Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) are pitching a bill that would ban the use of the term “Latinx” from official government communications, the Texas senator’s office announced Thursday.
“Hispanic Americans overwhelmingly oppose the term ‘Latinx,’ and I want to make sure our government does not bow to woke activists in our federal departments or agencies by insisting on ridiculous terminology like this,” Cruz said in a release, adding that the term “has no place in official government communication.”
The bill, called the Respect for Hispanic Americans Act, would prohibit federal agencies from using “Latinx” — a gender-inclusive variation of the Spanish terms Latino and Latina — in official communications or forms from agency heads or employees.
Though many Democrats and progressives picked up the gender-neutral term, some Spanish-speakers criticized the term’s -x ending, both because it replaces the Spanish grammar construction of the male -o and female -a endings and because the sound is difficult to pronounce in the language.
A Pew Research survey conducted in 2019 found less than one-quarter of U.S. adults who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino had heard of the term Latinx, and that just 3 percent said they use the term to describe themselves. A Gallup survey conducted in 2021 found that just 4 percent of Hispanic Americans use the “Latinx” term to describe their ethnic group.
“Hispanic Americans don’t need fabricated woke terminology imposed on us. The term ‘Latinx’ has no place in our federal agency’s official communication as it’s a degradation tossed around by progressive elites,” Rubio said in the release.
Cruz also knocked the “made-up term” on Twitter.
In the House, Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) introduced a similar bill earlier this year, called the Reject Latinx Act.
Salazar at the time accused the Biden administration of “waging a woke crusade on Latino identity and the Spanish language,” with her office labeling the term in a release as “a woke invention of the neo-Marxist left.”