People of color know that racist attacks, like longtime xenophobe attorney Aaron Schlossberg threatening Latino employees with deportation for daring to speak Spanish with Spanish-speaking customers, far predate Donald Trump, but he has certainly emboldened racists to act out, publicly, shamelessly and cruelly. It’s no surprise then, Andrea González-Ramírez writes in Refinery 24, that other Spanish-speakers worry if they could be next. “It feels like our language puts a target on our backs”:
In some instances, employees are the ones who feel free to harass customers for speaking another language. When Sophia Melissa Caraballo Piñeiro's mom came to visit her in Syracuse, NY in time for her graduation, she relied on her daughter because she doesn't speak English. That opened them up to being harassed at a Dollar Tree store.
"One specific employee, a white man, crossed our paths at least five times. Each time, he would hear us speaking Spanish, he would stare intently and then mumble something under his breath," Caraballo Piñeiro told me.
As they were getting ready to leave the store, the man approached them and started yelling at them. "[He was] saying that we shouldn’t be speaking Spanish, that we should speaking English and that we should go back to wherever we came from," she said.
Another Spanish-speaker, Samantha Loreto, told González-Ramírez that she and her mom were meeting a relative in Brooklyn when they were harassed. “We were talking in Spanish and a white dude started yelling at us and said something along the lines of 'I hate all this international fucking people, once and for all, go home.'" Even in Texas, which for the love of god used to be Mexico:
"My youngest sister was asked to not speak Spanish at all in school with her Latinx friends. The teacher said Spanish was only allowed at Spanish class," Alejandra Rivera from Houston, TX told me. "My dad was completely ignored at a hospital when a healthcare provider heard him speak Spanish. ... This happens way more often than it should."
English is not the official language of the U.S., but racists sure do act like it. Just days ago, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent racially profiled two Latinas, both of whom are U.S. citizens, for speaking Spanish while shopping. The mouthy Schlossberg, at least for now, has been shamed into silence, and maybe the public notoriety has even made one or two other racists think twice about opening their bocas to attack people minding their own damn business. And good, because no one should ever be afraid of speaking whatever language they want in their daily lives.