Eli Rosenberg, Washington Post, September 14, 2018

Taco Bell has parted ways with an employee captured in a video telling a woman at a Florida drive-through that she couldn’t take her order because no one working at the store spoke English.

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It is not clear what happened before the camera started filming, but the video starts out with Montgomery asking the Taco Bell employee why nobody there speaks English.

“Nobody in the back speaks English?” she asked. “So you can’t take my order?”

The Taco Bell employee at the window tells her she can’t.

“There is no one here that speaks English,” the woman says. “Mi vida, I have a car behind you.”

{snip} Despite the fact that the woman in the car is speaking English and the Taco Bell employee is speaking Spanish, they both appear to be able to carry on a rudimentary conversation.

“I want to order food!” Montgomery yells. “Well the line gonna be held up because I want to order. They won’t get their food because I want to order.”

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“I have an order behind you,” she says. “There is nobody that speaks English.”

The incident continued to get uglier, with the employee threatening to call the police.

“This is America. Y’all didn’t take over the whole population,” Montgomery shouts.

Hialeah is a city of about 240,000, according to government estimates; 227,000 of its residents are Latino, more than 94 percent.

The Taco Bell employee said her name was Luisa at the end of the video. {snip}

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The video gained attention after being covered by local news outlets, including the Miami Herald. It was brought to a wider audience by conservative media outlets such as the Drudge Report, the Daily Wire and Fox News, with many on social media also homing in.

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But there are some indications the dispute was not, in fact, related to language.

At one point another employee walks up to the window to talk to her co-worker, asking her to give the car a menu. But the employee says she doesn’t understand what the people in the car were saying, and then later, “I don’t want to.”

Montgomery, who is black, said on Facebook that she thought the episode was motivated more by racism than the inability of the worker to understand her.

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