A white woman, identified as Jill Cronenberger, was caught on video yelling at the manager of a Mexican restaurant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to stop speaking Spanish.
In two videos posted on Facebook, Cronenberger can be heard telling the manager of Tampico Mexican Restaurant, Sergio Budar, that he needs to speak English and to “get the fuck out of my country.” However, it should be noted he is speaking English during the entirety of both videos.
The videos have racked up over 1 million views since they were posted on Saturday.
https://www.facebook.com/irma.dleon.9/videos/vb.100023735028880/384008712400293/?type=2&video_source=user_video_tab
The woman tells Budar that she “lived in California for 20 years. English is our first language, so you need to speak English.” At one point, after being told several times to “speak English,” he replies, “What do you think I’m doing?”
He also explains to Cronenberger that he’s a U.S. citizen, but she doesn’t listen and continues on her tirade. Another patron at the restaurant is heard saying that she needs to leave if she’s going to continue “being racist.” She responds by saying, “I’m not racist.”
Budar asks her to leave the restaurant and says he will pay for the food she ate. Rather than leaving peacefully, she yells out that she was “raped by an illegal alien” and continues to repeat herself as she is escorted out. “You don’t speak Engish and you want me to be nice to you?” she asks as she is being held back. “Fucking rapist,” she says as she walks out the door.
https://www.facebook.com/irma.dleon.9/videos/vb.100023735028880/384008719066959/?type=2&video_source=user_video_tab
Irma Dleon posted the videos after her daughter captured the incident at work. “My poor baby was frightened but cannot believe this continues to happen,” she wrote on Facebook. “We should be united as a country but there is much hate. We are all human trying to help each other out. I will pray for this woman to be a better person, but you can only educate the ignorant. First, they must listen.”
“It makes me feel angry, sad. It’s unbelievable that we’re still seeing this kind of behavior to this day,” Budar told NBC News. “I’ve been living here for almost two decades and counting. I got my U.S. citizenship while here, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t speak other languages that are not English.”
It’s hard to separate this rhetoric from what we’ve heard from President Trump. Trump has called immigrants, specifically Mexican people, rapists before he was even elected. It isn’t a coincidence that we’re seeing more hate toward Latinx people; anti-Latinx hate crimes saw a 176 percent spike in America’s 10 largest cities in the first two weeks after the 2016 election, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino.
Unfortunately, videos of racist white women yelling slurs at people of color are abundant. Just in the last week, a Florida woman went on a racist tirade against a Black officer and another white woman was caught on video yelling racist slurs at a Black man in Scottsdale, Arizona.
