In the first week of taking office, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed several executive orders one of which establishes a policy regarding the use of “Latinx” in government documents. The executive order, signed on January 10, 2023, claims to “respect the Latino community by eliminating culturally insensitive words from official use.” It requires that state offices, departments and agencies review all documents for the use of the term Latinx and submit a written report of the findings. They have 60 days to revise all existing written materials and replace the term Latinx(s) with Hispanic(s), Latino(s) or Latina(s). The order does not comment on another gender-neutral term: Latine.
In Spanish and other Romance languages like French, and Portuguese, adjectives and nouns usually end in an “o” or an “a” preceded by the article “el” or “la”. These articles and endings are associated with gender and so words that do not inherently have a gender-orientation still have a grammatical gender. The masculine ending has been historically used for mixed-gender groups. However, as speakers develop new words to talk about changing ideas about gender, Spanish-speaking academics and activists have mostly recently suggested a gender neutral “elle” which combines the male pronoun, él, and the female pronoun, ella, for a person identifying as intersex, non-binary or transgender. In English, we use the pronouns she and he for women and men, and while they refers to more than one person it has also always been used to refer to a person whose gender is unknown. Latinx is in many ways an English word. It is also hard to pronounce in Spanish. For this reason, Spanish-speaking academics and activists have most recently been using “Latine.”
Spanish is spoken in over 20 countries around the world, including countries in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America, Central America and South America. People from all of these countries, including Spain, are Hispanic because they are Spanish-speaking. Latin America, a name first used by the French, refers to countries in the Western Hemisphere that speak Romance languages (Spanish, French or Portuguese). Latino does not refer to people from Spain, the Philippines or Equatorial Guinea, but it does include people from Brazil, Haiti, and French Giana. (Belize is the one country in Central America where the official language is English.)
The Real Academic Española, an institution based in Spain committed to preserving the good use and unity of Spanish in particular spelling, grammar and new words, has rejected the use of “x” as a gender-neutral alternative. The RAE is an organization similar in purpose to the Customary Law and Language Commission in the Marshall Islands. However, they are held in a different regard given the post-colonial relationship between Spain and the formally colonized countries that speak Spanish today. There is not the same affinity and connection that Marshallese communities in the U.S. have with governing institutions in the Marshall Islands. The Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, based in the United States, is not in complete agreement with the RAE on this issue. However, the League of United Latin American Citizens has stopped using Latinx in their official communications as of last year.
The executive order references a survey of Hispanic adults in the US, of which only 3% use the word “Latinx” to describe themselves and suggests that this means the population finds the term offensive. Other polls contradict this conclusion finding rather that about half of U.S. Latinos are comfortable with people using Latinx to refer to people of Spanish-speaking origin in the United States. Among this population, Latinx is in use among the younger, US born and bilingual, generation in a fight for gender equality and inclusivity.
At a minimum, this is a political move by Gov. Sanders if not a move against equality of non-conforming genders. Prior to midterm elections in 2022, a poll administered through Democratic Latino voter outreach found that 30% of Hispanic voters, including some Democrats though more Republicans, were less likely to support politicians who use the term Latinx. U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego from Arizona also denounced the term as one invented and forced on them by “White elites”.
This executive order has also been called out within the community in Northwest Arkansas for its exclusion of genders other than male and female. Irvin Camacho, a community organizer in Springdale Arkansas, explained that these are evolving terms and that as a community they are still trying to decide “what to use to describe ourselves.” He and others find the actions of the governor offensive because “ultimately it’s not really necessary to take any kind of action like that.” They take issue with “the fact that people are making decisions for our community without even reaching out to us.” While Sanders claims that this policy is motivated by cultural sensitivity, her twitter reveals an anti-trans bias dismissing criticism from the “liberal corporate media” as she roots out traces of the “radical left’s agenda” in Arkansas. Camacho commented on this bias saying that it seems “like this administration is attacking, unfortunately, these trans folks and these non-binary folks.” Camacho, a current Arkansas board member of the ACLU and a former candidate for State Representative for District 89, works for the Bail Project in Northwest Arkansas.