Terminology & Identities in a Latinx Research Guide
By Aaron Aruck
As a public fellow at the GLBT Historical Society for the summer of 2020, I surveyed the archives’ collections related to Latinx people to compile a new research guide. As part of this process, the archives staff and I had multiple conversations about whether the guide should use the term “Latinx” as an appropriate, clear and respectful identity category.
Screenshot from video of the 1977 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade; footage by Crawford Barton, Crawford Barton Papers (1993-11), GLBT Historical Society.
In recent decades, the term “Latino/a” has been used to identify people from Latin America and those with Latin American heritage living in the U.S. This term has functioned as a more inclusive replacement for the outdated and problematic label “Hispanic,” which carries colonial and racialized connotations and privileges the Spanish language as a marker for belonging. “Latinx” has emerged more recently as a way of noting a connection to Latin America without the problem of reductive gendering implicit in the terms “Latino/a,” from Spanish-language grammatical rules.
Language, Location, Locality
However, as with any identity category, “Latinx” is not without representational shortcomings. Many people of Latin American descent feel that “Latinx” does a particular violence to the Spanish language. Furthermore, several of the archival collections, such as the Collection of Materials on Costa Rican Lesbians and the Clark L. Taylor Papers, document the lives of people in Latin America who were not living in the United States. For these collections, the signifier Latino/a or Latinx seems tenuously applied at best.
Another important point is the fact that many groups primarily identify regionally, nationally or historically and not with such a decidedly broad term. Those collections that relate to Mexican Americans, for example, might be best served by the term “Chicano/a,” particularly as they document histories of labor, internal colonialism and the civil-rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
After careful consideration and deliberation, though, we have decided to employ the term Latinx because we feel it is the most inclusive and reflective of present-day identity constructions. I am struck by archivists’ painstaking efforts to constantly evaluate the respectfulness and inclusiveness of their language choices in grouping, cataloging and recording collections.
Identity categories — for better or worse — are tools we use as researchers wading through thousands of documents, and I am humbled to have partaken in a significant, if necessarily imperfect effort to describe collections that occupy the fuzzy and unstable edges of these categories of belonging.
Aaron Aruck is serving as a public fellow at the GLBT Historical Society in summer 2020 through the Humanities Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is working on his Ph.D. in history.