(lə-tēˈnə, lă-, lä-)
noun A Latino woman or girl.
Related Forms:
Usage Note: The use of the feminine nouns
Latina and
Chicana is perfectly proper in American English, and failure to do so (as in
She is a Latino) may sometimes be resented. The use of these forms as modifiers, however, poses unfamiliar problems in English. Is it wrong to use a masculine form such as
Chicano to modify
woman? Can one say
She is a Latino novelist, or is
Latina novelist required? There is no one answer to these questions, though a few guidelines can be proposed. First, since English nouns do not have gender, the Spanish rules governing adjective-noun agreement cannot reasonably determine English usage; thus the choice between
She is the city's first Latino or
Latina mayor does not depend on the gender of the Spanish word for mayor. Second, the use of the more general masculine form as a modifier in referring to women—as in
“Bush Appoints Latino Woman to U.S. Court” (headline in the
Sacramento Bee) and
“Juror 1427, a Latino woman who works for the Los Angeles County assessor” (the
Los Angeles Times)—is standard in American English. Again, English does not normally inflect for gender, and the use of
Latina in cases such as these would consequently strike many people as unusual. And third, when the feminine form
is used to modify words like
woman and
girl, it is often, though not always, suggestive of a liberal or feminist viewpoint, as in
“I came to know Chicana women living in a barrio who were organizing women's health-care programs” (
Ms. magazine).
