Santa Barbara woman seen on video harassing Latino street vendor
Last month, a Santa Barbara woman went viral after a video showed her making racist statements towards a Latino construction worker.
Now, another video has surfaced of the same woman verbally confronting a Latino street vendor.
The footage from the first video – taken on Sept. 16 – sparked a local protest, the Los Angeles Times said, with hundreds of people flooding the streets of Santa Barbara in protest of what they deemed to be a “racist encounter.”
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In that incident, the woman – identified by the Times as Jeanne Umana – enters a home down the street from hers despite the construction worker who was recording telling her that it was a private construction site.
“I live here. I’m American, you’re a Tijuanan,” Umana, 74, can be heard saying.
“Thank you for being racist,” said the construction worker, identified by the Times as Luis Cervantes.
Umana “apologized repeatedly” in an interview with the publication last month, saying that the ordeal began when she noticed a construction truck “speeding down her residential street and parked illegally in the middle of the road,” the Los Angeles Times said.
The former lecturer at UC Santa Barbara said that she approached the property to report the incident to a manager, not realizing it was an active construction site, according to the Times.
The latest video, which was recorded in August, was posted to Instagram by activist Edin Alex Enamorado last week and shows Umana verbally attacking a Latino vendor.
“You’re a crook,” she says, “You’re an illegal crook … Do you know what a crook is?”
“I thought you didn’t speak English,” Umana continued, even as the man asked – in English – what the problem was. “You don’t speak English because you’re a liar and a crook.”
Umana also claimed to work for the Santa Barbara Police Department “in public relations” before telling the vendor that authorities would be arriving in 15 minutes.
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The Santa Barbara Police Department said that Umana does not work for the department, and city officials say that they are “troubled” by her actions.
“My biggest issue is just the targeting of people of color,” Santa Barbara City Councilman Oscar Gutierrez told the L.A. Times. “And feeling that she can associate herself with the city really, really bothers me.”
Santa Barbara police asked the county district attorney to consider filing hate crime charges against Umana after the first video went viral, but the D.A.’s office declined to do so.
According to the L.A. Times, Umana’s arraignment on battery and trespassing charges is set for Nov. 30.
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