New Incident Of Racism In The United States

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

A new incident of racism toward Hispanics in the United States caused outrage. The video of two Hispanic friends who were verbally attacked by an American woman for speaking Spanish at a store in Colorado has gone viral and has been viewed more than a million times.

Fabiola Velásquez, 30, spoke to CNN about the bad time she had when she was speaking Spanish with her friend, Isabel Nava Marin, and Linda Dwire, 64, verbally assaulted them. As can be seen in the video, another young woman - Kamira Trent, 30, intervened in the discussion to defend the right of Hispanic friends to speak in Spanish.

"Don't harass people," Trent said when Dwire aggressively reached out and pointed her finger at her. When Dwire touched her, Trent leaned back and said, "No … I'm going to call the police." Dwire told Trent that she belonged to another generation, to which the young American replied, "No, I have respect."

Dwire says in the video "they are going to lose this country" to which Trent responds: "You cannot harass Hispanic women." The intervention in defense of the two young Hispanic women has won a lot of applause for Trent, who they call "hero."

"Letting these things happen is precisely the bad thing in this country," Trent later told BuzzFeed.

Dwire was arrested and faces charges of harassment motivated by prejudice, according to the Rifle Police Department. When Sergeant Carlos Cornejo arrived on the scene and spoke to Dwire, he told CNN that the woman had confessed to him that "it seemed offensive" that Velásquez and Nava speak Spanish and that he had told Hispanic friends to "speak English and be American ". Dwire was taken to the Garfield County Jail and later released.

Velásquez also expressed his outrage on social networks. “I never thought that this would happen to me. A friend and I were talking in the store in Spanish and suddenly a lady came to insult us that if we lived in this country we did not have to speak Spanish, we would have to speak only English,”she said on Facebook.

“Thanks to the other girl (whom we don't know) she defended us and called the police, and I think they took away the lady who was assaulting us. I always saw the videos on the networks and it gave me courage and today, which was my case, I can say that I felt great helplessness,”he added.