Nobody in Miami Says ‘Latinx’
Joseph Contreras, Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2023
Five Latino members of the Connecticut Legislature co-sponsored a bill last month to ban the word “Latinx” from all state documents. As lawmaker Geraldo Reyes Jr. put it recently, “We don’t really use it, and we find it very offensive.” {snip}
The AP describes Ms. Sanders as “tapping into a debate that’s divided Hispanics along generational lines,” but I’ve seen no evidence of such a debate here in predominantly Latino Miami-Dade County. Nobody uses Latinx here either.
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{snip} Latinx occasionally pops up on the pages of the woke weekly Miami New Times, but its editor, Tom Finkel, says “our style is to not use it unless it’s to reference something someone has asserted—the title of a work, or an event or discussion” or “if someone or something we’re quoting uses the term.” The Miami Herald, on the other hand, shuns the term and has editorialized against it: “Just drop it, progressives. . . . ‘Latinx’ has failed to gain buy-in from the people it’s supposed to empower.”
{snip} Folks can call themselves any damned fool thing they want, but the people who coin terms like Latinx don’t get how language naturally develops and evolves. It spontaneously bubbles up from the street over time and is seldom handed down from the ivory tower or the tony streets of Santa Monica.
