Media/Activists Broaden Push for ‘Latine’ After Spectacular Failure of ‘Latinx’
“‘Latine,’ a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media.”
The woke left’s insistence on the use of “Latinx” to describe members of the Latino community so as to be more “inclusive” of transgender persons and others who don’t identify as either gender has effectively died a miserable death, as Legal Insurrection previously reported.
The term, as we’ve also noted, has consistently failed to take root within the Hispanic/Latino community, with polls over the years confirming that only small a minority prefer “Latinx,” and others showing overwhelming majorities using “Hispanic” or “Latino/Latina” to describe their ethnic background.
So with the mainstream press and Democrats on up to President Joe Biden seeming to move away from the term, you’d think (hope!) the debate was settled.
But nope, the Usual Suspects are still at it, with the push for “Latine” gaining steam after the spectacular failure of “Latinx”:
"Latine," a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity over terms like "Latinx" on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media.https://t.co/LeHMntZxrU
— Axios (@axios) April 11, 2024
For the record, it’s not a new term, with some college campuses having already unofficially adopted it as part of their “inclusive” lingo, and some left-wing “news” sites having proposed it as an alternative, as we’ve documented before:
- ‘Latine’ Collective at Stanford U. Issues Demands to Campus Latino Center
- New York University’s LGBTQ+ Center Floats “Latine” as Alternative to “Latinx”
- DEI Summit at Portland State U. Features Race-Based Tables (including “Latine”)
- Far-Left Salon Mag Gives Up On Term “Latinx”(pushes for “Latine” instead)
But because the activist left/media industrial complex doesn’t know how to cope with losing an argument, they’ve launched a renewed and broader push to expand its usage beyond leftist drum circles:
“Latine,” a gender-neutral way to describe or refer to people with Latino origins, is surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media.
The big picture: Catch-all terms like Hispanic or Latino have come under scrutiny for blurring important nuances and presenting a large part of the U.S. population as a monolith.
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Latine is “part of a movement centered on wanting to build and foster an inclusive community,” says Carlos Zavala, vice president at consulting firm Whiteboard Advisors, which has used the term in reports from its work with tech and education groups.
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41% of U.S. Latinos in the latest Axios-Ipsos Latino poll in partnership with Noticias Telemundo say they are comfortable with Latine. […]
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To better accommodate diverse gender identities, some Spanish and Portuguese speakers are increasingly using the -e suffix for some nouns, such as using “todes” in addition to “todos,” both of which mean “everyone.”
And yet buried within the Axios report was this little nugget:
Latino/a and Hispanic are still the preferred terms for respondents, with over 80% acceptance, followed by a descriptor tied to a country of origin (such as Cuban American or Mexican American), the poll shows.
Will the “Latine” campaign work? My money is on “no” and I’m not alone:
I would bet my mortgage it is not, in fact, “surging in popularity” and this is just an elaborate effort by progressive activists to avoid admitting they were wrong. https://t.co/Q67HDp9I93
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) April 11, 2024
“Pendejo” and “pinche cabrón” are also surging in popularity to refer to people who use terms like "Latinx" or “Latine” https://t.co/IwbuW4RtFe
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) April 11, 2024
“Surging in popularity” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. https://t.co/QoKnNx8d1e
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) April 11, 2024
It is simply amazing to me that white liberals watched what happened with “Latinx” and decided to try another term instead of leaving the Spanish language alone.
“Back to the drawing board guys, we’ll find the right letters eventually..” https://t.co/KD2dT6FUD7
— Danielle Alvarez (@Danielle_Alva) April 12, 2024
The main thing this article gets right is that "Latine" appears to be "the new Latinx," by which I mean a term that leftist orgs are trying to force on people but is not widely used or acknowledged in the community it is supposed to represent. https://t.co/qt6quZWLH0
— AG (@AGHamilton29) April 11, 2024
The Rio Grande Valley is the most Hispanic area in Texas with over 90%, and I've never heard anyone use these made-up liberal terms.
In the Spanish language culture, there is a masculine and feminine gender distinction for all nouns.
Y Punto! https://t.co/M3zOpaZ4gX
— Mayra Flores Vallejo (@MayraFloresTX34) April 12, 2024
I represent one of the most Hispanic communities in America.
Trust me.
This is not a thing. https://t.co/Kwlu4EcNqZ
— Monica De La Cruz (@monica4congress) April 12, 2024
I think it’s safe to say that if something is allegedly popular “on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media,” then sane people should run away from it as fast as they can. Just sayin’.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
The quest of a foole.
or a toole.
It seems to me that using a non-gendered term for people with a heavily gendered language like Spanish would be like calling a person “it” in English.
They would LOVE Korean, the language is so gendered that boys and girls have different terms for big brother, big sister, dad, mom, uncle, grandma, grandpa etc. A boy calls his big sister “Noona”, a girl calls her big sister “Unnie” (Oonie?) etc etc.
Some things do change though.
Girls called their big brother “Oppa” but that term now means almost any boy in the neighborhood, even their boyfriend. I bet a lot of older Koreans really hate that.
Hebrew is so gendered that males and females have different ways of expressing personal verbs. “I walk” for a girl is different than “I walk” for a boy, even though “I” is not gendered.
The least gendered major language on Earth, so far as I know, is English. We have no gendering outside of direct references to males or females, and then never any such conjugation of the verbs … because we have almost completely done away with conjugation of verbs, at all, having nothing left but the minimal 4 forms – walk, walks, walking, walked – and everything built with structural words around those rather than conjugation. In fact, “walk” is not even a verb, but only becomes a verb in the right context, as opposed to SPanish and other languages where verbs are verbs and nouns are nouns and the twain shall never meet. In English, “We walk”, or “We take a walk” – with walk either being a verb or a noun, depending.
English is the most open, flexible language around, with no gendering to speak of … and American leftists are always out to try and say that English is the worst, most oppressive, most chauvinist language there is. Mostly because the bulk of AMerican leftists know nothing about any other language … and not much about English, either.
Latine is likely destined for the latrine.
Probably ….but not before lots of ink is spilled and grant money is spent wasting time with this until the grifters design another term to shove at us.
May I suggest instead “Atinelay” ?
Oodgay ideayay Oncisecay!
Si! Con la mierda!
¡Viva la caca!
What about the magic e that makes the vowel say its own name?
Wittgenstein on forces in gendered languages
538. There is a related case (though perhaps it will not seem so) when, for example, we (Germans) are surprised that in French the predicative adjective agrees with the substantive in gender, and when we explain it to ourselves by saying: they mean: “the man is *a good one’.”
OT: The GOP joined their commie palz (again) across the aisle to approve 2 more years of warrantless spying. But how about the Latino hurt feelings?
Now..now… they have so flooded the zone with illegals and criminals that the only way to deal with it is to surveille everyone. It’s not a bug… its by design.
Step 1. get all foreigners to come here.
Step 2 claim they are a risk
step 3 get law passed allowing spying on US soil
step 4 spy on the intended target who is not a foreigner.
step 5 slap forehead when one realizes google was already doing this.
I love how they are so intent on degendering just one word in a language where just about every word is gendered. Pretty much every language is gendered up the wazoo … except for English, which really has no gendering to speak of. How funny is that?
If Western Leftists want to degenderize Spanish then they have to rebuild the entire language, from the ground up. A complete revamping of all subject-verb conjugation and the conversion of all nouns and adjectives to neuter versions. THE ENTIRE LANGUAGE MUST BE REBUILT. … or just tell them all that they aren’t allowed to speak a patriarchical, totally gendered language like Spanish anymore and have to start speaking nothing but English. But Western Leftists hate English, so maybe they should force the gender-heavy SPanish to speak that weird click language? I don’t know if the clicks are gendered … they probably are, but to the Western Leftist, Africans can do no wrong, so it’s okay.
In any event, I’m going to throw my hat in the ring and propose “Latini“.
Psssst……don’t tell them, but the word “Latin” already exists, is gender neutral and has been in common English parlance to describe someone of Spanish, particularly Spanish American for 200 years.
Exactly. Why reinventand stupid. The word “Latin” suffices, beautifully. These Leftist and Dhimmi-crats are so appallingly arrogant, narcissistic and stupid.
This is really an exercise in raw power, with the Leftists and Dhimmi-crats flexing their cultural muscle, to revise the language to suit their fascistic whims.
Ah, the new ‘woke’ colonialism that seeks to impose its religion and culture norms upon brown minorities.
Pendejos.
Latine is too much like Latrine. Do you want to be a human urinal? Just imagine the Latine on her knees with an open mouth, taking in the yellow stream. This term won’t last long.
About 40 years ago someone decided to follow-up on the NYC is the Big Apple promotion by putting out bumper stickers with “Cleveland is a Plum.” I believe it was about 10nS before the first “Cleveland is a Slum” bumper sticker was printed. Marketing people in general aren’t very smart, and those at the top got there mostly by being evil. They just never seem to look at the unintended outcomes. Ask Charlie Finley how his “The Swinging A’s” campaign played out. 😉
This is yet still another further different example of white liberals (spelled “nice white ladies”) knowing what is best for those minorities who don’t know what is good for themselves, and need the nice white ladies to show them the way it should be done.
AKA -Affluent, White, Leftist/Liberal, Women or the acronym AWFL.
You forgot “University” as the fourth word. Now it flows.
Best me by 56 minutes!
“surging in popularity on university campuses, in museums, and among researchers and media.”
In other words, in reliably Leftist enclaves – and only in such areas. In the Real World™, not so much.
“Catch-all terms like Hispanic or Latino have come under scrutiny for blurring important nuances and presenting a large part of the U.S. population as a monolith.”
——-
So states Axios. Yet, this same outlet, as well as the rest of the Dhimmi-crat media lapdogs, trained seals, shills and propagandists, gleefully drop the characterization “white,” ad nauseum, as a pejorative and dehumanizing descriptor that is intended to strip millions of people of their individuality and unique heritage.
I repeatedly state that I don’t know any “white” Americans. I know Americans of Scottish, Irish, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, etc. descent.
We need a term like “patriarchy” that applies to academics and other useless leftists, because that’s what Latine represents. PhDarchy doesn’t really flow off the tongue. Nouns, articles, adjectives, gender is part and parcel of the Spanish language. I’d bet most of those using Latine don’t speak Spanish. Yet in their ignorant cultural arrogance they seek to impose their virtue signaling terminology on those who they perceive as beneath them. ¡No mas!
Latine is popular in museums? I thought dinosaurs were popular in museums. Someone also needs to inform my spell checker that “latine” is even a word.
The vile Leftists and Dhimmi-crats are so painfully stupid and un-self-aware that they can’t fathom that these attempts to impose the idiotic and contrived “Latinx” and “Latine” monikers represent the most manifestly obnoxious, paternalistic and arrogant acts of so-called “cultural appropriation,” imaginable.
Linguistic colonialism
That’s good!