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What’s the difference between Hispanic, Latino, Latinx and Latine?

People often want to know which term — Hispanic, Latino or Latinx — is the most respectful. But it really depends on the person and context.

“Hispanic” refers to any of the peoples in the Americas and Spain who speak Spanish or are descended from Spanish-speaking communities. It was coined in the 1970s by the U.S. Census Bureau to offer a pan-ethnic name for peoples such as Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans and others, whose social, economic and political needs were often ignored.

According to UC Berkeley's Cristina Mora, before the term “Hispanic” was adopted, the census enumerators would often check off people such as Mexican Americans as “White” on the census forms.

In contrast to Hispanic, the term Latino describes any person with ancestry in Latin America, a politically defined region usually unified by the predominance of Romance languages. This definition usually includes Portuguese-speaking Brazil and French-speaking Haiti, but excludes Spain.

But what about Latinx??

For some, the pronunciation of the word is cryptic: la-TEENGKS? LA-tin-EX? For others, it represents a kind of language imperialism by imposing a new English word onto a Spanish word and rendering it unpronounceable.

Latinx is essentially a non-binary form of Latino or Latina. The suffix “-x” replaces the “-o” or “-a” corresponding to masculine or feminine, allowing the word to resist the gender binary. (In Spanish-speaking countries, the term Latine with the suffix “-e” is circulating as an alternative to the -o/a binary.)

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