The United States is definitely a country of contrasts. While some people celebrate the start of Hispanic Heritage Month, which marks the Mexican declaration of independence from Spain by Miguel Hidalgo on September 16, 1811, by filling downtown Chicago with mostly Mexican flags and the sounds and tastes from down the Rio Bravo others decide to participate in the culture wars that are consuming mainstream America and slowly creeping into Latino families.
It is the case of Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (D) Ward 35, who posted on Twitter on September 15 that:if we commit to Latinidad as an inclusive, unifying and liberating political project, then we must work towards building a Latinidad that dismantles patriarchy and transphobia. Using gender-neutral language like Latin or Latin helps us reach that horizon.”
When another user replied in the same thread that Latinos don’t like or care about the use of X’s at the end of words, he responded with a laughing emoji followed by text that read, “You’re so stupid.” .
The tweet was a response to Alderman Raymond Lopez’s own tweet that said, “Anyone who uses LatinX is insulting my heritage.” Which was a sensible comment and in tune with what most Latinos in America feel about the decline of academically invented inclusive language. This unfolds when just a few decades ago Latinos avoided learning or speaking Spanish to avoid being profiled on the road or at work.
Just to clarify, I support with all my might the right of people to live their lives as they want and be called as they want. But I expect the same respect for my culture and language.
Any attempt to transform the Spanish language from above, without this being a natural process certified by our established institutions for its regulation, is nothing more than an expression of cultural colonialism that decants almost into discrimination.
When I was in high school I met a member of the Venezuelan Academy of the Spanish Language, Dr. Alexis Márquez Rodriguez. In a speech he gave to the senior students at my school, he told us that Spanish had in fact changed.
He said that after more than 100 years of American influence – the US owned many oil fields in my country – Venezuelans call the security guards “Guachimanes”, say they will “cachar” the bus, or search with courtesy of their friends to “pichar” them a cold beer.
He added that these and many other words became part of the Venezuelan Spanish lexicon and were subsequently accepted by the Royal Academy of Language in famous dictionary.
Who knows if the Americans working in the oil fields of Maracaibo and Maturin wanted us to use and learn their words.
But Alderman Ramirez-Rosa and the people in the elite don’t seem to understand these cultural nuances, they don’t want to wait for American cultural influences to settle in and education to change. A significant portion of Latin Americans still feel that LGBTQ+ issues and adapting language to them are not big discussions.
They just want to make a difference in our language through what they call “a revolution”.
It is better called a The invasion. Ramirez-Rosa added in the same series of posts on September 15, 2022 that Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs who lived in the Valley of Mexico in the pre-Cortesian era, was gender neutral and that we lose nothing by trying to be inclusive.
But he fails to mention that later in history a more technologically advanced Spanish Empire used coercion and the full weight of its culture—Catholicism, the Castilian language, European rules of society—to finally crush the original civilizations of the Valley of Mexico.
Now, many centuries after the Latins built a culture of their own, a mixture of all the human civilizations that converged on our continent during colonial times, other invaders, with another flag – that of “salvation” – want to impose themselves on us again. their truth and tell us what is right and wrong.
It feels very much like a revival of Manifest Destiny politics, but this time the “civilization” they are bringing us is not trains, industry, imperialism and manners.
Their Manifest Destiny doctrine now consists of changing how Latin Americans view the institution of the family, how we speak our language, and what our children should learn about sexual identification in school.
Sadly, Alderman Ramirez-Rosa is not alone in this tendency to shame Latin Americans and try to arbitrarily impose changes in the way we speak and live.
The American mainstream media responds to this call by echoing this barbarization of our societies. Just check out this damn New York Times article about it DECISION of the provincial government of Buenos Aires to limit the use of inclusive Spanish so that children can write formal Spanish: that which is accepted in courts, schools and workplaces.
Spaniards who more than 97 percent of our people talk in their daily life.
The Royal Academy of Languages determined in a 2020 report that using the consonant “X” instead of a vowel is unnatural (“unnatural”) in Spanish. We cannot pronounce it except with any vowel. Yet these elites—yes, if you’re Latino and went to college or are currently part of an elite—can’t understand that their worldview is fundamentally different from that of the majority of people Ramirez-Rosa claims to represent.
Ramirez-Rosa is so steeped in this elite and their American exceptionalism that his attempt to appear revolutionary by using “Latinidad” as an American political movement—not the cultural identity it encompasses—is, to put it mildly, , to laugh.
By this I am not saying that protecting Latino heritage means giving up on taking responsibility for changing society from within, as we see is necessary in some Latinos. democratic districts in LA and elsewhere.
I also believe we should never forget the legacy left by visionaries and activists like Cesar Chavez who made Latinos the powerful political and cultural group we are today.
But Latinos in the US and south of the border worry about a faltering economy that is crushing our working-class families, they worry about racial discrimination and police profiling, they worry about political violence.
People from Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia worry about the spread of communist ideas that have proven harmful to everyone over the past hundred years, they struggle with inflation eating away at their meager wages, and they worry about the oppression of not being able to just be a Latino and express their culture and be free to express it without being called transphobic.
The struggle for an inclusive Spanish is not yet an important issue for Latinos. We had already developed in our language ways of being more inclusive, but these ways of speaking had not been adopted anywhere Cervantes was spoken of.
Latinos can be culturally competent and understand the nuances of American life, and of course, support Ramirez-Rosa’s and anyone else’s use of the term “latinx” [sic] in English only because it might make sense culturally, although people who consider themselves Latino rarely use it and often hate it.
But you can’t be inclusive by calling people transphobic or stupid just because they defend their heritage. This is simple colonialism, or in Spanish “inclusive” cxlxnxxlxsmx. In any case, behavior like that of Martinez-Roza and his allies is inciting in our communities nothing less than one: YANKEE KO HOME! Followed by a well-deserved: Respect to be respected.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/opinion/midterms-latino-voters.html
