Oscar Almonte Espinal

It’s Hispanic Heritage Month and while many universities, corporations, news outlets and the government are celebrating Hispanic-American’s contributions to this nation, there is still a debate occurring within the Hispanic-American community on whether the term “Hispanic” is the correct term to identify this community.

Since its inception in the 1970s, under the administration of Richard Nixon, the term Hispanic has been an ingrained term to define and identify the collective Latin American community inside and outside the U.S. However, some argue that, “Hispanic refers to anyone from Spain or Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America. It, therefore, promotes Spanish heritage, something many oppose because of the violent ways that they colonized our countries and the erasure of Afro-Latinos and Indigenous people.”

To counteract the erasure that happens with the term Hispanic, the word Latinx surfaced in the early 2000s. Merriam-Webster defines this term Latinx as, “relating to, or marked by Latin American heritage —used as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina.” Inclusive of non-binary and transgender people, Latinx has been taking popular culture and social media by storm.

Many universities and institutions, including Penn State Abington, have embraced Latinx by changing their Latin American organizations names and programs to this term. In fact, on Sep. 18, Penn State Abington led a “Latinx Heritage Month” conversation with four Latinx professors across the Penn State commonwealth to discuss this divided between Hispanic and Latinx.

Similar to Hispanic, the term Latinx has also met heavy criticism from scholars and the media. The New York Times reports, “In part, it’s a linguistic issue: Latinx just doesn’t translate to Spanish, some argued. A commenter from Ohio wrote that, if you’re a Spanish speaker, ‘the term Latinx reads like a thousand nails in a thousand blackboards.’”

The Pew Research Center also released a study in August 2020, stating that, “about one-in-four U.S. Hispanics have heard of Latinx, but just 3% use it.” This statistic is staggering considering the debate that is occurring.

Granting this divide between the use of Hispanic and Latinx, The New York Times reports that a scholar said, “even if the terms are not always understood, it’s important to be ‘inclusive of all those identities that have had less visibility in our conversations, in our books, in our movies.”