Show me your papers
An employee at a South San Jose, Calif., gas station was fired after ranting against a customer who was speaking Spanish in the store and demanding the customer prove she was a U.S. citizen.
According to ABC 7, San Jose resident Grecya Moran was speaking Spanish with an employee who, she said, had greeted her initially in Spanish. The two carried on a conversation in Spanish until another employee demanded that the two speak English, the outlet reported Tuesday.
In the video, Moran can be heard telling the employee, who is white, that she is allowed to speak Spanish before the employee asks for proof that Moran is a U.S. citizen.
It’s not the job of gas station cashiers, or any other random person, to demand proof of citizenship from people speaking a foreign language…or from anyone else.
“I even went up to her and I apologized,” Moran told ABC 7. “I said, ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry. All she was saying is– she was greeting me in Spanish. How my day’s going.’ And she said, ‘I don’t care, you talk in English because this is America.'”
Moran told the outlet that the employee, who is not named, became more agitated.
“She started saying something about, ‘Trump needs to hurry up and build the wall.’ That’s when I was like oh my God, she’s being serious,” Moran told ABC. “I just got my phone, started videotaping her.”
Trump and Fox News.
The ex-employee will be hosted on the White House lawn or the Rose Garden for a press conference soon, no doubt.
Speaking Spanish.
In San José.
Alta California.
On Bernal St.
Who are the invaders here?
It’s amazing how many assholes are afraid of the Spanish language, and if you’re bilingual, watch out! That’s too confusing for a tiny mind to manage without terror!
A lot of them are scared of English, too, when spoken correctly. If you speak good English around them, they call you a coastal elite and a libtard.
“Good” English? By whose standards?
There was a similar story a couple of months ago (which I can’t find now) about a woman in a shop queue in one of the Southern border states. Somebody, possibly a shop employee, got offended because the woman was on her phone speaking in one of them thar furrin languages, and told her that if she wanted to speak in that language, she should fuck off back to the country where it’s spoken.
The woman calmly explained that she was Native American, speaking in her native tongue. She then asked the person when he was planning on going back to England.
What a Maroon – well, if you’re in the US, probably not by the standards of the English! It amuses me that everyone wants people to speak ‘English’ here when what the people saying that are speaking would not be recognized as ‘English’ by the English. There are times when one of them will use the term ‘American’, except it’s not even really American, since it is a form of English that has mutated. And as AoS points out, not native to this area, either.
At one time, I might have been happy to go “back to” England, considering where this country is headed, but with all the Brexit silliness, I’m not sure I’d even want to go there now. So if I want to ‘go back home’ to someplace I’ve never actually been, I have my choice of Ireland or Sweden (both on my mother’s side). I think Swedish might be a hard language to learn at my age.
iknklast,
You’ve touched on a nerve here. First, well, yes, their English has changed over time, but then so has the English you speak and I speak, and all the countless varieties spoken in the British islands. And every variety maintains some archaic features and develops novel features (look up the history of non-rhotic varieties of English for a nice example, and check out Shakespeare in the original pronunciation) so in that sense they’re all “mutant” forms. But there is nothing intrinsically better about one form over another; it’s just that for sociolinguistic reasons some forms gain prestige.
As for what counts as native, that depends on your time frame. Go far enough back and English isn’t native to England. And ask the Basques about all those damned Indo-European interlopers.
Apologies for the rant, but prick a linguist and this is what you get.
This is one of those cases that looks better in writing. Then I watched the video and it seems very likely the person objecting to the Spanish is mentally incapacitated somehow. She’s slurring her words and saying a lot of nonsensical stuff.
Or maybe she’s just a nasty person who came to work drunk.
Okay, Skeletor, once again you must insist that everyone is reading it wrong. Thanks for the correction. We might actually have thought it was a nasty thing to act nasty, but you are able to diagnose someone as incapacitated from watching a video. Thanks.
What a Maroon, yeah, the language we speak today includes a lot of stuff even my grandparents wouldn’t recognize, and they’ve only been dead for 25 years.
#9
Her speech seemed very much in line with what I see from older Trump voters mid-rant.