At a Friday morning meeting of the Arkansas Organization of Hispanic Women, director Margarita Solorzano was forced to divert the meeting from talk about the new governor’s ban on the term «Latinx» in government affairs.
“I asked them not to be distracted because other things are happening in the state,” Solorzano told NBC News.
He executive order signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders surprised Solorzano and other Latinos in the state. She viewed the ban as «political noise».
“We use ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic’ in our daily work,” he said of the terms his organization uses. «Refering to [word] Latinx I know [it] It’s important to some people, but it’s not necessarily the general sentiment of the immigrant or Latino population. They have other, more pressing issues to pay attention to: people are worried about surviving every day and making sure they provide for their families.»
On the ban, he said, «it is not the concern of the clientele we serve.»
Solorzano focused more on what the governor’s plans were for the issues she believes need more attention, such as education, access to health care and the justice system.
Irvin Camacho, 30, a community rights organizer, said the ban «just caught me off guard that they would go after something that’s not a big problem in our community.»
According to Camacho, issues of concern in the state include a lack of education, low teacher salaries, high incarceration rates, homelessness and a lack of mental health resources.
Camacho, who also sits on the board of the Arkansas American Civil Liberties Union, said he primarily uses Latinx as an all-inclusive term in educational and organizing spaces. “I almost never hear Latino in those circles anymore.”
The ban was not just a surprise, he said, but a potential warning of things to come under the new administration.
“It is an attack not only on the Latino community, but also on the trans and non-binary community,” he said. “But what worries me is if this administration on day one decided to sign this executive order, what does it look like for us going forward?”
For Rumba Yambú, who identifies with the pronouns they/them, the decision felt personal.
Yambú, who identifies as translatinx, has worked to build a more inclusive space with inTRANSitive, a nonprofit they helped found in 2017 by offering educational and financial resources to empower trans residents in the state.
Yambu said the decision has brought to light a lot of the anti-LGBTQ sentiments and «identity erasure» that surfaced during the Trump administration, especially with the government ban on trans terms.
“It has been a challenge in this state to find some kind of support for us, for trans Latinx migrants,” Yambú said in a frustrated tone. «We are not causing any harm and [don’t] they want to cause harm by identifying as Latinx and no one is forcing more…Latinos, Latinas to identify as Latinx.»
In his executive order, Sanders had cited a Pew Research Report 2020 which found that only 3% of the Hispanic population nationwide uses the term Latinx. «Ethnically insensitive and pejorative language has no place on official government documents or in the titles of government employees,» the executive order states.
As Solorzano pointed out, most Hispanics in the state do not place a high priority on debates about what terms are used, as is the case nationally.
Republican Consultant Mike Madrid, who warned the democrats In a column about how terms like Latinx can alienate working-class Latinos, he said in a phone interview Friday that questioning «the value of a word that is not part of the language of the vast majority of Latinos is legitimate.»
But Madrid, which is based in California, criticized Huckabee Sanders’ timing and priorities.
«But is he up to making it one of his first acts?» he said. “If that is the biggest Latino problem, then I care about Latinos in Arkansas. It’s not about Latinos, it’s about gender, it’s become political football.»
“We are having this discussion that no one knows or cares about; it’s in baseball,» Madrid said. “It speaks to how degraded political discourse has become and the complete lack of understanding that both parties have for the Latino community.”
Solorzano said that “we are only talking about a word that, for Latinos, can be significant. For us, the word latino, hispanic, latinx, we can use those words interchangeably[ly]. In the end, we as people define ourselves.»
sandra lilley contributed.