Does the label “Latinx" highlight individual identities or build collective solidarity?

Is it both?

Paola Ramos is a correspondent for Vice and contributor to Telemundo and MSNBC. As a queer, Cuban-Mexican, first-generation American Latina from Miami, she often had to choose “different hats depending on the rooms I entered or the prejudices I encountered“. 

She wrote Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity about her cross-country travels to find out more about this community and her place in it.

Where others studied group behavior, she chose to listen to individual stories. These are the people she heard:

• Paula Saldaña, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice field coordinator serving low-income uninsured women in Rio Grande Valley colonias
• Mónica Ramírez, Justice for Migrant Women founder fighting sexual harassment and assault on female farmworkers in California’s Central Valley
• Blake Gentry, Indigenous rights advocate helping non-Spanish speaking Mayan asylum seekers in Tucson
• Angel Sanchez, former gang member and convicted felon, now a law student at the University of Miami

• Olivia Levins Holden, Puerto Rican artist and muralist in Minneapolis
• Juan Villalonga, Venezuelan exile, wrongfully deported
• Leyanis Diaz, Afro-Cuban and Miss Black Florida 2017
• Ilia Calderón, born in Chocó, Colombia and first Afro-Latina anchor of a major TV newscast in the US
• Enrique Tarrio, Afro-Cuban far right activist defending his Latinx identity as American first Latino second

• Dinorah Marquez, Latino Arts String Program creator teaching mariachi to low-income Milwaukee Latino students
• Felipe Santos, La Guelaguetza festival organizer and Oaxacan community member revitalizing Poughkeepsie
• Carolina Contreras, Dominican Afro-Latina and founder of the first beauty salon for naturally curly hair in NYC
• Aldo Perez, local community organizer and leader in NYC’s Latino Muslim community
• Jonathan Jayes-Green, UndocuBlack Network Afro-Panamanian co-founder advocating for undocumented Black immigrants in Washington D.C.

Politicians and marketers have long treated “Hispanics" and “Latinos" as one single group. If this list shows us anything, its the great diversity within. So why have one Latinx label?

Because the old labels left too many people out. Those who didn’t look (Afro-Latinas) or sound (non-Spanish) Latino enough. The LGBTQ. The undocumented, new immigrants, and Dreamers. The poor. The indigenous. The rural, the border states, and the Midwest. The conservatives. The Muslims and the Asians.

Latinx lets them all count.

It’s for all of them. Everyone of them owns it and belongs. It’s their identity. Even with all their differences, it unites them and demands that the rest of us see and hear them. That’s power.

“Have you heard?” is our way of sharing another point of view on commonly held beliefs. Through this we hope to encourage curiosity, dialogue, and tolerance of diverse ideas.