FINDING LATINX

A young, queer Latinx journalist travels the U.S. to find out exactly what the term means to those who use it.

Ramos has impressive credentials: The former deputy director of Hispanic media during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, she is a Vice News host and correspondent and contributor to MSNBC and Telemundo. In her debut book, the author gives voice to a rapidly growing American demographic. Interviewing “the voices that are often neglected in the back of the room,” the author shows us a myriad of experiences that are often flattened in other portrayals. Many of the issues facing the Latinx community are the same as those that present challenges for other marginalized groups, including racism, colorism, gentrification, and sexual abuse. While the author does a good job informing readers about certain elements of the Latinx experience, the narrative sometimes bogs down in comparative statistics. Many of the numbers are helpful for context, but their abundance can detract from the power of the personal stories. Via these anecdotes, the author conveys both “the exceptionalism and the ordinary” in the Latinx community, demonstrating attention to nuance and allowing her interviewees to express themselves freely. As much as this is an exploration of the Latinx movement—which “forces you to look at 60 million people in a different way [and] to reframe the country’s own geography”—it is also a journey for Ramos. “I am queer; I am Latina; I am Cuban, Mexican and first-generation American,” she writes. “These are words I was not ashamed of saying out loud—but there’s a difference between passive recognition and really owning one’s identity….Yet the truth is that, for years, I had either blindly danced around these identities or felt like I had to choose one over the others.” Though the narrative is sometimes choppy and lacks a coherent throughline connecting the chapters, it’s clear that this was an important project for the author, and her passion is evident.

An inclusive look at the Latinx experience.