Turns out if you define a third of your pale population as "Latinx" instead of white, very few white people remain.
Even the 2020 census had the sense (heh) to finally drop the "Hispanic race" and have it as a separate label, but the "researchers" felt like going out of their way to redefine it as a "race" again. Not sure why race is even treated as a scientific thing to begin with in their census, but such is the Amerikkkan way I guess.
Edit: don't even want to think about the causes of this "age gap"
In America, the terms Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic refer to basically anyone from any country in the Americas that is below the United States, geographically and 'culturally'. It's essentially a label Americans use to say, " oh you're from one of THOSE shithole countries".
The great great grandson of a Spanish conquistador who massacred thousands of indigenous people to claim his own plantation is considered the exact same as the granddaughter of an indigenous person on the receiving end. Both are called Hispanics, making the word an utterly meaningless label.
Yeah, I have a particular beef with those labels because, although I usually like my Latin American cousins, my "Hispanic" country speaks Portuguese and not Spanish. In the census there wasn't even an option for Latin American people who speak languages other than Spanish (Portuguese and French but also Guarani or Quechua or the various creoles).
It's extra insult to injury that they appropriate the gendered "Latino" instead of just using their own "Latin," but then feel the need to slap an X on it. I've never even seen non-Yankees using latinx instead of the age old latino/a/e/@ out there.
You forget to take into account background level racism in
Technically, yeah, but all official US census stuff writes the whole label as "Latino or Hispanic" and use both interchangeably. It's not uncommon to hear people referring to Brazilians or even Haitians as "Hispanic," because to the common Yankee, being Latin American and Hispanic are the same thing.
It even generates some fun arguments on Quora such as "are Spanish people white?"
That'd be the correct way thinking in 1990 before they added "latino" as a synonym [PDF, page 3], but then they just randomly added that in without changing the question. Since Yankee ethnography is so crap and they usually don't even define their shit properly, as most social Yankee stuff (unrelated but they don't have a list of proscribed domestic terrorist groups, only foreign ones). It makes sense that they'd be terrible at this when the "Hispanic Question" is literally the only ethnicity question in the census, and you have shit like "race white, for example, German, Italian."
Yet; let the steady collapse of hegemony slide further and bet you'll start seeing more direct-action oriented enclaves getting flagged for terrorism. They did just clink up the Uhuru House for 'undeclared foreign agency'; and that's an adjacent bullshit charge.
I have seen many Hispanic people in South America writing Latinx on signs, posters, applications, news articles, etc. Its not extremely common but I have seen it plenty of times personally in many places across Equador, Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico.
Its not a "Yankee" cultural imperialism.
Hilariously even Bad Empanada has a video of himself in Argentina where he says he'll walk out of his house, walk in a random direction, and then end the video when he comes across Latinx in a small city in which almost no one speaks English.... He made it less then 2 minutes before coming across a poster for a community event that was advertised towards, Latinos, Latinas, and Latinx.
My issue is not with gender neutral endings in romance languages (though I think they're rather underadopted right now), but that for some reason Yankees decided to go with the unpronounceable "X" ending rather than very old and established Latina/o or Latine or even Latin@. In my experience those are way more common than X endings, though I admit I haven't looked at hard data on that.
They could've just called them "Latins/Latin-Americans" but they chose to first a appropriate the grammar for "Latino" then think try to "fix" it in the classic Yankee fashion of not looking at already established norms.
Latina/o and latin@ aren't really that pronounceable either outside of saying the word twice in both forms, and yet they get used a fair bit too. -x is certainly my least favourite way of doing this as well, but acting like it's some yankee imposition seems a bit dumb
Just to make it clear, I have no issue with the "-x" ending in and of itself and "yankee imposition" implies that anybody in Latin America cares about what the Yankees have to say about Spanish (or in my case, Portuguese) in the first place. I just think that Unitedstadians created their own problem by calling us "Latino" instead of "Latin" or "Latin-American," (which are both already gender-neutral) and then have to fall back to their own customs by putting the "-x" in there.
It really is a minor beef, but it's annoying to see them appropriating words and trying (and failing) to speak in Spanish to appear more inclusive. Their language is already gender neutral, they could just call us Latins, Latines, Latinamericans or (IMO my favourite) Americans, but gringo gotta appropriate culture.
It’s not meant to be spoken, it’s supposed to be a writing standard as opposed to a spoken one.
“E” is also pretty common and it seems to be used interchangeably with “X”. That’s probably more of a personal choice.
“X” is also commonly marketed as “Yankee solution finding”, when it was first proposed by a Puerto Rican Psychologist to challenge the gender binary of Spanish. It is not an American invention, it just gained popularity there first.
I've seen it sometimes on the Spanish-speaking internet (and of course in other situations like todxs), although a bit less than latin@
Americans don't want to call them 'Latins' because that might imply some sort of relationship between them and the Romans, and that's not allowed because they're from shithole countries, and America is the rightful heir to the Roman throne or whatever.