Here’s an only-in-Miami story. This week a woman who speaks no Spanish tried to order food at a Taco Bell drive-through in Hialeah. Things didn’t end happily.
Late Wednesday night Miami resident Alexandria Montgomery pulled up to a Taco Bell on East Ninth Street in Hialeah. Montgomery tried to order in English, but was told by the woman at the window – in Spanish – that she had to order in Spanish.
In this video of the exchange that she posted on Facebook, Montgomery asks to speak to a manager.
“Nobody here speaks English? Nobody in the back speaks English?” she asks.
“No,” says the woman.
“But I want to order food.”
“No hay nadie que habla inglés.”
“No one here speaks English,” says the woman. She then tells Montgomery in Spanish to “move on, honey, because there are other cars behind you.”
When Montgomery refuses, the woman threatens to call the police.
“OK, te llamo la policia.”
That part Montgomery understood.
“Call the police?" she asks incredulously. "I didn’t do nothin’.”
“This is Hialeah,” the woman tells her in Spanish.
Montgomery, who is African-American, issued a discrimination complaint to Taco Bell management. Taco Bell told WLRN in an email:
“This does not meet our customer experience expectations. We have worked quickly to resolve with the customer to ensure this doesn’t happen again.” And it said the woman who refused Montgomery service “no longer works for the [Taco Bell] brand.”
Hialeah’s population has the largest percentage of Latinos of any city in the U.S. – and last year the personal finance website WalletHub rated it the country’s least diverse city.
