A random stranger yelling at two Mexican women for speaking Spanish is enough to make you lose your faith in humanity, but your faith will soon be restored when an ally stepped in and called her out.
It went down on Monday at a grocery store in a city called Rifle (only in America, folks). A woman identified as Linda Dwire freaked out at the sounds of something other than English. A good Samaritan named Kamira Trent stepped in and said, “I’m calling the cops. You leave these women alone! Get out!”
Dwire didn’t simply take the L and stop spewing vitriol.
“You come from a generation that’s destroying this country,” she said.
“ No I do not. I have respect. You do not harass people,” Trent replied.
With her finger pointed at Trent, Dwire said, “You will lose your country. You know what, you will lose this country.”
Trent followed her down the aisle and called the cops.
According to BuzzFeed, Dwire was taken to Garfield County Jail and charged with two counts of bias-motivated harassment.
The women targeted by Dwire explain that when she overheard them speaking Spanish to each other, she asked them if they lived in the United States and whether they liked it.
One of the women, Fabiola Velasquez, was grocery shopping with her children when Dwire yelled, “You’re in America. You’re in my country. You can’t speak Spanish here. You need to speak English if you’re going to be in America.”
Trent was shopping in the aisle when she heard the harassment and rather than just heading for the cereal section, called the lady out.
Dwire maintains that she’s not racist, she’s just a champion of the English language.
“It’s a patriotic thing. When people come to my country, they need to love it enough to speak English,” she said.
Velasquez, on the other hand, views it as a racially-charged attack. “If she wasn’t racist, she wouldn’t care what language we would speak,” she said. “It baffles me because, I don’t understand, what concept they have about us [immigrants]. What are we trying to take away from them exactly?”
The video went viral with over six million views on Twitter, and Trent is being celebrated as a hero.
Trent has advice for anyone who witnesses or suffers from a similar situation:
“Stand up and say something. Letting that happen is really what’s wrong with our country.”
