Pronounced “La-teen-ex.” A gender-neutral word, increasingly used instead of Latino and/or Latina, to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity. The -x suffix replaces the standard o/-a ending of nouns and adjectives, used to signify grammatical gender in Spanish. Its plural is Latinxs. Can also be used as an alternative to Latino or Latina for people who don’t necessarily identify as female or male. This could include people who identify as agender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming, genderqueer and gender fluid.
Be aware that many people who identify as Latino/a or Hispanic are not familiar with the term Latinx. Only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino had heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% said they used it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.
Read more in this article in Latina magazine.
Updated February 2021
