Video of elderly woman harassing a Filipino and Mexican-American family goes viral, Daly City mayor responds
An elderly white woman last week harassed a Filipino- and Mexican-American family, going on a racist, xenophobic rant while waiting behind the family in the line of a Daly City, California grocery store.
Last week Filipina-American Jenny Vela posted a video on Instagram in which an older white woman mockingly addresses the multicultural family saying, “Look at all the groceries they’re buying. Steal our food, steal our money, steal our jobs.”
A man not seen in the video, presumably Vela’s husband, Alfred — who is Mexican-American — defends the family by saying, “I’ve got a family to feed,” to which the woman replied, “So what? Go back to your country.”
The husband replied, “This is our country.”
“You’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying, just like how you got here,” the woman retorted.
Vela’s Instagram post, which was published before she made her account private, was captioned: “I’ve never felt so angry and sad overall because I had my 5-year-old with me.”
The Vela family told ABS-CBN that they were shocked by the encounter. Jenny Vela said that she was especially taken aback because she had grown up in Daly City, an ethnically diverse city. A majority of the comments posted under the video mirrored that shock and many expressed outrage at the white woman’s comments.
“We’re thankful that everyone is able to see this, and we have a community that supports us and loves us,” Jenny Vela said of the video, which has more than half a million views on various social media platforms, as of this writing.
Alfred Vela said, “It’s not right that we have to put up with this type of bigotry, racism, prejudice behavior, especially coming from an elderly woman.”
After the video went viral on social media, Daly City Mayor Juslyn Manalo, who is Fil-Am, said she was appalled by the act of racism and “anti-immigrant” rhetoric occurring in her city.
“Hearing the racial slurs and also the anti-immigrant sentiment was something I would have never expected at a local grocery store we all go to,” Manolo said. “People in our community need to know that this is something Daly City, or myself as mayor, do not condone.”
The video was also posted by a friend of the family, Danika Aquino, who said that she “was told by one of the cashiers that they had took the woman in the back [of the store] and talked to her, but no one knows further information about what happened after.”
How do you know that she is a white American? Did you interview her and did you find out her name? Please let me know. Thank you.