Latinos Are Also Part of the Lost Generation

Dear Republic,

We have a great follow-up to our Jacob Savage coverage for you today, by the talented — who interviews Savage and proposes to extend his proposition beyond the “vanishing white male writer.”

• ROL

LATINOS ARE PART OF THE LOST GENERATION

Last year in December, Compact published Jacob Savage’s piece “The Lost Generation.”

The polemic went viral. He was subsequently interviewed in these pages.

Savage’s central claim is that around the beginning of the year 2014, cultural industries and a spectrum of institutions began quietly closing the door on millennial men who could not fit themselves into a preferred diversity category. The “Lost Generation” essay’s argument was, for once, presented in an empirical manner, rather than as a moral tirade, which is the conventional format of most who rail against DEI. Savage’s provocative lament was not that older white men had vanished. To the contrary, Savage argues that younger men entering the pipeline after the DEI turn, faced an institutional wall their Gen-X elders had escaped.

What Savage did not fully explore was the Latino case. In American cultural institutions, “Latinx” appears to be another diversity category. Yet Latino masculinity is also pre-coded as patriarchal, suspect, and carrying an embarrassing aura of the retrograde. In response, Chicano polemicist Richard Rodriguez confronts the term “Latinx” as an attempt at puritanical erasure: “X is the mark of the illiterate…Latinx is at war with the Spanish language, with the Sierra Madre and her favorite, her first-born son, Macho. Latinx is at war with centuries of romance and sexual chauvinism and humor. Latinx is an American word. (...) Latinx is puritan coinage.”

DEI championed the term Latinx, which implies castration (neutering) and the irredeemability of Latino men, over whom Latinas and Latinx nonbinaries were to be favored whenever possible. The illiterate’s signature, the “x” in “Latinx” also symbolizes the vanishing, the xing out of the…