From the Los Angeles Times:
‘Latinos’ is out, ‘Latinx’ is in at UC San Diego in nod to evolving gender and sexuality terms
By GARY ROBBINS, DEC 02, 2018 | 8:20 AM
UC San Diego has begun using new words to refer to Latinos and Chicanos in a move that reflects the profound change that’s occurring nationally in the way many people define their gender and sexuality.
The gender-specific terms Latino and Chicano are being selectively replaced with Latinx and Chicanx to promote acceptance of virtually anyone who falls under the headings.
The change is being promoted by students, social justice activists and the LGBTQ community, which are trying to get people to look beyond conventional notions of gender, sex and appearance.
As broadly used, Latino refers to people of Latin American origin or descent.
Latinx includes men and women of Latin American descent, people who are not exclusively male or female, people who don’t think of themselves as a man or a woman, and people who don’t act or dress in ways that are common to people of their gender.
The same basic definition applies to Chicanx, with the exception of heritage. Chicanos are Americans of Mexican descent.
What about “Hispanx?”
Corporations should sponsor these new words. The Spanx brand would likely pony up some serious cash to make “Hispanx” mandatory at colleges across America.
Heterosexual African American men could be renamed Under Armour-Americans in return for a hefty annual retainer.
“This is about making the university more inclusive,” said Becky Pettit, UC San Diego’s vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion.
From The Triton:
More than 70 faculty members are asking for answers after the Director of the Center for Engaged Teaching (CET), Jace Hargis, was terminated from his position this year and the encompassing center was reorganized with a new lead: Carolyn L. Sandoval, the wife of Vice Chancellor Dr. Becky Pettit.
An official announcement declared that the Triton was all wrong, Ms. Sandoval and Ms. Pettit weren’t exactly married and, anyway, Ms. Sandoval was getting an all new position.
But, my impression is that the upper reaches of University of California management has been a hotbed of lesbian backscratching for many years now. Almost nobody in the press seems interested in this story, even when the UC Santa Cruz chancellor Denice Denton leapt to her death from the roof of the luxury highrise of her lesbian lover, for whom Denton had obtained a $192k job with UC.
But even that got virtually no news coverage because it’s just another dog bites person story: practically every week presidents of major universities who are involved in lesbian financial scandals leap 50 stories to their deaths in San Francisco. Plummeting college presidents is practically a cliche.
“We’re meeting students where they are.”
Or where we want them to be.
The university also is trying to more broadly appeal to Latinos, an area where it has lagged behind some University of California campuses.
Nothing says respect for Latino culture and the Spanish language more than neutering it with weird sci-fi neologisms.
… Schools like Grossmont and MiraCosta colleges already use those terms in their publicity. So does UC Irvine. The University of San Diego holds a Chicanx/Latinx graduation.
But deeper change is being sought. And it involves two words — Latinx and Chicanx — that are not widely used by the general public, partly because there’s confusion about what the words mean and how they are pronounced.
People are especially perplexed by Latinx, which was reflected in a reader survey published this year by Remezcla, a media company.
The survey found that readers were almost evenly divided between pronouncing Latinx as latin-x and la-teen-x. A small percentage preferred lah-tinks. Still others have suggested referring to Latinos as Latin@, a gender-neutral term that hasn’t caught on. …
The issue of gender identity also has surfaced in the way students apply for undergraduate admission to the University of California system.
Students can now choose from heterosexual/straight, bisexual, gay and lesbian to describe their sexuality.
Under gender, they can select gender nonconforming, genderqueer, transgender, trans man, trans male, trans woman or trans female. …
The San Diego Union-Tribune asked Pettit whether some people will view words such as Latinx as an act of political correctness, leading to blowback against the campus.
“I think the nature of higher education as institutions is to create spaces for resistance and for people to redefine themselves and for people to redefine the world that they want to live in,” Pettit said.
“I don’t mean to sound flippant, but that’s what universities exist for: to allow people to think freely, to allow people to redefine and shift culture.”
And if you don’t shift in exactly the demeaning fashion we’ve instructed you to shift, we shall crush you like a bug.
