to the pairs el/la, un/una, and él/ella).

Works Cited

Dávila, Arlene. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. U of California P, 2001.

Gutiérrez, Ramón A. “What’s in a Name? The History and Politics of Hispanic and Latino Panethnicities.” The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, edited by Gutiérrez and Tomás Almaguer, U of California P, 2016, pp. 19–53. 

Milian, Claudia. LatinX. U of Minnesota P, 2019.

Montez, Noe, and Olga Sanchez Saltveit, editors. The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance. Routledge, 2024. 

Mora, Cristina G. “Cross-Field Effects and Ethnic Classification: The Institutionalization of Hispanic Panethnicity, 1965–1990.” American Sociological Review, vol. 79, no. 2, Apr. 2015, pp. 183–210.

Morales, Ed. “Latinx: Reserving the Right to the Power of Naming.” Chicanx-Latinx Law Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2023, pp. 209–26.

Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. Email to the author. 18 Feb. 2024.  

Oboler, Suzanne. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of Re(Presentation) in the United States. U of Minnesota P, 1995.

Onís, Catalina M. de. “What’s in an ‘X’? An Exchange about the Politics of ‘Latinx.’” Chiricú Journal, vol. 1, no, 2, spring 2017, pp. 78–91.

Pérez Jiménez, Cristina. Personal communication. 2 Apr. 2024.

Rodríguez, Juana María. “Latino/a/x.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 3rd ed., edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York UP, 2020.

Sanchez Saltveit, Olga. Email to the author. 23 Mar. 2024.

United States, Congress. Public Law 94–311, 16 June 1976, uscode.house.gov/statutes/pl/94/311.pdf.