As you said, it's 3% but in the US
The biggest issue with both "Latinx" and the Spanglish topic is that latin america is such a diverse concept that any broad statement about how much acceptable it is or not will probably be wrong.
I've seen the x used in written text outside of white academy since years and years ago here in Chile (Todxs, Nosotrxs, etc). A lot of people hate it here, but then you need to start asking if they hate it because it's hard to use it in spoken spanish (a valid concern imo), or because it's gender neutral. The use of the "e" is starting to be used more broadly (Todes, Nosotres, etc.), and it gets a lot - and I mean A LOT - of pushback because it's a "profanity of language" and "we already have gender neutral, just use the o"
So when some people here say that the latinx it's just a white thing, I am baffled. Then it hits me, that's probably the case for Latino Americanos, as in, Latines that live in the US.
So that research shouldn't really be drilled into everyone's mind because that just alienates latines from the rest of the world because of an American thing.
Thank you. It feels like discussion of "Latinx" ends up conflating "white people made it up" (which is false), "don't you dare use it for latine people unless they say to," "you're colonizing our language," how LatAm people both inside and outside of the USA would react to it, and the actual criticisms of the term itself, making it nearly impossible to actually discuss the dang thing.
Like, there are so many different nuances here. Not every LatAm person speaks Spanish (from people whose parents/ancestors immigrated to the USA and didn't teach them the language to areas where Spanish isn't the primary language), which is a point against "it's hard to say." At the same time, it CAN be difficult to say for people who speak Spanish natively, and we can't deny how widespread Spanish is for us.
For those of us that don't speak Spanish or have a hard time with it, especially if we grew up outside of a Latin American or even South American country, "it's hard to say" comes across to me less like "let's find something that works internationally" and more like "shut up, we don't need this." And then we get into the small percentage of people polled that do use it--of
course it would be a small percentage. Most people fall into the gender binary! Unless you're someone that's in a queer space, feminist space, or are otherwise in-the-know about "Latinx"/"Latine"/etc., it's only natural to use the gendered version.
And then all of that is before we even get into the pushback against gender-neutral terms, the existence of homophobia, the existence of transphobia, etc.
It's interesting that you say it seems like it's mostly USA-based LatAm people refer to it as something that white people created! I was under the impression that, regardless of news headlines and such using it, it came primarily from Latinx/Latine people here in the States.
Personally, I find it frustrating when people actively tell others
not to use "Latinx" to refer to LatAm people as a whole. As you said, it's meant to be a gender-neutral term--not just a term for people who don't fit within the gender binary, but also a way to refer to groups of LatAm people as a whole without defaulting to "Latino" if there's even just a single man in the group. I've switched over to "Latine" myself, but I view it kind of like I do "queer," though the history is vastly different. It's an umbrella term that not everyone has to like, and if someone doesn't want to be referred to with it, that's totally fine... but trying to make it off-limits as an umbrella term itself is not, imo.
