A nationwide poll of Hispanic Americans has shown that only 1% of respondents prefer to be called “Latinx,” which is a favorite term in the media and academia.
The majority (54%) prefer “Hispanic,” while 18% prefer Latino or Latina, according to a survey of 2,000 Hispanics by polling firm OH Predictive Insights.
Some respondents said that they prefer to be called by their country of heritage or origin, such as Cuban or Mexican (6%), but nearly twice as many (11%) prefer to be called “American.”
Another 6% would prefer two descriptors — their country of heritage and the term American, e.g., Cuban-American, Mexican-American, etc.
The final 2% prefer the term Chicano or Chicana. The survey results didn’t mention the term Tejano, which is used by some Texans.
The findings of this poll are similar to those of a Pew Research Center survey of 3,000 Hispanic adults in the U.S. last year, which found that only 3% of respondents would use Latinx to describe themselves. Younger, college-educated Hispanics are likely to do so.
According to the NPR podcast Code Switch, “Latinx emerged sometime in the late’ 90s… Latinx is a term that is gender inclusive and inclusive of LGBT adults.”
In Spanish, the final letter of a word can indicate whether it is grammatically male or female, with O indicating masculine words and A indicating feminine. For example, Latino means a male person of Latin American origin, while Latina means a female person of Latin American origin. By contrast, the term Latinx is gender neutral, since it does not contain a final A or O.
The new poll was carried out in March. The sample size was 2,000, including 317 respondents in Texas. Nationally, respondents leaned to the left politically, with 31% telling pollsters that they were liberal, 22% conservative, and 47% identifying as moderate.
OH Predictive Insights also asked respondents about what they thought were the top issues facing the U.S. The top concerns were COVID-19, the economy, health care, and immigration. Other answers included education, race relations, political division, and moral issues.
