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”
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 local community gathering that was advertised towards, Latinos, Latinas, and Latinx. Again, this was in the middle of a non-English speaking small Argentinian city.
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.
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.
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.