The emergence of the term “Latinx” has sparked widespread contemplation, controversy, and curiosity. In today’s post, Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW, digs into the roots of Latinx in an effort to more fully understand her own. What, she wonders, does identifying as Latinx mean to me?

 

In conversation with a close friend, I used the term Latina and he informed me, “That term isn’t used anymore. Now we say Latinx.”

“Really?” I replied. “Since when?”

I felt confused and anxious. When another friend and colleague informed me of her evolution to self-identify as Latinx, I became more interested in the use of this term.

The movement to deconstruct identity under white constructs is not a new one, as we have seen in the Chicano movement and elsewhere. This blog post will discuss the emergence and importance of Latinx, as it relates to intersectional identities around race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, culture, and class.

In 2004, the term Latinx emerged for those who are gender nonconforming and in the transgender community. Latino/Latina, Hispanic, and Latin are some of the words that describe Latin Americans with origins in or descendants from Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Latinx grew in popularity after the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016 and is now populating mainstream academia and professional associations, many of which are changing their names. None of my relatives in El Salvador or Nicaragua use Latinx, nor do my nieces and nephews refer to themselves as Latinx. They all shared my reaction to the use of the “x” as if it were stripping us of our Latinidad.

In an effort to understand, I collected some data. I discovered that some academics in Latin American countries are using Latinx in their research and that, despite the rapid growth in its use in the United States, only 2% of the U.S. Latin American population use the term. My fellow Latin American colleagues enlightened me about their decision to self-identify as Latinx, feeling that it better represents their experience that embodies more than gender. For them, embracing the inclusionary Latinx is emblematic of rejecting white supremacist constructs. So what is the controversy? Amongst our Latino/Latina/Latinx brothers and sisters, several components are up for debate, specifically around Spanish as a gendered language. Those who are in support of the term stress that it is more inclusive of all identities (race, class, gender, etc.) and remind us that most indigenous languages are non-gendered. Those who are against it argue that American progressives are changing our Spanish language and that Latinx is “linguistic imperialism.”

With thirty-three countries in all of Latin America and the Caribbean, we are a very diverse group of peoples across race, ethnicity, tribes, rituals, and histories. What we all have in common is colonization and imperialism. I realize now what it means to “x” out, as a colleague referred to it, the gendered part of the word Latina/Latino. We are “x”-ing out dominance and claiming our place in a privileged and powerful society. We are “x”-ing out the Spaniards that colonized indigenous people in Latin America. Perhaps it is in my own privilege and power that made it difficult for me to bring forth the psychic colonization of language and the erasure of the indigenous people in a land where I claim cultural and ethnic heritage. Being a white Latina, I am compelled to find my own truth and speak from that place, to state that my ancestry likely traces back to the oppressors that raided these lands. This is painful to express given my mixed heritage of Spanish, indigenous, and Basque blood, the latter of which were an oppressed people under the Franco regime. What does this imply for me, then? Does this mean I have internalized patriarchal systems of power? While I am a white Latina, I do not identify as white because, in the formation of my cultural and ethnic identity, I have not experienced the privilege gained from whiteness. After all my conversations with friends, relatives, and colleagues, I have concluded that Latinx is, in essence, an act of decolonization. In the spirt of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, it is not to be confused for an act of resistance; rather, it is one of liberation, power, and reckoning (1952).

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In recent years, psychoanalysis has seen a wave of scholarship on race, ethnicity, culture, immigration, gender, sexuality, and feminism and has been attempting to fill in the gaps in our literature, conferences, and training programs. The re-emergence of decolonization theories (Fanon, 1952; Césaire, 1955) is informing our psychoanalytic scholarship with a robust analysis of the dilemma of a colonized mind. Achille Mbembe in Critique of Black Reason (2017), for example, offers a potent critique of colonization theory, philosophy, and global history that adds richness to the discourse. Latinx opens an umbrella for multiple identities that have been excluded, dominated, colonized, and historically left out of our analytic conversations and consulting rooms.

Psychoanalysis is a means of identifying unconscious conflicts that map destructive patterns and interfere with living a productive and fulfilling life. In clinical practice, Latinx provides analysts and analysands an opportunity for rupture, repair, and restoration as they navigate between them the entanglements of privilege and power around race, ethnicity, and gender. What psychic defenses are getting in the way of breaking free from historical oppression, trauma, and colonization? How does the legacy of slavery, anti-blackness, anti-brownness, and indentured servitude shape a person’s internal world? Asserting a Latinx identity is a powerful statement that informs us that this person is aware of their complex traumatic histories of marginalization and colonization. We as analysts are then tasked to work from an intersectional framework that interweaves race, ethnicity, and gender, taking great care not to oppress any of these identities (Collins, 2008).

In a dramatic move towards liberation, we are finally feeling our full selves and taking our power back. With the “x,” we are decolonizing the Latin American mind.

 

Interested in intersectionality? Join Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW, for her upcoming course, “Intersectionality in Psychoanalytic Practice: Informing Your Practice Through the Lens of Intersectionality,” Fridays, January 10, 17, 24 and 31, 3-5 pm.

$240; $160 for candidates
8 CEUs for NYS social workers

Learn more and register HERE

 

Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW, is Founder and Co-Chair of the Committee for Race and Ethnicity at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is Co-Chair of the Inter-Institute Task Force Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in New York, serves on the Organizing Committee with Reflective Spaces/Material Places in San Francisco and New York, and is Member-at-Large of the Division 39 Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology’s Section IX for Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility. She is on faculty at the Training Institute for Mental Health and the Weill Cornell Center on Human Rights in New York and at the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology in San Francisco. Her interests are in undoing racism, community psychoanalysis, decolonization, social justice, Latino/Latinx, immigration, and intersectionality.  

 

References

Césaire, A. (1955). Discourse on colonialism. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.

Collins, P.H. (2008). Reply to commentaries: black sexual politics revisited. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 9(1), 68-85.

Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.

Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of black reason. Durham: Duke University Press.    

 

 

 

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