The term latinx didn't come out of "rich educated people" - certainly a lot of educated folk have been pushing it in the last decade (self-identifying grad students and recent college grads, for instance) - but there's a weird sort of prejudice going on in assuming everything can only come out of "rich educated [non-latino, based on your use of "their" there] people"
Where the term originated matters to some extent, but also where it comes from & is being used also matters. And the drive for 'Latinx' is coming from rich educated people.
1) anyone who studies in US university, is "rich educated" for South American standards
2) Quote from article bellow:
> a queer Latina ... mostly from white, right-wing Latino men.
> “When you’re a white Latino ... Black Latino ... transgender Latino, next to a queer Latino, next to an Indigenous Latino
> understand the diversity of our community
Those three paragraphs paint picture that "Latino" is some sort of community. And you can be in-group or out-group (by being right-wing-white-Latino). There is also somebody who speaks on behalf of "our community".
But that is simply not true. It is an ethnic group. Its name may change over a few decades, if new name gains use in South America. Not in a few years, because some US citizens said so, and decided to rename "their community"!
There's literally no one in the actual Latin American countries that call themselves Latinos outside the USA (and perhaps some other rich countries).
I would be called a Latino in the USA, being a Brazilian of brown skin. That amuses me as I have literally never thought of myself or my fellow Brazilians as Latinos... we're simply Brazilian (we may be region-specific, like carioca - from Rio, or Paulista, from Sao Paulo... but still Brazilian, obviously) and I am pretty sure Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Colombians and others are the same... just like white Americans do the same: are you ever a white person when presenting yourself to another American, or e.g. Texan, Californian or whatever??
In the US there's two forces at work, the racist side calling all Spanish speakers Mexican (or various slurs) and the various communities attempting to get larger power by uniting on their commonality. The polite racist (government) side chose Hispanic and the grass roots represented by La Raza and others promulgated Latin American/Latino. Meanwhile I've come across younger non-activist second-generation people referring to themselves as Spanish.
It pays a lot to actually participate in the community to know what to do. I find that people don't like being labelled in any community, but that they may use terms of art to describe their membership in different groups.
Some discussion here: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-27/op-ed-latin...