Call Us Latin Americans (Latinoamericanos)

We are Latin Americans. Not “Latinx.” Not “Latine.” Not even “Hispanic.” And not “Latino” alone. Latin Americans: that is the correct term in English, free of gender conflict, rooted in geography, history, and culture.

By Diana Leal — Medialuna Magazine

9/20/2025

The simplest act of respect the United States could offer the millions of people from Latin America who help build and sustain this country is to call them by their name. Not with a trendy neologism. Not with a term that flattens history. Not with a label that confuses more than clarifies. Call us Latin Americans.

Names matter. They shape how we’re seen, how policy is made, how markets target us, and how belonging is imagined. For decades, the U.S. has cycled through labels — “Hispanic,” “Latino,” and most recently “Latinx” — each with different intents and different blind spots. Each reinvents a people whose identity is older than any single country and larger than a marketing demographic.

“America” itself was once a continental name, applied in the early 16th century to the “New World.” Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map christened the hemisphere after Amerigo Vespucci; the landmass stretching from Arctic Canada to Tierra del Fuego became “America.” People born in that hemisphere — Mexicans, Colombians, Brazilians, Peruvians, and countless others — were, by geography and by history, Americans. That changed when one nation, the United States of America, grew into global preeminence and appropriated the shorthand “America” for itself. The result is a quiet but powerful erasure: the rest of the hemisphere has been linguistically constrained into adjectives and categories created elsewhere.

“Hispanic” emerged as an official U.S. category in the 1970s for census and policy purposes. It has the virtue of brevity but the liability of inaccuracy: it reduces a vast, multilingual region to a relationship with Iberia. “Latino,” an English-derived shorthand, widened the lens, but remains etymologically awkward: Latium belongs to ancient Italy and Rome, not the Amazon or the Caribbean. Both labels flatten a terrain of languages, histories, and racial realities into a single, serviceable demographic.

“Latinx” was born in progressive circles as an attempt to reconcile Spanish grammar with gender inclusivity. But it is an American invention applied, often without consultation, to a hemisphere. It solves a problem that English does not have — gendered endings — by imposing an alien morphology on Spanish and on the lived experience of millions. For many, “Latinx” feels less like liberation and more like a linguistic colonization: an ‘X’ that anonymizes and abstracts, turning vivid cultures into an algebraic placeholder.

Beyond etymology, the term obscures the reality of Latin America: it is not a race. It is a region — a living mosaic. Indigenous, European, African, and Asian lineages have mingled and collided for five centuries. Languages multiply: Spanish and Portuguese dominate, but hundreds of Indigenous tongues still thrive; in Brazil alone, more than 200 Indigenous languages are recorded. Skin color varies from very dark to very light. Culture, not pigment, binds us: food, idioms, family structures, histories of resistance, and creative worlds.

When policy-makers, brands, and media outlets decide how to label us, they are doing more than choosing words. They are deciding who gets noticed, who receives targeted services, and whose contributions are recorded in national memory. The unilateral adoption of “Latinx” by some institutions often ignored the views of the millions it purported to represent. Polls and street-level testimony show most Latin Americans — especially older generations and Spanish-dominant communities — do not embrace the term. It sounds foreign. It lacks the cadence of our speech. It feels imposed.

There is a straightforward, elegant alternative: Latin Americans. The phrase translates the geography and the cultural lineage into English with precision and dignity. It follows the linguistic pattern used for other diasporic groups — African Americans, Asian Americans — acknowledging both place and origin. It is not erasing gender; it simply uses the language that English affords. It also recognizes that being “American” is not the exclusive property of any single government-issued passport. We are Americans of another kind — Americans of the wider, original continent.

Changing how institutions speak is easy compared with creating real inclusion. The shift from “Latinx” or “Hispanic” to “Latin Americans” will not solve poverty, fix education, or end discrimination. But words frame how we think; and changing the frame can open space for deeper policy conversations about labor rights, immigration, health care access, and political power. Using the right name is not performative if it is followed by substantive engagement.

If the United States truly wishes to honor the Latin American people within its borders and beyond, the gesture is simple: call us by our name. Not to erase the differences within our region but to respect them. Not to invent new identities for convenience or aesthetics, but to restore a name that is historically honest and culturally resonant.

Language can humiliate or it can dignify. The choice, in this case, is obvious.

Words shape perception. Perception shapes power. If the United States truly wants to honor the people who help sustain its economy, culture, and future, then it must begin with something simple: respect.

Respect our identity. Respect our culture. Respect our name. We are not “Latinx.” We are not “Hispanic.” We are Latin Americans.

Chat GPT contributed to the editing of this article in Spanish.