What’s in a name? 2020 Hispanic Trends report takes a new look

POSTED ON Aug 18, 2020

A new report on the emergence of Hispanic and Latino says that in more than 15 years of polling by the Pew Research Center, when one term is chosen over another, the term Hispanic has been preferred to Latino.

More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population, the report said.

But despite this increase, online searches for Latinx remain below those for Latina, Latino and Hispanic, according to the August 2020 Hispanic Trends report from Pew.

Researchers Luis Noe-Bustamante, Lauren Mora, and Mark Hugo Lopez found that about one in four U.S. Hispanics have heard of Latinx, but just 3% use it.

Noe-Bustamante is a research analyst focusing on migration and Hispanic trends at Pew Research Center, and Lopez is director of global migration and demography research at Pew. Previously, Lopez was director of Hispanic research. He is the co-editor of “Adjusting to a World in Motion: Trends in Global Migration and Migration Policy.”

For the analysis, the researchers surveyed 3,030 U.S. Hispanic adults in December 2019 as part of the National Survey of Latinos. They asked survey respondents about their awareness of the term Latinx and their views of the term.

Young Hispanics, ages 18 to 29, are among the most likely to have heard of the term – 42% say they have heard of it, compared with 7% of those ages 65 or older.

Hispanics with college experience are more likely to be aware of Latinx than those without college experience; about four-in-ten Hispanic college graduates (38%) say they have heard of Latinx, as do 31% of those with some college experience.
By comparison, just 14% of those with a high school diploma or less are aware of the term.
In addition, the U.S. born are more likely than the foreign born to have heard the term (32% vs. 16%), and Hispanics who are predominantly English speakers or bilingual are more likely than those who mainly speak Spanish to say the same (29% for both vs. 7%).
Awareness of the term Latinx does not necessarily translate into use. Use is among the highest for Hispanic women ages 18 to 29 – 14% say they use it, a considerably higher share than the 1% of Hispanic men in the same age group who say they use it.

The report said that for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

The emergence of Latinx coincides with a global movement to introduce gender-neutral nouns and pronouns into many languages whose grammar has traditionally used male or female constructions.

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