Hispanic Democrats in Connecticut Want To Erase ‘Latinx’ From State Documents

A group of Democratic lawmakers in Connecticut, all of them Hispanic, have borrowed a page from a Republican governor halfway across the country and proposed a ban on the use of the word “Latinx” in all state documents. They say the term is offensive to Spanish speakers.The word, used as a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” and “Latina,” is the currently preferred usage among advocates of transgender rights in America.Yet a state representative of Waterbury who is the bill’s chief sponsor and one of five Hispanic Democrats who put their names on the legislation, Geraldo Reyes Jr., said Latinx is not a Spanish word but is rather a “woke” term that is offensive to Connecticut’s large Puerto Rican population. “I’m of Puerto Rican descent and I find it offensive,” he said.Last month, Arkansas banned government officials from using Latinx on formal documents as part of several orders issued by the Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, within hours of her taking office.The Log Cabin Republicans, which represents LGBT members of the party, praised Ms. Sanders’s order. “The term Latinx is just another misguided product of the modern left’s relentless obsession with stripping gender from American life, an obsession that LGBT conservatives fight back against daily,” the group’s president, Charles Moran, said in a statement.Mr. Reyes said his motivations might be different from Sanders’s, but he believes her decision was the right one.The League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights group in the United States, announced in 2021 that it would no longer use the term Latinx.“The Spanish language, which is centuries old, defaults to Latino for everybody,” Mr. Reyes said. “It’s all-inclusive. They didn’t need to create a word, it already exists.”An assistant professor of “Latinx and Multiethnic Literature” at Boston University, Maia Gil’Adi, said the word dates back to Latino and Latina youth and queer culture in the 1990s, with the “x” being a nod to many people’s indigenous roots.“The word Latino is incredibly exclusionary, both for women and for non-gender conforming people,” she said. “And the term Latinx is really useful because of the way it challenges those conceptions.”A Spanish language professor at the University of Florida, David Pharies, said another movement would replace the “o” and “a” in many Spanish nouns referring to people with an “e.” He said that is something that would be easier for Spanish-speakers to pronounce than the word Latinx.“Latinx was clearly a solution that was proposed outside the Spanish-speaking world,” he said.It’s not clear how often the term Latinx has been used in Connecticut state documents. A search for the word on the state government’s portal returned 945 hits for documents, including press releases, blogs, and reports using the word.An attorney for the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, Michelle Dumas Keuler, told Hearst Connecticut Media that it uses the term in any complaint it submits about housing, employment, or other types of discrimination, when requested.Mr. Reyes said he expects the bill to get a hearing before the Democratic-controlled legislature’s Government Administration and Elections Committee during the current session.

Hispanic Democrats in Connecticut Want To Erase ‘Latinx’ From State Documents

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