Sarah Huckabee Sanders, newly sworn in as the 47th governor of Arkansas, rustled up several executive orders within hours of embarking upon her term.
Donald Trump's former White House press secretary signed an order that restricts any future official Arkansas documents from using the term "Latinx" and urges that it be replaced with the words "Latino" or "Latina" in all previous records.
According to the first female governor of Arkansas, the term - pushed in recent years by progressive groups as a gender-neutral alternative to the Spanish words Latina and Latino - was an example of "ethnically insensitive language".
Sanders, who succeeded Asa Hutchinson as governor, cited a Pew Research poll as revealing that a mere 3 percent of US citizens with Latin American ancestry opted for this specific term when describing themselves.
"Ethnically insensitive and pejorative language has no place in official government documents or government employee titles. The government has a responsibility to respect its citizens and use ethnically appropriate language, particularly when referring to ethnic minorities," the executive order signed by Sanders stated.
Sanders, who, at 40, is the youngest governor in the nation, also cited the Royal Spanish Academy (Spanish: Real Academia Española, or RAE), a Madrid-based institution serving as an acknowledged linguistic guide for the Spanish language. The RAE officially rejects the use of "x" to replace "o" and "a" to identify gender in the language.
"One can no more easily remove gender from Spanish and other romance languages than one can remove vowels from English. It is the policy of the Governor’s administration to prohibit the use of culturally insensitive words for official state government business," the executive order added.
Latinx gained increasing use in the 2000s among activists, LGBTQ communities of Latin American origin, and gained traction online as a term which was supposed to be more inclusive than the gendered nouns typical of the Spanish language, which they maintained was insufficiently "woke." However, critics rejected the term as something that was rarely used, besides being an attempt to impose American standards on another language.
Sanders, who made no secret that her priority was to bring in a "large-scale education reform package", issued several other executive orders on her first day in office.
One of them prohibits "indoctrination and critical race theory in schools". Critical race theory, or CRT, originated in the Sixties and is based on the idea that race is not a natural and biologically grounded feature, but a socially constructed category used to oppress and exploit people of color.
The theory specifically argues that US laws and legal institutions are "inherently racist" and function to create and maintain social, economic, as well as political inequalities between whites and non-whites, most notably black people.
Long criticized by GOP voters as controversial, divisive, and unpatriotic, CRT has surfaced in classroom lessons around the US and generated pushback from parents and conservative lawmakers. Some Republican lawmakers moved to ban it from grades K-12 in their states. The term K-12, used in the US and Canada, pertains to the grade level system in schools before college or university.
Last year, Trump said that Republicans would impose a full-fledged ban on CRT if they took back Congress in the midterm elections in 2022. Now, Sanders, who has positioned herself as "Arkansas' education governor". went on record as saying:
"As long as I am governor, our schools will focus on the skills our children need to get ahead in the modern world, not brainwashing our children with a left-wing political agenda."