Rising political tide of young adults, Gen Z: An Interview of John Della Volpe, author of "Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America (2022)"

Friends:

I often wonder whether members of the Millennial or Gen Z generations know just how powerful they are. Together, they will be approximately 40 percent of the electorate in 2024. This is eye-popping, as far as I am concerned. Add to this growth of the Hispanic/Latinx Gen Z population to learn that "in each of the next few years, over 1 million Latino citizens will turn 18 and this trend will continue after it peaks in 2025."

As Harvard Institute of Politics pollster, John Della Volpe, aptly maintains, our youth have significant power in their hands to determine the future of this country—if they will only do so. 2024 is not an election to sit out of, my Millennial and Zoomer friends, but rather to exercise your voice to put our country on a path to a better world.

I'm really curious about and interested in an observation that Della Volpe and others are making, which is that Gen Z as a group, cares about the underdog. I'm hearing this in this Gen Z podcast I listen to titled, "#GenZ," as well as in other analyses, for example, one published in Archrival that distinguishes Gen Z from earlier generations who viewed world events indirectly through news accounts while Gen Z views the world directly through the eyes of the persons experiencing a particular situation, making it easier for them to be empathetic with others since they're getting news straight from the source. Endless TikTok, Instagram, and other social media feeds make this possible.  

Aside from reading the interview below, I also highly recommend Della Volpe's book titled, "Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America (2022). It's well-written, inspired, and inspiring. 

Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Cruz, A. & Romero, L. (2023, October 2). How the growing Latino vote could factor in to 2024 election: Latinos are now the second largest group of voting-age Americans, ABC News.

Della Volpe, J. (2022). Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America, St. Martin's Press.

Peterson, J. C. (nd.). Gen Zs resolve to build a more empathetic culture in 2021, Archrival.

Rising political tide of young adults, Gen Z

Polling expert points to backlash after expulsion of 2 Black Tennessee legislators
in their 20s after gun-control rally in wake of Nashville school shooting

Reps. Justin Jones (left) and Justin Pearson were expelled over their role 

in a gun-control  protest on the Tennessee House floor in the aftermath of a 

deadly school shooting. Both were later reinstated.

George Walker IV/AP Photo

by Christina Pazzanese | The Harvard Gazette Staff Writer

April 14, 2023

The expulsion of two Black state Democratic lawmakers in their 20s by the predominantly white, Republican-controlled Tennessee House in late March ignited backlash across the country. Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were ousted for rallying in the House with local activists and student protesters in support of stricter gun controls following a school shooting in Nashville that left six dead. Both men were voted back into office last week.

What started as a modest gun-control protest outside the Tennessee state house erupted into a national cause after Jones and Pearson characterized their removal as an effort to silence Gen Z voices, disempower communities of color, and weaken democracy.

The incident is yet another example of the political potency of Generation Z, the 70 million young Americans born between 1997 and 2012 (aged 11-25). Since 2018, members of Gen Z have become politically engaged on issues like gun control, the environment, reproductive health, education, and racial justice, and, increasingly, running for office. The Gazette spoke with John Della Volpe, director of polling for the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. The IOP conducts the twice annual Harvard Youth Poll, a national survey of college-age Americans on political issues and trends. Results from the Spring 2023 Harvard Youth Poll on gun safety will be released April 24. Della Volpe’s 2022 book “Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America,” chronicled the impact the country’s youngest voter demographic is already having on U.S. politics. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

(Pearson will appear in a Harvard Kennedy School discussion Wednesday at 6 p.m., moderated by Archon Fung, director, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government.)

Q&A

John Della Volpe

GAZETTE: How would you describe Gen Z socially and politically?

DELLA VOLPE: They are the most diverse, the most educated generation in American history. And like other cohorts of Americans who have seen their share of trauma and chaos in the country, this generation is unique in that they don’t have a collective memory of America coming together or united. They don’t have a memory of Sept. 11, nor Sept. 12, nor Sept. 13. So that’s one thing that stands this generation apart from all generations since the Greatest Generation.

The second thing is, they’ve had this ongoing period of disquiet in their lives. From the Great Recession, the havoc that placed on so many American families — 80 percent of families lost 20 percent of their wealth during the Great Recession — when they were young. Their earliest memories of school oftentimes [is] hiding under a desk for regular school shooter drills.

By the time they’re in middle school and high school, they’re dealing with younger people in their community suffering from depression, opioid abuse. Sadly, we saw a significant increase in suicides once they turned into adolescents. Followed by the chaos in our politics, white nationalism through COVID.

“I think any place where Gen Z feels like others are marginalized, they’ll show up,” says John Della Volpe, whose book “Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America,” chronicles the impact the country’s youngest voter demographic is already having on U.S. politics. Courtesy of HKS

So, this is a generation that’s dealt with more trauma more quickly than any generation in 70 years. All that trauma happened before the oldest member of this generation turned 25, when neuroscience tells us that our brains are mature.

Once they turned 18 and got the right to vote, they had a kind of whiplash between President Obama and President Trump, [where they] can see the relevance of politics in their lives and the differences between the parties.

Of course, all that was supercharged on Feb. 14, 2018, when a shooter walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and, in the span of six minutes, shattered a community forever. It was those students, two of whom are at Harvard now, who challenged themselves, their peers, and the rest of America to stand up and organize and try to fight back.

In that 2018 midterm, we saw roughly a doubling of participation relative to the average turnout in midterm election years in the last 30-something years. In most of those elections, between 15 and 20 percent of people in their teens and 20s participated in a midterm election. When Gen Z entered the arena in 2018, we saw participation in the mid-30s. More than two-thirds, as much as 70 percent, of young people in ’18 voted for Democrats. And that trend of high levels of participation and high levels of support for Democrats has continued from ’18 to ’20 to ’22.

GAZETTE: Aside from gun violence, what other issues are animating Gen Z most?

DELLA VOLPE: Overarching are concerns about individual rights and freedoms, defined as the right of a woman to control her reproductive health; the right of all Americans to breathe clean air and clean water; the right of every child to be guaranteed a quality education; and the right of younger people to feel safe from school shootings and all Americans to feel safe in public spaces. Those are the top three or four issues animating young people.

GAZETTE: Gen Z and Millennials together will soon dominate the electorate. Where are they now and how do these groups compare politically?

DELLA VOLPE: Millennials and Gen Z will be roughly 40 percent of the electorate in ’24.

These two generations travel together in terms of their political values, and the way in which they view the world government. Both generations care about the same issues. They believe in a robust government to solve some of the systemic issues facing this nation.

The biggest difference is Gen Z has an urgency about their approach that Millennials lack. Millennials seem more comfortable working outside of the traditional systems, in nonprofits, and in their communities, to tackle the issues they care about. Whereas Gen Z seems committed to using all the tools in their civic toolbox — voting, running for office, as well as everything else that Millennials were doing. There’s an urgency, almost a desperation in some cases, I’d say, when you talk to some of the more active members of Gen Z.

GAZETTE: The expulsion of Tennessee state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson by a white Republican supermajority ignited a fierce backlash nationally. Some, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, predicted the incident would only strengthen and “radicalize” young voters politically. Do you anticipate the conflict in Tennessee and young voter turnout that helped elect a Democratic justice to the Wisconsin state supreme court will further tighten Gen Z’s embrace of its emerging political power?

DELLA VOLPE: I absolutely do. I wouldn’t necessarily use AOC’s word “radicalization,” but I believe what we saw last week and what we’re seeing is a generation who’s not only voting in even-year federal elections, but they’re now translating that enthusiasm and that passion into elections for statewide office, as well as a movement for those three things you talked about. I think what we’re seeing now that Gen Z is able to show their political muscle virtually anywhere at any time.

GAZETTE: How do you anticipate that political muscle flexing to manifest itself?

DELLA VOLPE: I think in all the ways you’d expect, and that includes more young people running for office, and more young people participating in local politics, in state politics. So, I’m watching what’s happening in Florida carefully; I’m watching what’s happening in Idaho, in Texas. That’s where this movement could be extended to a local basis. Remember, up until the last year or so, a lot of the young Gen Z organizers were only able to organize on Zoom and on Slack and on text because of COVID. So, we’re just beginning to see what happens when a generation that has spent most of the time online uses more traditional grassroots organizing practices.

GAZETTE: You’ve said Gen Z was arguably the GOP’s worst nightmare. What did you mean by that?

DELLA VOLPE: Gen Z are values-based voters motivated by a protection and expansion of basic rights — clean air, clean water, to feel safe in school, reproductive rights. They’re concerned about those who are more vulnerable themselves, specifically members of the LGBTQ community. Basically, the protection of our democracy. Those are what I would call the table stakes. Unless members of Gen Z are engaging with individuals or parties who align with their sense of priorities or values, they’re not going to get very far in terms of convincing them to support a cause or to vote for them. In the last two elections, at least 2020 and 2022, Republicans won the vote of everybody over the age of 45 handily. There was a “Red wave” among voters over 45. It’s the turnout, the participation, and the support for Democrats that blunted that. That’s why they are the Republicans worst nightmare.

GAZETTE: Surely, the GOP sees that the cultural and political issues they’re rallying around are turning off Gen Z voters. Do you see any indication that the party is trying to recalibrate any of their positions or messaging?

DELLA VOLPE: I don’t. There’s an article in The Hill where I made this exact point — these are values-based voters — and the Republicans [and] the author I talked to countered, “No, it’s a messaging problem.” Before you get to messaging, values need to align. The messenger has to be authentic and trustworthy, and then the message has to be clear and concise and persuasive. But the message doesn’t matter if values aren’t aligned, and the messenger isn’t authentic.

GAZETTE: What’s the best move for Democrats — sit back and just allow the Republicans to further alienate them? Or is there a way they can blow it with Gen Z?

DELLA VOLPE: Sitting back and focusing on other constituencies is the reason we had Donald Trump as president in 2016. You can never take this generation for granted. Every day, you have new members of Gen Z tuning into politics. They don’t have a natural affinity for [political] parties or for Democrats. It’s incumbent upon all parties to reach out and to listen and to work with members of this generation to show that they care. They’re empathetic, and they’ve got solutions to the challenges they care about.

GAZETTE: Is 2024 the next big test for their strength as a voting bloc?

DELLA VOLPE: I think any place where Gen Z feels like others are marginalized, they’ll show up. Wherever they feel vulnerable Americans are being taken advantage of, they’ll show up. I didn’t predict that they’d be showing up like they did in Nashville, but the Republican Party made it so. I don’t think we’re gonna have to wait until 2024 to see the impact of Gen Z.

UPCOMING EVENT: "Indigeneity and the Latinx Community," sponsored by the Harvard Latino Alumni Alliance

Friends,

Great opportunity by the Harvard Latino Alumni Alliance to attend an event next Saturday, October 17 at 1PM CST, addressing "Indigeneity and the Latinx Community." 

Thanks to Irene Gomez for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

DESCRIPTION: Latin America is home to over 800 Indigenous groups and 45 million Indigenous people, many of whom have migrated to the United States. Our Indigenous roots are often celebrated, yet the struggles and experiences of Indigenous people are regularly neglected or completely ignored in the mainstream. Join us for a conversation celebrating and unpacking Indigeneity within the Latinx community with Hugo Morales (AB '72 , JD ‘75) and Professors Floridalma Boj Lopez and Américo Mendoza-Mori on Saturday, 10/17, at 2 PM EST/ 11 AM PST.
Register HERE.

Rudy Ramirez is a brilliant theater director and we are so fortunate to have him here in Austin.  His equally brilliant and beloved mother, Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas, too.  Due in great part to the existence of the black-white binary—where race for these groups stubbornly equates to "black" or "white," invisiblizing Latinx peoples—we who are Latinx know just how woefully under-recognized in all our complexity we are in society, politics, and the arts.  Through his award-winning theater, Rudy is helping to change this.  And how better than through theater and the arts?  I love this quote from this piece:

"It's necessary to tell stories that say, 'Our beauty doesn't come from fitting into the idea of what a citizen or a woman should be, but rather, our absolute inability to be contained by those words.'" 

To get a taste of his magic, consider attending the FuturX  theater & performance festival next week at the VORTEX Theater.

Congratulations, Rudy! We love all that you do. By attending to our multiple marginalities, your raise silent voices and un-mute unspoken topics that promise to liberate, even as they complexify. Godspeed!

-Angela Valenzuela

Rudy Ramirez's FuturX Festival Puts Latinx Performance Center Stage

The theatrical Renaissance man moves Latinx performance out of the margins

BY TREY GUTIERREZ, FRI., NOV. 1, 2019

Rudy Ramirez (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Representation.  Its importance is a hot topic among theatremakers. But when the conversation shifts toward actually achieving it, Rudy Ramirez believes a lot is left unsaid. "People don't tend to think about diversity within communities of color. They don't think it's there." As a member of both the Latinx and queer communities, the award-winning director has time and time again found meaningful onstage inclusion either lacking or nonexistent. "I realized if I was going to talk about Latinx experience in a non-simplified way," Ramirez says, "it'd have to be from my own perspective."

In recent years, Ramirez has led a charge for broader Latinx visibility in Austin's performance scene. Doing so across several mediums, the artist's most notable push began in 2018 in the form of the FuturX Festival, a multi-day showcase of forward-thinking, Latinx-penned performances, including solo shows, plays, improv, and a host of avant-garde work.

Described by collaborators as a "theatrical Renaissance man," Ramirez seems the ideal candidate to organize this event. Since beginning his tenure as Vortex Repertory Company associate artistic director in 2011, the artist has earned a reputation (as well as five B. Iden Payne Awards and a Chronicle "Best of Austin" award) for staging fresh, challenging work. "Rudy has this ability to recognize and summon people's internal power," says actor/playwright Krysta Gonzales. "When you invite people in to see what they have to offer, magic happens."

At its core, FuturX is just that: an invitation to experiences typically hidden from the mainstream. "I'm interested in highlighting the margins of Latinidad," says Ramirez. "Latinx identity in dialogue with, say, indigenous, African American, trans, or queer identity." Considering their affinity for inclusive narratives – the artist is currently directing three: one for bilingual theatre company Teatro Vivo and two for FuturX – it's telling that until 2015, Ramirez hadn't staged a Latinx-written show: "There was no real opportunity to do anything that spoke to my background. Even when I found ostensibly 'Latinx' work, I wasn't connecting with it specifically."

Like many creatives of Mexican descent, Ramirez's heritage isn't exactly simple. Their father descended from a long line of working-class Tejanos and his mother from 20th-century Mexican landowners fleeing political unrest – leaving their son with a complicated understanding of class and race that never aligned with propagated Latinidad narratives. "Chicano theatre is often about certain experiences: being an immigrant or migrant worker. There are experiences of Mexicanidad that I'll never know – and to stage those stories would be appropriative." It doesn't help that these narratives are frequently resolved in predictable ways. "I've always been chafed at those plays that culminate in the embrace of family and tradition – 'Always trust what abuelita says.' As a queer person, I can't readily look at tradition as 'that's where home is.' The home I've mostly made for myself is with friends: my chosen family."

Ramirez would chase his own representation through playwriting, performing their solo piece Promised Land: A Radical Queer Revival in 2009 and the duo show Footnotes for People Who Don't Speak Spanish with Beliza Narvaez in 2011. Then, in 2015, things finally clicked. While directing Tanya Saracho's El Nogalar, a loose adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard set against the backdrop of Mexico's drug wars, they saw reflections of their family's unique backgrounds: namely, their father in the hardworking, class-conscious character Lopez. "[Nogalar] addresses prevailing attitudes in upper-class Mexican culture vs. working-class culture. It felt like two halves of myself meeting for the first time."

Today, El Nogalar remains a blueprint for Ramirez's FuturX planning, not only for its thematic freshness, but for how Saracho's writing refuses easy answers. "As terrifying as the drug cartels have been, they're one of the few opportunities for working-class folks to gain wealth in a segregated, caste-like society. Classism is always racism in Mexico, and there's nowhere near enough work about the racism we put on each other." Ramirez's eagerness to complicate conversations surrounding Latinidad would similarly draw them to directing FuturX's first headline performance, (Un)Documents, Jesús I. Valles' poetic solo show that, in addition to foregrounding queer Latinx intersectionality, balanced the question of "Why fight for citizenship if, to exist, it must delegitimize?" against "What happens without it?"

"Tension is one of my favorite words in theatremaking, saying, 'Neither answer is right, so let's sit in that neither-is-right-ness and experience the pull.' Maybe there we'll find something new." This year, in staging Krysta Gonzales' new play Más Cara at FuturX, the director aims to bring that same dramatic tension to another rarely seen experience: Latina womanhood. A fantastical dissection of gender expectation and tradition, 2019's flagship show follows headstrong Latina Alma on a lifelong journey toward self-respect. Her quest is aided by Mexican folklore goddesses Coatlicue, La Llorona, and Tonatzin – themselves representing archetypes of Mexican femininity. "While [Más Cara] is about empowerment for women, it refuses to say, 'And that's when I left my husband, lived my best life, got remarried ....' Sometimes you don't find somebody else, but nevertheless, respecting yourself necessitates that sacrifice."

As each passing rehearsal brings FuturX 2019 closer, Ramirez has been reflecting on how these performances shaped their up-and-coming festival. "It's necessary to tell stories that say, 'Our beauty doesn't come from fitting into the idea of what a citizen or a woman should be, but rather, our absolute inability to be contained by those words.'" While Ramirez will be the first to tell you that representation is a complex, multifaceted subject, it seems that so many of their efforts center on that basic idea of resisting containment, be it in the form of easy answers, tired narratives, or someone else's expectations. "When you're Latinx, so often you're told, 'You're just too much, too emotional, too sexual, too needy ...' I think sometimes the 'too much' is them saying, 'There's too many of you.' Look at some theatre seasons, and apparently, yeah, even one Latinx program is too much." Clearly, there's work to be done, but where better to begin than affording voice to unheard perspectives?

"We want to create work that says, 'I'm not too much. I'm enough,'" says Ramirez. "'And if you don't think so, you'd better get out of the way.'"

I disagree, generally, with this piece published in The Phoenix out of Swarthmore College. However, I find the argumentation fascinating. Check out the comments that follow. Click to the piece to get there.

It's a great piece—together, I insist, with the helpful commentaries that follow—for teachers that want to sort these kinds of things out in their classrooms. Without a full airing, however, you do risk getting people really angry. And we must always remember no matter what that Spanish for us in the U.S. is alway the colonizer's language, an artifact of the colonization of our indigenous tongues and that colonization in these very ways, continues into the present.

Moreover, we can simultaneously love the Spanish language as we can and should love any language, and be critical of it's violent, imperialistic origins.

It also shows just how emotional a conversation this is. So tread carefully, my friends.

-Angela Valenzuela

The argument against the use of the term “Latinx”

November 19, 2015  Gilbert Guerra and Gilbert Orbea  53 Comments Latin American Studies, Latinx,linguistics

As we continually search for ways to improve gender inclusivity in Spanish, we have come up with a myriad of broad language such as Latino/a and Latin@. The most recent of these solutions is the term “Latinx.” In our opinion, the use of the identifier “Latinx” as the new standard should be discouraged because it is a buzzword that fails to address any of the problems within Spanish on a meaningful scale. This position is controversial to some members of the Latino community here at Swarthmore and beyond, but the other positions within the community also deserve to be heard. We are Latinos, proud of our heritage, that were raised speaking Spanish. We are not arguing against gender-inclusive language. We have no prejudice towards non-binary people. We see, however, a misguided desire to forcibly change the language we and millions of people around the world speak, to the detriment of all. Under the “degenderization” of Spanish advocated by proponents of words such as “Latinx” words such as latinos, hermanos, and niños would be converted into latinxs, hermanxs, and niñxs respectively. This is a blatant form of linguistic imperialism — the forcing of U.S. ideals upon a language in a way that does not grammatically or orally correspond with it.

The term “Latinx” is used almost exclusively within the United States. According to Google trend data, “Latinx” came into popular use in October of 2014 and has since been widely popularized by American blogs and American institutions of higher education. The term is virtually nonexistent in any Spanish-speaking country. This is problematic for many reasons. It serves as a prime example of how English speakers can’t seem to stop imposing their social norms on other cultures. It seems that U.S. English speakers came upon Spanish, deemed it too backwards compared to their own progressive leanings, and rather than working within the language to address any of their concerns, “fixed” it from a foreign perspective that has already had too much influence on Latino and Latin American culture. The vast majority of people in Latin America from personal experience, would likely be confused and even offended by this attempt to dictate for them how their language is to be structured and how they ought to manage their social constructs. It is interesting to observe how many “Latinx” activists become outraged when a non-Latino person wears traditional Latino costumes such as sombreros without understanding the significance of what they are wearing when they themselves participate in a form of reverse appropriation. To be clear – this is not to say these Latinos are detached from the culture, but rather taking American ideals and social beliefs and inserting into a language that has widespread use in places outside of the U.S. Rather than taking from a culture or people a part of them without respect or reverence for it, this reverse appropriation aims to put into a culture a part of one’s own beliefs. This is not the forced and unwarranted taking of culture but rather the forced and unnecessary giving of incompatible segments of U.S. culture.

Perhaps the most ironic failure of the term is that it actually excludes more groups than it includes. By replacing o’s and a’s with x’s, the word “Latinx” is rendered laughably incomprehensible to any Spanish speaker without some fluency in English. Try reading this “gender neutral” sentence in Spanish: “Lxs niñxs fueron a lx escuelx a ver sus amigxs.” You literally cannot, and it seems harmless and absurd until you realize the broader implication of using x as a gender neutral alternative. It excludes all of Latin America, who simply cannot pronounce it in the U.S. way. It does not provide a gender-neutral alternative for Spanish-speaking non-binary individuals and thus excludes them. It excludes any older Spanish speakers who have been speaking Spanish for more than 40 years and would struggle to adapt to such a radical change. It effectively serves as an American way to erase the Spanish language. Like it or not, Spanish is a gendered language. If you take the gender out of every word, you are no longer speaking Spanish. If you advocate for the erasure of gender in Spanish, you then are advocating for the erasure of Spanish.

What then, is the solution if not “Latinx”? It may surprise you to learn that a gender-neutral term to describe the Latin-American community already exists in Spanish. Ready for it? Here it is: Latino. Gender in Spanish and gender in English are two different things. Even inanimate objects are given gendered -o/s and -a/s endings, although it is inherently understood that these objects are not tied to the genders assigned to them. In Spanish, when referencing  groups, we only use the feminine ending when referring to an exclusively female group. On the other hand, when we refer to groups using the masculine ending, the group could either be exclusively males or a mix of people. For example, when someone says “los cubanos” an English speaker may instinctively interpret this as “the male Cubans,” but a Spanish speaker simply hears “the Cubans.”  In fact, the only way to refer to a group that is not exclusively female in Spanish is by using the masculine ending. Therefore, according to the grammatical rules of Spanish, the term “Latinos” is already all-inclusive in terms of gender. For those that want the singular form of “Latino” without the association with gender, alternate forms exist — one can state their ancestry (“soy de Cuba/Mexico/Venezuela/etc”) or “soy de Latinoamerica”. Ultimately, the problem here is that “Latinx” does not fit within Spanish, and never will. X as a letter at the ends of words in Spanish is unpronounceable, not conjugatable, and frankly confusing. These alternate options both respect those on the non-binary spectrum and respect the dignity of the Spanish language.

We understand that some people may still support the term “Latinx”. Ultimately, we will never attempt to force anyone to personally define themselves in any way. If after reading this article anyone still feels that calling themselves “Latinx” instead of any other term brings them more happiness, we will respect that choice. However, we are strongly opposed to and cannot support this particular terminology becoming the new norm or creeping any further into a language it does not belong in. Some may be put off by gender in Spanish. But we are offended by the attempted degradation of our language at the hands of a foreign influence. “Latinx” undoubtedly stems from good intentions but is ultimately also clearly representative of a poorly thought out and self-defeating execution as well as a lack of respect for the sovereignty of Spanish.

What It Means to Be ‘Latinx,’ and What That Means for America by Julian Castro

So many people are exploring not solely "Latinx identity," per se, but also what it actually means.  Here, Julian Castro reviews a book on the topic by Dr. Ed Morales titled, Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture.

Personally, I like the gender neutral part of the expression and also that it's a millennial development and I really love my millennial students and have two millennial children of my own.

The "Latin" part of the word is the rub for me as it smacks of assimilation as it suggests that we're "Latin," from Europe when we're not.  Even if our genes travelled all of the world, our people did not.  

Moreover, in some situations, "Latinx" can inadvertently participate in the erasure of history.  What comes to mind, in this regard, is the establishment of the "Chicana Caucus" at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies," where some wanted to change the name to the "Latinx Caucus" a few years ago.  This put the caucus in an interesting situation due to its long history of progressive politics, but pushed back on this specific proposal in order to preserve the history of the caucus.

I'm confident that this kind of situation is playing out across many different contexts and is certainly something that must get discussed and negotiated.

That said, what I do like of Castro's reading Morales’ analysis of Latinx identity is that the x is variable, beyond the gender neutrality it clearly represents.  As an umbrella term, it conveys mestizaje, hybridity, and a spectrum of identity.  

My sense of where this will all go at least with respect to everyday social relations is in the direction of "situational ethnicity" where depending on the context, one's ethnic identity either gets displayed or concealed.  In some contexts, Latinx makes sense.  In others, it won't.

I conclude by citing another important work by political scientist Dr. Cristina Beltran, author of the book, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity.  I think she nails it when she offers the following:

"Latino," like the category "women," should be reconceived as a site of permanent political contestation. 

This is a reasonable conclusion to draw and this is a good problem to have.  Thanks to Paul Saldaña for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

What It Means to Be ‘Latinx,’ and What That Means for America

A crowd at the 2018 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City.CreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press

Image

By Julian Castro

• Nov. 14, 2018

LATINX
The New Force in American Politics and Culture

By Ed Morales 368 pp. Verso. $24.95.

A crowd at the 2018 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City.CreditCreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press

In September, just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary recognized the word “Latinx,” which it defines as “of, relating to or marked by Latin American heritage — used as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina.” I was happy to see the addition, and also more than a little amused. I thought back to my freshman year of college in 1992. As I sat in a computer room in my dorm working away on an early Macintosh, a red squiggly line immediately appeared underneath the word “Chicano” after I typed it into the paper I was writing about my family’s background. When I hit the spell check to see what the problem was, Microsoft Word had a suggestion: Chicago. “You don’t even exist,” popped into my head. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a new experience. Years earlier, in middle school, I’d been asked to fill out a form that included a question about my background. There were three options to choose from: black, white or other. “Well, I’m not black or white,” I remember thinking, pencil in hand, “but I don’t like the sound of ‘other.’” I left it blank.

For many Latinos, stories like these are all too familiar. In “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” Ed Morales fills in that blank as well as the long, painful, complex and intersectional struggle for identity that has shaped America’s Latino community. As Morales notes, Latinx is just the latest in a series of terms, from Hispanic to Latino/a and even Latin@, employed to refer to individuals of Latin American heritage in an inclusive way.

Reading Morales’s dissection of Latinx identity formation, however, one begins to believe that the x in “Latinx” is more than just a means of providing gender-neutrality. As in algebra, the x is variable. How a Latino or Latina perceives himself or herself — and how he or she is perceived by others — often depends on context. Unhappy with the binary notion of race popular in the United States, Morales offers the concept of mestizaje, or hybridity, that encompasses a spectrum of identity, the result of hundreds of years of intermixing among African, European and indigenous peoples in Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean. Latinos can be black, white, brown or anything in between. Skin color, national origin, whether one lives in the mainland United States or outside of it, and one’s ability to speak Spanish, not to mention gender and sexual orientation, all play a role in one’s self-concept.

Morales, an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University who describes his own identity as that of a “racialized person living in a U.S. megacity, who has a somewhat ambiguous phenotypical appearance,” proves refreshingly introspective, weaving enough personal biography into the book to pull the work back from veering too far into inaccessible academic jargon. “In my own extended family, there is generally a disdain for blackness,” he writes, and tells of his father, who “traded on Anglo-Americans’ perceptions of his whiteness if it helped him in financial or social transactions, yet sought to avoid complete identification with whiteness when it came to his ‘real’ identity.”

According to the 2010 census, there were 55 million Latinos in the United States, and they made up 23 percent of Americans under the age of 18. Today, although Asian-Americans are now growing more quickly in percentage terms, Latinos are still growing fastest numerically. That means the destiny of the United States and the destiny of the Latino community are powerfully intertwined.

“The American identity will never be fixed and final; it will always be in the making,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a quarter century ago in “The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.” While Schlesinger’s observation may be true, it is much easier asserted than accepted.

With his boogeyman approach to electoral politics, Donald Trump has deftly exploited anxieties about the impact of America’s changing demographics on our national identity, and no group has been more vilified by Trump for political purposes than Latinos. After declaring in his announcement speech that Mexico was sending rapists and drug runners to our country, months later Trump dismissed questions about the legitimacy of fraud claims against Trump University by insisting that the American-born judge of Mexican descent who was presiding over the case could not do his job right because “he’s Mexican!” His administration has been even worse, cruelly separating families apprehended at the Southern border, failing to adequately respond to Hurricane Maria and then dismissing the deaths of 3,000 Puerto Ricans as mere fantasy concocted by political opponents.

It is no surprise, then, that the Latino community is widely misperceived and is especially in need today of voices to defend and humanize it. In this way, “Latinx” couldn’t be timelier. For one thing, Morales shatters Americans’ view of the community as monolithic. Although nearly two-thirds of Latinos claim Mexican heritage, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and a growing community of Latinos from Central and South America each have unique cultural and political experiences in the United States.

Morales explores these to varying degrees, and, importantly, makes clear that Latinos have been integral to America’s progress for generations, even as they have grappled with relative invisibility, outright rejection of their place in America and internal struggles about their own identity. He reminds us that it was Gonzalo and Felícitas Méndez, the Mexican-born father and Puerto Rican mother of daughter Sylvia Mendez, who challenged California’s separate and unequal “Mexican schools,” winning an appellate court victory in 1946 that paved the way for the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education that struck down racial segregation in schools eight years later.

Morales’s writing can be hyperbolic at times. “For an American economy that has been largely stagnant, the opening of Cuba is a last-ditch opportunity to stave off looming worldwide economic disaster,” he writes of President Obama’s efforts to open up Cuba to American investment. Still, the book’s deep dive into the crosscurrents of Latinx identity is a powerful reminder that, as Americans wrestle with questions about who is and who is not “American” — and, indeed, questions about what it means to be an American in the 21st century — the nation can benefit immensely from the robust inclusion and understanding of a community that has spent generations grappling with nearly every facet of its own identity.