Dem Rep Bans Staffers From Using ‘Latinx’

‘When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use’

Karl Salzmann • December 6, 2021 6:20 pm

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) announced Monday that he bans his staffers from using the term “Latinx.”

“To be clear my office is not allowed to use ‘Latinx’ in official communications,” Gallego wrote on Twitter. “When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.”

Gallego’s announcement comes on the heels of a nationwide poll that found 40 percent of Latino voters say “Latinx,” a gender-neutral word for their ethnicity coined by left-wing activists, “bothers or offends them.”

Only 2 percent say they use the term to describe themselves.

The poll, which was conducted by Bendixen & Amandi International, found that 68 percent of Hispanic voters use the word “Hispanic” to describe their ethnicity, while 21 percent use “Latino” or “Latina.” Thirty percent of respondents went so far as to say they would be less likely to support a politician who uses “Latinx.”

Prominent Democratic politicians, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden, and journalists have embraced the term, which left-wing activists and academics invented to avoid the Spanish language’s gender binary of “Latino” and “Latina.”

This poll is not the first to find that Latino Americans oppose “Latinx.” A Gallup poll found in August that just 4 percent of Hispanics use “Latinx” to describe themselves. A Pew survey found last year that most Hispanics have never heard of the word.

The Bendixen & Amandi poll comes as Latino voters have in the last few years increasingly shifted toward Republicans. Former president Donald Trump received unexpectedly high levels of Latino support in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and Hispanic voters were crucial to Republican Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s victory this year.