When I asked Ruben Gallego to reflect on the kind of feedback he’s gotten in the year since tweeting that Democrats shouldn’t use the term, he told me that it’s been mostly positive. “I was not alone in my frustration about it,” he said. “Once I said it, I think a lot of people felt that they could also state their frustration with it. Especially older Latinos, and Latinos in general, just don’t use that term.”

That mood was repeated in many of my conversations. “Nobody, in general, in my district uses that term,” Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico told me. Representative Raul Ruiz of California, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told me that the 38-member organization still prefers to use Hispanic or Latino, and members rarely use Latinx with one another or their constituents. “I don’t see it having a critical mass at all,” he said. “The vast majority of people I speak to, hardworking—working-class Latinos and Latinas—really don’t make it an issue.”

The legislators and staffers I spoke with all arrived at a similar conclusion: Use the word when your audience calls for it, or when making a targeted campaign push, but don’t go out of your way to champion it. “One should not be pressured to identify themselves in one way or the other,” Fernández said. “The way you identify evolves over time. In my instance, I grew up Chicana, as my father was very active in Chicano politics, in social-justice and racial-justice issues. That’s the term we used and that was a term you used if you were Mexican American.”